How a passionate group of locals cracked Nanaimo’s stubborn parking rules—and unlocked new possibilities for housing and community.
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Ashley Salvador is a city councilor in Edmonton, Alberta. A national leader in housing reform and urban revitalization, Ashley shares how she helped bring about a brand new tax subclass that’s making Edmonton safer and stronger.
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You won’t see it on cable news, but some of the boldest zoning reforms in North America are happening in places with just a few thousand residents. Here are 6 towns rewriting the rules on parking.
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Edmonton is proving that communities don’t have to accept neglect as inevitable. Here’s how it’s turning derelict properties from liabilities into catalysts for renewal.
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Calgary is cutting delays—not corners—to deliver more housing where it’s needed. And your city should be paying attention.
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Craig Cassar is a first-term city councilor in Hamilton, Ontario. He joins Tiffany to discuss the challenges his city faces and the progress it’s made. They also talk about the importance of synergy between urbanism and environmentalism.
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Instead of waiting for someone else to fix their community’s transit problems, this group of local advocates took initiative with something simple—and powerful.
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Hazen Elwood is a student and Local Conversation member in Calgary, Alberta. Norm and Hazen discuss ways to build an advocacy network and the power of raising local awareness through storytelling. (Transcript included.)
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If you think cars are speeding down your residential street, you're almost certainly wrong. That doesn’t mean cars are moving at a safe speed, though.
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Rosaline Hill is a registered professional planner and awards-winning architect from Ottawa, Canada. She joins Tiffany to discuss the complexities of housing reform and to explain how she helps municipalities visualize and argue persuasively for development. (Transcript included.)
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Saeed Vahid, a Local Conversation leader from Richmond Hill, Ontario, joins Norm to talk about how his group collaborates with city officials and how the expansion of the Greater Toronto Area has affected Richmond Hill. (Transcript included.)
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Calgary is transparent about it’s finances. Now it’s time to uncover where value is being created—and where resources are being drained.
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Kip Santos is a trained civil engineer and construction manager who quit his job to build Local Conversations full-time. Now he splits his time between the U.S. and Canada, nurturing the groups he's founded and building missing middle housing. (Transcript included.)
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Officials in Ottowa, Canada, are showing that local governments don’t need to accept expensive and unproductive projects, even if they have a lot of momentum behind them.
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Co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss the challenges faced by Victoria, Prince Edward Island, a town of 139 residents. They talk about how very small towns like Victoria show the absurdities of the Suburban Experiment best — and feel its consequences most keenly. (Transcript included.)
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Do speed cameras actually make roads safer, or are they just another enforcement tool that fails to address the underlying design issues that cause speeding in the first place?
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Spencer Coyne is the mayor of Princeton, British Columbia. He joins this Bottom-Up Short to explain how he’s implementing the Strong Towns approach in his city, including how to incrementally reform a zoning code and how to do a lot with a small amount of funding.
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Sometimes, small advocacy efforts seem like they’re not worth the time or effort. But every small action plants seeds for future change, both in your city and in yourself.
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Having to shut down major pieces of infrastructure because it can’t afford to repair or replace them is a bad position for a city to be in. But in some cases, it’s just the wake-up call officials need to start making better decisions.
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In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn talk about satellite communities and the psychological phenomena that incline people toward large projects.
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