Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Controversy around Victoria’s CP lawn bowling green continues

I spent part of last night and again early this morning commenting at length on two blog posts by Victoria Downtown Residents Association chair Rob Randall’s blog, which was very useful for me since it forced me to think some specific issues as well as some larger things through.  Sort of.  Anyway, for those interested in Victoria politics or development and land use issues in Victoria, take a look at Rob’s March 20/08 entry, Rethinking the CP lawn bowling green, which was the entry that prompted a renewed comments flurry (even though it’s already a couple of months old), as well as the more recent City’s Request for Proposals for bowling site draws controversy (from yesterday, May 22/08).

Diigo Bookmarks 05/24/2008 (a.m.)

• Transmaterial 2: To Redefine Our Physical Environment - PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” - Annotated

  PingMag interview with Blaine Brownell, architect and sustainable materials researcher, whose focus is on green building.

  “From repurposed materials that act as surrogates, to recombinant ones that fuse several materials into a hybrid, making them stronger and more effective — Blaine points us to products that might shape our physical environment in the future.”

  Materials discussed include self-healing polymers inspired by biological systems, which can automatically heal cracks in buildings, for example.

  The article includes many other photographs / examples with descriptions of weird and wonderful bioneered and sustainable building materials.

  tags: pingmag, transmaterial, bioneering, biomimicry, architecture, technology, blaine_brownell, sustainable_materials

Vancouver Sun article: “Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months”

Ok, tell me you don’t find this story by Vancouver Sun’s Frances Bula rather alarming: Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months? I wonder if there’ll be follow-ups, and whether the count that people were turned away 40,000 times over a nine month period is accurate. If it is, then that’s proof that the Province isn’t doing nearly enough to get a handle on housing, housing affordability, addictions, mental health, and homelessness — not to mention on the portfolio of Children and Families. It seems that of those 40,000 times that people were turned away, it happened almost 16,000 times to women and children.

What a society… No federal housing policy in Canada, obviously nothing much on the Provincial level — and yet the Province is swimming in money, with new gas exploration licenses bringing in something on the order of half a billion dollars?

Look, the cities are bearing the brunt of this crisis. Memo to Province: fix it! Give the cities the tools, kick municipal leaders into action in the right way, do whatever is needed.

Victoria’s problems around homelessness are growing all the time, too — see Rob Randall’s blog entry on the proposed Ellice Street shelter relocation: authorities are telling the neighbours they expect the count of people who are homeless to decline in number. Well, I doubted that when I read it then, but in the wake of Bula’s article now, I really doubt it.