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Download the latest Price Tags here.
What do the residents of False Creek North think of living in one of the largest centrally located, high-density, pedestrian and family-oriented mixed-use neighbourhoods in the world?
Hardly anyone thinks to ask the people who move in after a project is designed and built. In this case, graduate students at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, under the guidance of Professors Wendy Sarkassian and Larry Beasley, set off to find out how False Creek North is meeting the needs of those who call it home. The good and the bad.
Based on the report – Living in False Creek North – this issue is a summary of their findings, extensively illustrated.
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Bike Hire in Brisbane
“Brisbane looks set to become the first Australian capital city to join several European centres in introducing a public bike hire scheme, with the city’s council launching a call for proposals for the project at the weekend. Lord Mayor Campbell Newman said the scheme would be similar to the Paris and Barcelona models. …
‘There’ll be bike (stations) every 300m in the inner parts of Brisbane and in terms of the price structure, it could be similar to Paris, where the first half-hour is free’. Mr Newman said the initial stage of the project would have 2000 bikes at 150 stations across innercity Brisbane, from Newstead in the inner-north to the University of Queensland at St Lucia in the city’s southwest.”
For more on the Paris model, go here.
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From the Sydney Morning Herald:
SOARING fuel prices are carving into the budgets of car-dependent households in western Sydney, exacerbating problems of insufficient public transport options and long distances to workplaces.
Families in the west are driving up to 20 times the distance of those in the eastern suburbs, inner west and Lower North Shore, according to research by a PhD student at the University of Technology, Sydney, Peter Rickwood. [Full story here.]
With fuel prices at about $1.50 a litre, households in the city’s outer western ring – many of which are struggling with mortgage repayments – are sacrificing more than 6 per cent of their gross household income on petrol, Mr Rickwood’s research shows.
Households in the inner city are using less than 2 per cent of their incomes on fuel.
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From The Age:
So if we were to envisage the greater metropolitan Melbourne as an ideal city, what would we aim for, and, just as importantly, what would we avoid? The Sunday Age asked a group of prominent Melburnians – architects, artists, urban planners, developers, designers, the head of a health body, historians – for their thoughts. As can be expected, their responses were many and varied, and yet, there were few grand or fanciful statements – and only one call for a landmark building. Mostly, their desires were aimed at creating a better designed city of more human dimensions, welcoming to people of diverse backgrounds, abilities and incomes.
Story here.
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Something really important is happening down under.
The City of Sydney just released its “Sustainable Sydney 2030″ strategy. It might be just another good-intentioned vision document – but this one is based on the ideas of Danish architect/planner Jan Gehl (who recently spoke in Richmond). And there are some big ideas.
…the City of Sydney’s draft plan (would) dramatically transform the city, including the demolition of the Cahill Expressway over Circular Quay.
… George Street would become a pedestrian mall and the Western Distributor would be buried beneath a revitalised Darling Harbour.
A light rail loop would also be established between Central and Circular Quay, and retail and business development would be built over the rail lines near Central Station.
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Transportation consultant Jarrett Walker is now based in Sydney. He was an immediate source to ask for comment on the just-released plan for the City, heavily influenced by the ideas of Jan Gehl (see post below).
Gehl’s plan is excellent as an application of New Urbanist concepts to Sydney, often saying things that local planners knew but only an outsider can say. Sydney’s CBD is a difficult case: uneven terrain, a maze of narrow and crooked streets dating from the earliest colony, all now built to highrise densities with an access system overly dependent on cars.
Gehl’s call to demolish biew-blocking freeway ramps will sound familiar in Seattle or San Francisco but is still revolutionary in Australia, especially New South Wales.
At Circular Quay, the City has made an excellent choice in response to Gehl’s earlier draft which called for demolition of the entire elevated structure across the waterfront. This structure has two levels; a top level is the Cahill Expressway, while the lower level is a crucial rail station.
Gehl’s first suggestion, to put the waterfront rail station underground, was almost unimaginably complex and expensive. The final plan leaves the rail line in place but moves the station a short distance, leaving a low single-deck structure that can be integrated into a new look for the quay, while still opening up the visual gap between the financial district and the waterfront. A remaining challenge is to make sure that rail passengers arriving at the relocated station also have an aesthetically satisfying experience.
One concern about the plan is that as a City of Sydney product, it inevitably focuses more on urban design issues and less on impacts on transportation. For example, a George Street pedestrian and light rail mall would be a lovely thing, but there will still be buses and they will need to run somewhere, and those facilities need to be part of the vision before it can be called a plan.
New South Wales urgently needs a strong centralised public transit planning authority that can engage local governments in these conversations. Sadly, the current structure consists of separate rail, ferry, and bus entities with inadequate integration between them.
Jarrett’s blog is always worth visiting. Check it out here.
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Over 600 people filled a hotel ballroom to hear New Urbanist planner/achitect Andres Duany lecture in an SFU City Program lecture. Bloggers Frances Bula and Stephen Rees have done a great job in conveying his provocative statements and ideas in detail.
Click on the names above to read their comments.
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Brisbane to get free bikes
Sophie Elsworth From: The Courier-MailDecember 09, 2007
FREE bicycle hire around the city could be introduced to Brisbane commuters and tourists next year.
Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is concerned about ongoing traffic pollution and congestion in the city, and hopes to introduce a public bike-hire system like those in some European cities.
“I hope that once people see how easy it is to get around the city by bike they’ll start thinking about using the car less for those quick trips down to the shops and other short journeys,” he said yesterday.
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Here’s more information than you probably want to know about the demographic make-up of Canada – as revealed by just-released census data. What jumped out at me, though, was that Canada does not have as high a rate of foreign-born people as Australia.
Highlights of the census of immigration, citizenship and language
Kirsten Smith
CanWest News Service
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
- On census day, May 16, 2006, almost 20 per cent of the population, or 6,186,950 people, were foreign-born.
- More than one million of these people arrived in Canada between January 1, 2001 and census day.
- Since the 2001 census, the foreign-born population increased by 13.6 per cent or four times the growth rate of the Canadian-born population.
- More than half the recent immigrants came from Asia and the Middle East, then Europe, followed by Central and South America and the Caribbean, and lastly Africa.
- Canada has a higher proportion of foreign-born than the United States, 19.8 per cent compared to 12.5 per cent.
- Among western countries that are immigrant-receiving countries, only Australia has a higher proportion of foreign-born population than Canada.
- Over 70 per cent of new Canadians use English as their mother tongue.
- 17.5 per cent of the foreign-born population that live in Quebec report French as their only mother tongue.
- Of the new immigrant whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, the largest groups are Chinese languages, at 18.6 per cent.
- Italian, Punjabi, Spanish, German, Tagalog (from the Philippines), and Arabic are the most common mother tongues after English, French and Chinese for foreign-born people.
- 93 per cent of the foreign-born population could conduct a conversation in either French or English in 2006.
- Almost 70 per cent of new immigrants settled in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
- Between 2001 and 2006, more new immigrants than before opted to settle into smaller census metropolitan areas.
- If a new immigrant settled in the CMAs, they tended to live downtown, not in the suburbs.
- Just over 85 per cent of foreign-born residents who were eligible for citizenship in 2006 became citizens.
- 2.8 per cent of the population hold citizenship of another country in addition to Canadian. Eighty per cent of these citizens are foreign-born.
- Of the foreign-born Canadian citizens who have a second citizenship the largest groups are from the United Kingdom (14. 7 per cent), Poland (6.6 per cent), then the United States (5.4 per cent)
- In 2006, the number of foreign-born residents from Asia and the Middle East exceeded that of Europe for the first time.
- The main source country for new immigrants in 2006 was the People’s Republic of China (14 per cent), India (11.6 per cent) the Philippines (seven per cent), and Pakistan (5.2 per cent). These countries held these positions in the 2001 census as well.
- Rounding out the top ten source countries for immigrants are: the United States, South Korea, Romania, Iran, the United Kingdom and Colombia.
- Leading source countries from Central and South America are Colombia and Mexico.
- Leading source countries from Africa were Algeria and Morocco.
- Our new immigrants are young. Almost 58 per cent who came in the past five years were between 25 and 54. By contrast, only 42 per cent of the Canadian-born population is in this age bracket.
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The Sydney Morning Herald has started a series on the city’s Central Business District:
“Sydney is actually a wonderful city and has extraordinary potential for being a nice place,” says Dearing, a former senior government planner. “But the quality of the city centre has vast room for improvement.”
CBD’s failings, the Herald considers how we can accentuate its attractions and make them easier to navigate while unpicking the ugly bits of the urban fabric.
Start here.
