It could also be more critical than a “rendering farm,” the massive computer hardware installation that makes data-heavy industries like digital special effects firms happy to be here. (The VEDC is working on one of those as well.)

Lee Malleau, who was unveiling the VEDC’s Economic Action Strategy, said Vancouver is emerging as a key hub of the video and digital special effects sector, along with Los Angeles and London. But unlike those two cities, Vancouver lacks reasonably-priced housing.

Creating that housing will be essential, Malleau said, if the city is to continue to attract international talent, whose wages will go much further in cities with cheaper homes.

One mile of the Seattle Viaduct came down in nine days last October, without the chaos drivers always anticipate on such occasions. Latest updates from Seattle show the city is moving ahead with new traffic patterns to clear the way for the tunnel, which will ensure good connections remain to the port and other arterials.

But city after city is putting a freeway on death row.

The Seattle project is just one of a wave of removals right across America, homeland of the car. According to this update in Atlantic Cities, the battle is moving to the neighbourhood level, where more and more communities are debating the shape of their future. If a freeway can come down, why not an overpass? Well, in fact, it can.

Now the sentences are flowing from those UK arrests and the jail terms are staggering. Young lives are undoubtedly being ruined as punishment for a few moments of stupidity.

One mother of two, who slept through the riots but accepted a looted pair of shorts from a friend, is facing five months in prison. Another young woman who briefly took two left-foot running shoes, then left them behind: ten months.

Then there was the pair of young men who organized a Facebook page urging a riot, which they didn’t attend and which didn’t occur: four years!

It will interesting to see how BC courts respond. Community service, anyone?

Former city planner Nathan Edelson did a remarkable job of summarizing Jim’s planning career, one of several major careers he’s had so far, for the audience at the award ceremony. To his credit, Edelson reported the controversies as well as the achievements. His conclusion:

“In my view and that of so many others in the Downtown Eastside, throughout the city of Vancouver and indeed across Canada, Jim Green is seen as an incredible community builder who makes efforts – sometimes extraordinary efforts as with the Woodward public process – to engage local residents in decision making, but who at the end of the day gives  priority to concrete results.”

Read the full text of Edelson’s tribute here.

But when the panel of eminent judges released its decisions last night to a packed auditorium at SFU Woodwards, there was only one point of agreement. This proposal received both an honorable mention and a win in the “people’s choice” category.

When the proponents’ names were unveiled — neither judges nor online voters knew who developed the proposals — the team included a remarkable group including Norm Hotson, Larry Beasley, Jim Green, Margot Long and many more.

Here’s the city’s summary of the entire contest:

December 2, 2011

Viaducts competition winners announced

Vancouver’s viaducts were the centre of attention last night as 15 concepts, ranging from the practical to the highly imaginative, were recognized at the finale to the re:CONNECT ideas competition. Designs were as diverse as creating wide boulevards, monuments and museums to building recreational canals and adding new parks.

More than 100 entries were received in the competition offering creative possibilities for the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts and the Eastern Core, an area that stretches from Northeast False Creek to Clark Drive

A design jury, made up of renowned international and local urban experts, selected winners in three categories for the two competition entry streams – free and fee: Connecting the Core, Visualizing the Viaducts, and Wild Card.

The free stream (no cash prize) was a low- barrier stream directed toward people from any background who could enter without a fee. The fee stream, which required an entry fee and awarded cash prizes, was directed more at design professionals such as architects, engineers, as well as urban planners and their skill sets.

The jury was made up of five industry professionals: Allan Jacobs, globally-renowned urbanist and planning consultant (Berkeley, California); Rob Bennett, Executive Director, Portland Sustainability Initiative (Portland, Oregon); Joe Hruda, Member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (MAIBC), architect and founding partner at CIVITAS (Vancouver, BC); Tom Hutton, professor at the Centre for Human Settlements and School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC (Vancouver, B.C.); and Patricia Patkau, MAIBC, architect and founding partner of Patkau Architects (Vancouver, B.C.).

The People’s Choice award winners were also announced last night, chosen by the public who were invited to pick their favourites in each category by voting online. The competition attracted entries from across Canada and 13 other countries. More than 15,000 votes were received online, along with over 1,500 comments.

For details on the winning entries, visit vancouver.ca/reconnect

While no decisions on the viaducts are being made through re:CONNECT, the ideas the competition generated are intended to spark dialogue and help inform and inspire planning for this part of Vancouver.

The viaducts options will feed into the public consultation for the Transportation Plan update in spring 2012. Planning work to develop policy directions for the Eastern Core will continue in the New Year, with a report to Council anticipated in summer 2012.

Just three years ago, as voters headed to the polls to elect Gregor Robertson for the first time, the global economy was in free fall. The October 2008 numbers reflected the end of the city’s long building boom. A few months later, building permit activity had dropped by at least half and the new Vision council was scrambling to find $50 million in savings to balance the 2009 budget.

Four hundred and twenty-eight residential units were approved in October this year, compared to 130 three years ago. (By January 2009, the number had dropped to 34, of which 18 were replacements)

Today it’s hard to find a city block in many parts of the city without new construction or renovation. Vancouver specials are being tossed out for a 21st century update: much larger, centre-plan, two-storey homes with full basements, quality stucco exteriors and much finer finishes. (The granite front steps on many of these homes are notable for the observant canvasser.)

Laneway homes, a controversial aspect of 2008 campaign, are routine now: 162 have been approved so far this year, but they weren’t even listed in 2008.

The global economy is still in deep trouble and the US housing market is so grim that cities like Cleveland are bulldozing foreclosed homes to “save” neighbourhoods. Here, in Lotusland, we’re still building, but fewer and fewer residents can afford to buy. It looks like existing homeowners are responding with a quiet housing expansion program right under our noses.

With Suzanne Anton’s NPA crew offering voters a Vancouver version of Harris’ “common sense” platform in the Nov. 19 election, Lorinc’s deep analysis of “How Toronto Lost Its Groove and Why the Rest of Canada Shouldn’t Gloat,” published in the latest issue of The Walrus, makes for unsettling reading.

Harris’ first blow came in 1995, according to Lorinc, with a botched amalgamation of a dozen cities into the Greater Toronto Authority, a “smaller government” scheme that left the region with 25 mayors, 244 municipal officials and a destructive competition among larger municipalities for economic development and senior government funding.

The second hit came in 1997 when Harris “relieved” municipalities of education funding obligations but handed them the cost of public transit and housing. (Although Lorinc holds up Metro Vancouver’s governance system as a model, it arguably has many of the same deficiencies.)

Of course, Vancouver is not the GTA and a Vancouver election is not the same as an Ontario election. But the “common sense” philosophy is a direct link between Harris, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and the NPA platform. All in all, it’s a cautionary tale.

Emily Carr's War Canoes: are those high rise condo towers on the horizon?

The breathtaking new show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Shore, Forest and Beyond: Art from the Audain Collection, can be read two ways.

It is both an extraordinary review of BC art from earliest contact to the present, but it’s also a challenge to voters to think about the future of the gallery itself on the eve of a civic election.

The show is a stunning collection of masterworks of BC art. The remarkable First Nations masks, that date from the pre-contact days to the present, are a show in themselves. But they are juxtaposed with work by Emily Carr and E.J. Hughes, as well B.C. Binning and Jack Shadbolt, in ways that force the viewer to think critically about the province’s past and future. (The amazing collection of work by Mexican Modernists like Diego Rivera seems both utterly out of context and a surprisingly good fit. It is, at least, a glimpse into the Audains’ world view.)

Will it incorporate First Nations or exclude them? Will the arts be seen as fundamental to to our future? Or will we remain the resource extraction economy that is so evident in Hughes’ work?

Equally critically, will the gallery expand enough to allow exhibits that could even raise these questions?

All of these pieces, enough to fill two floors of the current gallery, are from the private collection of Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa. Audain, he founder and chair of Polygon Homes Ltd., is an art gallery patron who has been a driving force behind the VAG’s search for a downtown location to create an iconic new gallery.

Vision Vancouver’s election platform promises significant new creative space in Vancouver. But where does the VAG fit in that new reality?

A lengthy council debate earlier this year opened the door to new options for the VAG, all based on the need for expansion.

The Audain show throws down the gauntlet. The masterpieces in this show give a glimpse of how great a new, expanded gallery could be.

But expansion, despite the VAG’s current $800,000 operating deficit, is a consensus position.

The real question is how to finance that expansion. Can a new gallery project raise the $300 million required for a new building? Should it include condo development? Into the view corridor? Or is there another way?

One vision of the future sees a new gallery at Larwill Park, the old bus depot site, funded by the profits of a condo tower piercing the view cone that crosses that site.

There will be many who oppose that approach. The new VAG show challenges voters to think beyond “forest and shore” to consider the future of the gallery itself.

The Stock Exchange project is just one of a new wave of construction of office and job space projects in the Downtown Core that will exceed two million feet very quickly.

The announcement should raise confidence about four key council policies:

• the decision several years ago to impose a moratorium on condo construction in a key section of the downtown core so there would be room for the jobs needed to make the city economy tick;
• the decision to adopt other jobs-friendly land use policies of the Core Jobs Review;
• the requirement for green building construction at LEED gold levels, which this project will exceed; and
• Mayor Gregor Robertson’s drive to commit the city to “green jobs” as a strategy to move Vancouver forward.

The result is a rash of office construction exceeding two million square feet that is riding these policies as well as the wave built up by the city’s very competitive tax structure, rapid transit and our general economic stability.

The only cloud on the horizon? Housing prices, which more and more employers are learning can be a deal-breaker even when recruiting high priced help that can work anywhere but earn much more where housing costs are lower.

Metro Vancouver’s mayors will vote Oct. 7 to approve or reject this service increase.

Sick of being passed up at the bus stop?

Keen to see Translink win approval of the Moving Forward supplement that would add the Evergreen Line and increase bus service seven percent by 2013?

It’s time Transit Nation spoke up and 4TransitNow is one way.

The Moving Forward supplement would increase gas tax two cents a litre and find $30 million a year from other sources — perhaps property tax — to buy:

• major bus service increases in Vancouver, particularly on east-west routes;
• new service to support U-Pass expansion;
• station upgrades at Main, Commercial, Metrotown, Surrey Central, New Westminster and Lonsdale Quay;
• the 11-kilometre Skytrain Evergreen Line to the Tricities with five new stations and 28 new cars;
• King George Boulevard B-Line;
• Highway 1 Rapid bus;
• regional service increases on key corridors; and more.