Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Saturday, November 15, 2025
City of Burnaby makes formal apology for decades of discrimination against people of Chinese descent
Since BC started out as a British Colonial outpost, people of European descent were at the orchestrated top of the human hierarchy. Chinese and Asians & nonwhites in general were a concern to the White majority of early BC.
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/en/remembrance/people-and-stories/chinese-canadians
South Asians were also a concern to the colonial power structure.
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/komagata-maru
https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2016/08/the-komagata-maru-incident-of-1914.html
Of course Indigenous and Black People were part of being categorized as a lesser class of human.
It took a very long time for the British_Empire to respect the people of a multicultural world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_British_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_British_Empire#Decline_and_decolonization
Multicultural Canada has less than 1% of the world's population. Yet, so many smaller countries are able to have a higher density and larger population than Canada.
Burnaby in Greater Vancouver is part of Canada's largest urban area on the Pacific_Rim. There are still many people who would like to thwart the scale of growth in Greater_Vancouver. They don't want the region to become as big and dynamic as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Seattle, SFBA, Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane.
A big & dynamic urban region means more Asians and more nonwhite people in general. Unfortunatly, some people are still too uncomfortable with that notion.
https://jfdatalinks.blogspot.com/search?q=Burnaby+apologizes
Thursday, June 26, 2025
High Density Plans for Vancouver
Well, Vancouver still isn't allowing any residential tower to rival the tallest in Edmonton, Calgary & Seattle. BC is 75% mountainous yet, there are only a handful of potential major urban regions in this backwater wilderness of a province.
Vancouver could get more benefits from developers if there was more incentive to build taller hotels and residential towers, as long as there was a good component of affordable housing.
Monday, March 31, 2025
New Westminster City Council balks at high-rise density plan
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/lower-twelfth-street-area-study-update-new-westminster-rejection
Given the limited industrial areas within the Greater Vancouver Region, there should be a balance between residential & industrial.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/columbia-square-new-westminster-edgar-development-plan-approved
However, some parts of NW need more taller towers in order to have much grater urban density.
https://www.newwestcity.ca/transportation/transportation-planning
https://www.newwestcity.ca/planning-building-and-development/roadworks
https://www.newwestcity.ca/transportation/trucks
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Why doesn’t Australia simply build more cities?
A lot of the secondary cities in each state could become big in their own right.
Texas has a lot more people than Australia, yet it's a much smaller area & still has plenty of room.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829222001605
https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-06/future-cities-paper-web.pdf
https://scenariojournal.com/article/made-in-australia
Of course one expects Melbourne and Sydney to have all the big stuff. However, from a Canadian perspective, it's amazing to see that Australia has a 12 lane crossing in Brisbane & a 10 lane crossing in Perth. Such wide bridges just don't exist in Halifax, NS & Victoria, BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Leo_Hielscher_Bridges 12 lanes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrows_Bridge_(Perth) 10 lanes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrows_Bridge_(Perth)#Railway_bridge:_2005 Seattle & Montreal would end up having their own version of a wide bridge with a train component as well. Of course, stubborn & backwards Greater Vancouver would be one of the last urban areas to ever allow such similar bridges.
It doesn't look like anyone from Canada was ever able to convince Australians to give up on bridge duplication & opt to just cram everything into 4 lanes or an inept 3+lane+bridge for two-way traffic.
Monday, July 22, 2024
Switzerland
Switzerland has 8.9 million people & can fit into BC about 23 times. BC has yet to reach the population of one Switzerland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Largest_cities
Unless BC claims to have a different set of physics than that of CH, mountains can't be used as an excuse for limited urban growth & density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Switzerland
Italy & Japan also have plenty of mountains, but that hasn't prevented them from proper planning & infrastructure development.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/switzerland/netherlands A very flat country with about double the population of CH.
Friday, June 14, 2024
Urban Density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_density
https://www.straight.com/city-culture/why-urban-density-is-actually-good-for-us
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2023/04/17/when-density-good-and-when-it-harmful-cities
https://theconversation.com/urban-density-matters-but-what-does-it-mean-58977
"In the 1970s, British Columbia cities adopted policies and processes to resist densification. As Mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan started the EcoDensity Initiative to counter these." https://globalcivic.org/urban-density-urban-bc-vancouver/