The Salem Harbor Power Station will close in June 2014. Initially, the field looked wide open for exciting new redevelopments, but now it appears that the site might see another power plant. Strike one for Realpolitik, zero for vision? Green Drinks invited Jan Schlichtmann, Lori Ehrlich, et al., to debate on June 26, 2012.
Got controversy? Density and building height are sure to push city dwellers’ buttons, particularly if the culture to date favored sprawl and single-family homes.
The term windspill captures the failings of our energy policy (as the Gulf of Mexico oilspill unfolds). We can now also see the shortcomings of NIMBYist and BANANAist obstructionism to alternative energy sources.
Victoria continues to work on developing a new Official Community Plan, and has enlisted noted planner Mark Holland. My thoughts on the process here.
The City of Victoria is trying to gauge public attitudes as part of its efforts to come up with a renewed Official Community Plan (OCP). There’s a website dedicated just to this endeavor, Shape Your Future Victoria. There are surveys to fill out, questionnaires to answer, …and opportunities to be a jackass on camera. I […]
The tremendous natural beauty that surrounds us bestows a false sense of entitlement, although we’ve done nothing to earn natural beauty. Stewardship lets us earn it, but now Victoria must at last wake up to earning built beauty.
Watching Nicholas Ray‘s 1954 classic Western Johnny Guitar, I kept focusing on the antagonisms between Joan Crawford’s character Vienna and Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small as ones between developers and NIMBYs. The story is psychologically complex, conjuring objectively social and personally individual reasons for both the desire to maintain the status quo and the will to […]
There are plenty of important things to write about (like Canada’s miserable inability to defend net neutrality), but I just realized something important about fantasy, failure, and the city of Victoria’s self-deceiving love affair with faux heritage. It’s a mind-set espoused by way too many people, and likely to contribute to our upcoming stagnation. A […]
Victoria has a weekly tabloid newspaper called Monday Magazine, which, starting as an alternative publication ~35 years ago, has somehow managed to stay mired in the worst sort of “us and them” thinking that feeds into (and off) the roiling Schadenfreude of the perpetually resentful. Lately, one of their old writers from some many years […]
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