TRUWinnipeg.org

Robert W. Galston, The Rise and Sprawl
When it comes to Starbucks, I tend to agree with James H. Kunstler when he told Good Experience blog:
Starbucks provides something very simple, in short supply: agreeable public space… You pay $3.50 for their stupid coffee concoction, but you stay at their table for an hour and a half. [...]

Robert W. Galston, The Rise and Sprawl
City Hall’s downtown development committee did the right thing yesterday and threw out the appeal to stop the construction of a 15-storey condo and retail building on Assiniboine Avenue between Hargrave and Carlton, the Free Press reports.
The building is, judging from this conceptual rendering, positively disgusting in its design, [...]

A couple of people forwarded this notice to me this past week. It is a forum or “lecture” (implying a one-way dissemination of information/opinion) on the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) National Transit Strategy, which is basically a formation of new Canadian policy for federal funding of new and upgrading existing transit infrastructure such as [...]

In response to Professor Chis Leo’s blog article, Kissing Frogs: Building Coalitions For Change In Canadian Cities, about building coalitions to make Winnipeg a nicer place to live insofar as transit and housing are concerned:
In the late 90s, a guy who is and was a cycling activist happened across my uwto.org website.
Cycling Guy suggested starting [...]

Robert W. Galston, The Rise and Sprawl
Last winter, when City Hall said they were not interested in letting Mr. Zaifman bring the suburbs to the finest little street in the city’s most distinct and important neighborhood by demolishing a strip of businesses and the remnant of a 130-year-old house for a parking lot, Zaifman warned [...]

When it was announced in 1881 that the Canadian Pacific Railway would cross the Red River at Winnipeg, the young city’s future as Western Canada’s pre-eminent centre of trade, finance, and culture was secured. As a result, the already briskly growing city experienced a real estate boom of such stupendous proportions, that it would make [...]

Robert W. Galston, The Rise and Sprawl
Walking down its streets today, it’s hard to imagine that Point Douglas, the neighborhood I call home, once faced the threat of demolition in the name of urban renewal.
In a 1959 story, the Winnipeg Tribune quoted a Mrs. Olga Fedink of Stephen St: “[P]eople don’t know whether their houses [...]

Winnipeg’s West End is easily the city’s most underestimated district. Snotty suburbanites (who frequently live in beige-carpeted 1980s tract homes) like to dismiss this neighbourhood of century-old trees, churches, and homes as “the ghetto,” but my West End is a place of friendly front porches, classic midwestern architecture, and inexpensive dining.

Lipton Street
Previously I had [...]

By people who realize that if you abandon the criteria that public works need to be ugly, stupid and cheap, you can actually improve the lives of citizens, not just through transportation, but by making their public space more beautiful.

An interesting report in the Free Press on that problem that for sixty years just hasn’t gone away, the downtown parking problem.
Today, this is being tackled with more vigour than we’ve seen since the early Juba years in the 1960s–which everyone knows ushered in a second golden age for Winnipeg’s central business disctrict.
And who better [...]