[Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is travelling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. This week the project wraps up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] Last week I posted the story of my dream urban pilgrimage—a journey I recently made to the first post–World War II American sprawl suburb, Levittown. I wrote that I was caught off guard by how benevolent the residential sections of Levittown seemed when compared with the modern sprawling suburban neighborhoods that were modeled after it. It cannot be ignored, however, that the commercial strips within and surrounding Levittown nonetheless suffer from the same problem that sprawling suburban outposts do—the hollow lifelessness of a car-oriented landscape.

A Pilgrimage to Levittown, NY (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Burbs) from ResilientPLANET on Vimeo. [Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is traveling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. This week the project wraps up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] Almost everyone has a secret pilgrimage destination tucked somewhere in their own personal book of dreams. For many these are, as Ryszard Kapuscinski once wrote, "certain magical names with seductive, colorful associations --Timbuktu, Lalibela, Casablanca." They are places to which we attach wonder, mystique, and fascination; places that we dream of one day exploring, with the subliminal hope of finding an exotic understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place within it. My secret place is Levittown. I have always wanted to go to Levittown.

[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?

[caption id="attachment_3484" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Thank you to Pakalakamino on Flickr for the source photo. "][/caption] A plethora of perambulating peripatetics and other pedestrians descended on Vancouver at the beginning of October to madly rush through 200 presentations from twenty countries in just three short days. It overlapped both CanU, which I wrote about last week, and a Spacing Vancouver contributors meeting at the same time, and my head has only just stopped spinning from the experience. By the second night, as I struggled valiantly with an avalanche of bright pink balloons alongside Spacing's national editor and local podcaster (true story - photo from another group), I felt the pressure of wanting to attend every single session close in with a rosy, claustrophobic haze. The simultaneously happy and sad reality was that it was simply impossible for anyone to take in all the interdisciplinary opportunities on offer - if it were, I'd still be there, two weeks later, trying to get my fill. Presentations in the breakout sessions ranged from the vague-but-feel-good advocacy victory video to data heavy analysis, and the variety was very much appreciated, if it did make for some tough choices. Note to cycling advocates looking forward to Velo-City 2012: practice your power-walking and learn to be in multiple places at once!

[caption id="attachment_3265" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="   Source photos are from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool."][/caption] If this article is the first you've heard of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, you're not alone. Its board is a veritable who's who of the field, however, boasting centuries of experience in the public and private sectors - Vancouver's Director of City Planning, Brent Toderian, serves as President and Toronto's Director of Urban Design, Robert Freedman, is Chair. Its relatively low profile is a conscious choice as it builds up its organizational capacity before broadening its base; last weekend's meeting in Vancouver was only its third annual gathering, and the agenda revolved around finalizing a draft charter and setting up working committees. The group is, at this point, essentially invite-only, though they happily opened their doors to Spacing Media. Several keynotes and a variety of panel sessions started off the conference like many others. Among the highlights were Gordon Price's scathing analysis of the suburban predicament - motordom, it seems, is now his preferred term - and Pamela Blais' critique of the misdirected financial incentives that created that result - perverse cities, or pervurbia for short, in her parlance. The weekends' main attraction for Spacing was, however, the insider's view of this nascent alliance of urbanist giants.