These days, everyone seems to have a revolutionary new approach for bringing communities back to life. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: community revitalization has too long been dominated by narrow [...]

In the early 1970s, I was a medic on a scuba team in the United States Army’s 7th Special Forces Group. The 7th SF was, and is, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Our immediate neighbour on [...]

For decades, planners have been taught that the way to revitalize a community is to attract employers. With that larger tax base, they can then work on enhancing the local assets and quality of life: renewing [...]

Redevelopers have many tools for helping them select the right property in a community, and for designing the best use of that property. What they don't have is a tool to help them select the right community [...]

What caused the current economic crisis? Some blame the mindless sheep masquerading as American bankers, or the casinos masquerading as investment houses on Wall Street. Others point the finger at ineffective [...]

Let's say you represent a large, institutional real estate investor in today's economic climate. What's the main indicator you look for when choosing communities for your latest project? The usual answer [...]

Large-scale urban revitalization is too often a chicken-or-egg story in Canada. A major redeveloper comes to town, promising a large project that might turn around the community's fortunes. In the [...]

Cities worldwide are jockeying for a position as a top global provider of financial services. Toronto is currently ranked number 17. This September, public and private leaders interested in Toronto's future [...]

Most community revitalization plans fail (often miserably). Most redevelopment projects don’t deliver anywhere near their revitalizing potential to the community, even though they might pay off nicely [...]

Planning should ideally be the most holistic of disciplines, addressing the needs of human culture, wildlife, economics, and a plethora of other agendas in a systematic manner that has a rigorous theoretical [...]