This City Life

Urban Renewal: a new series on restoring community in a post-pandemic world

Over the past four years, I’ve felt increasing disconnected. This is despite being more digitally connected than ever- to global events, my friend’s lives on social media, and my workplace. I don’t think it’s just me feeling this way.

Since the pandemic forced people indoors and in front of screens, we’ve left behind the real world and our communities for a virtual reality. The local media landscape is shrinking, so we know little of what is happening around us and the virtual workplace means we spend more time at home and less time connecting with people face to face.

This has an impact on our cities, our communities, and our wellbeing. According to a recent a Meta-Gallup survey taken across 142 countries, nearly 1 in 4 adults across the world report feeling very or fairly lonely. The survey also found that the rates of loneliness were highest in young adults.

How do we restore a sense of community and authentic connection in a increasingly digital world - one where we are instead connected to misinformation, global politics, and algorithms 24/7 infiltrating our social media feeds with influencers, who persuade us to desire lifestyles that won’t make us happy and things we don’t need?

I believe the urbanist community has a role to play in helping solve these societal issues, so I’m launching a series to explore this topic from the perspective of local planning - how we design our cities and parks, activate our public spaces, restore nature in cities, fund community and arts programs, develop policies on safer streets and affordable housing, and more.

I’m calling the series Urban Renewal, a negative term in urban studies that refers to a 1970s North American policy of demolishing low-income communities to build massive freeway projects surrounded by desolate highrise buildings.

Renewal represents the process of revitalizing or rejuvenating something to its original state or improving it. I want to talk about what urban renewal should be, not removing vibrant communities in favour of cars and concrete, but actually restoring a sense of community that we seem to be losing to the virtual world.

I’m hoping to talk to a diverse range of perspectives for ideas on how to address this issue. Reach out to me if you work in urban issues and have thoughts about how to rebuild community in a post-pandemic world!

Photo credit: Street Lab (Uni Project)

Highlights from the Plan 200K Speaker’s Event

How does a traditional suburb become more urban and walkable?

This summer, I was a guest speaker on family-friendly cities with Charles Montgomery, author of the Happy City, at an event hosted by the City of Abbotsford for its Plan 200K. With this plan, Abbotsford is hoping to answer this question. You can learn more by watching this short video with the event highlights.

How Does an Urbanist Celebrate Earth Day?

People often say that when you become a mother, you start to care more about saving the planet. After having Vallen, I didn’t have this revelation or fear that I wasn’t doing enough. As a self-proclaimed urbanist, I focus on using my voice and this blog to promote walkable, livable communities. This is where urbanists have the greatest impact.

You may be asking, “how does that play a role in honouring and protecting the Earth?”

Building great communities involves helping people experience what makes them feel alive. This feeling allows you to you feel more connected to the Earth, nature, and humanity (you probably don’t feel alive when you’re sitting in traffic, watching TV, or looking at you phone). If you live in a thriving community, you’re able to do things like:

- Walk, bike and take public transit to your destination safely and enjoyably.

- Afford a modest sized home where you can raise a family and be closely connected to your community.

- Interact with a diverse range of people.

- Have access to nature.

- Find support for your family and children.

- Enjoy vibrant public spaces, arts and culture.

- Consume less energy (e.g. heating your home, driving a car and buying stuff you don’t need).

These aspects of community make us feel safe, happy, engaged and connected. This is why urbanists are so passionate about community-building. We believe that good planning policies can help save the Earth.

A windscreen perspective on how cycling and walking make your city more human.

We can’t make technological advances in renewable energy and we don’t preach about eating less meat and recycling more. Our role is to shape and influence policies toward creating complete communities where people can live a good life and minimize our negative impact on the planet. This also means living our values by driving less, taking public transit, and living in smaller homes that require less energy.

Earth Day is a time to celebrate what we love about the Earth, but also a time to recognize the role we all play in protecting it.

Wishing you all a Happy Earth Day on April 22.

Speaking on Family-Friendly Cities and the Future of Abbotsford

Next month I will be joining Charles Montgomery, urbanist and writer of The Happy City, to talk about how Abbotsford, BC, can build a family-friendly city as they move forward with their new Official Community Plan.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to speak about this groundbreaking plan. If you have been following the process, ‘Abbotsforward,’ the draft plan, involves transforming the traditionally suburban community to include a downtown core with abundant public spaces, bike lanes, and sidewalks to encourage people to drive less.

The plan is meant to guide urban planners on developing the city until its population reaches 200,000. Abbotsford is currently home to about 140,000 people. City staff are also suggesting that 75 per cent of new city growth happen in existing urban areas.

Henry Braun, the Mayor of Abbotsford, calls the plan a “game changer.”

“We’ve had a lot of sprawl in this community. We want to make this a more walkable, livable, walking city. That’s what the public has told us.”

If you want to learn more, or you live in the area, come join us!

Kids in the City: Raising my son in a walkable community

This is the seventh installment of Kids in the City, a new series that will showcase families who embrace compact urban living - in all of its forms (condo, townhouse, duplex, etc).

I write a lot about the benefits of living in a compact urban home, so I thought I would share a bit about my experience. My husband and I own a 1200 square foot duplex in a Vancouver neighbourhood called Grandview Woodlands, which is a few blocks from Commercial Drive, a funky shopping street with tons of cafes and restaurants.

We are not interested in ever buying a single family home together, and plan to stay in our neighbourhood as my son grows up. We love it here because it is friendly, vibrant, walkable, close to many parks and only a few Skytrain stops away from Downtown Vancouver.

Here are my thoughts on raising a family in the city:

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Elon Musk’s Feud with Public Transit Enthusiasts

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has a utopian vision for transportation: that we all will drive automated electric Teslas through massive underground tunnels (with no traffic, of course). However, for anyone who loves communities designed for walkability - cities like New York, Paris, Vienna and Vancouver - his vision is a dystopian nightmare. If you enjoy bloated suburbs, then Elon’s vision is for you.

He even went so far as to attack public transit, saying at an artificial intelligence conference earlier this month that “public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?”

He also said that you might end up next to a “serial killer” on public transit and that this is why people want individualized transport, that “goes where you want, when you want.”

Urbanists around the world united against Musk yesterday on Twitter with the hashtag #greatthingsthathappenedontransit and the responses are touching, funny, and true. From meeting the love of your life, to taking your baby home from the hospital, to losing 50 pounds, taking public transportation involves a sense of humanity not found when you drive around in your own metal box.

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