Last week I had lunch with a friend and fellow urbanist, Bob Ransford. Lunches with Bob are never boring, as we get right into things, and often debate. Bob’s a communications specialist and a longtime member of the Twitteratti (@BobRansford), so amongst discussions about strengthening urbanism in the Cascadia Region, and affordability debates in Vancouver, I asked him a question that’s been on my mind for the last month: Is Twitter a positive tool for Canadian urbanism? Put another way, is twitter facilitating smarter discussions on the country’s urbanism, or are we all getting dumber, 140 characters at a time? I had been very dubious about Twitter while I was a municipal leader, even though I had been blogging as the Director of City Planning for years (I had never sought official permission to do that, and there had been no official rebuke or order to desist, although there was some passive disapproval that I was generally aware of that never became an official issue). A few of my planning, design and architecture friends working in other city halls were tweeting, some as “citizens”, and others referencing in various ways their official positions. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I saw many public officials (mostly politicians) getting in big trouble from poorly thought-out tweeting. Although I’ve always had the disciplined approach that I don’t write or say anything in social media that I wouldn’t be prepared to say on the record to a reporter, or “shout from the street-corner at Robson and Burrard” (a thought process I used through 6 years of blogging from City Hall), I had always concluded that the risk wasn’t worth it when it came to Twitter. As I was leaving the Vancouver Chief Planner role in February, one of my former colleagues took the liberty of setting up an account for me, strongly encouraging me to use it as part of the “free voice” I would have after leaving city leadership. Indeed, the reasons and circumstances under which I was leaving City Hall, I was told, were already “burning up the Twitter-verse” and if nothing else, I would want to monitor that.

[caption id="attachment_3474" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Image courtesy of Tyler Ingram."][/caption]   On October 5th, Maclure's celebrated 100 years of operation as a taxicab business in the Lower Mainland. Those 100 years have seen a great deal of change in how we get around in Vancouver — from walking and cycling, to horse-drawn carriages, to streetcars, to, more recently, electric trolley buses, diesel buses, and cars big and small. While we can look back on it purely with nostalgia, we can also think about it through the lens of a sustainable urban transportation future, that involves single-occupancy vehicles and more of other modes that both emit fewer GHGs and keep us engaged with our communities. How might we draw upon our past to inspire us in creating what comes next?