Vancouver The Most Livable City In North America: Economist

The Huffington Post
August 28, 2013

Vancouver may be the best place to live in North America, but it has yet to recover from a Vancouver Island highway closure that dropped it to third in the world in 2011. The West Coast city ranked below Melbourne, Australia and Vienna, Austria in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s livability survey, which assigns cities a score out of 100 based on factors such as stability, health care, culture and environment. More …

National Charrette Institute

NCI Certificate Training

This training session offers participants the opportunity to earn the basic and advanced NCI certificates. Participants will learn project planning and management skills, using a charrette as the transformational moment. It includes a half-day intensive in public meeting facilitation skills. This course will also feature a combination of Canadian and American case studies. It takes place Monday to Wednesday, October 7-9, 2013 at the Oceanic Plaza, 1032 West Pender Street, Vancouver. To learn more and to register, click here.

18 Core LUs

New Registered Educational Provider: National Charrette Institute

This non-profit organization provides training and coaching in the NCI Charrette System™ while advancing the fields of community planning and public involvement through research and publications. Course content can include project planning and management as well as public meeting facilitation skills. To learn more, click here.

Developers Build-in a Community Voice

By Hadani Ditmars, Globe and mail
August 23, 2013

For many architects, the community planning process can be a daunting one. The idea of design by committee, where hundreds of residents contribute their two-cents worth on new projects, can often produce dubious aesthetic results. But for Vancouver architects Mark Ostry and Russell Acton, whose firm Acton/Ostry had to accommodate neighbourhood input on the proposed Rize Alliance project at Kingsway and Broadway in Mount Pleasant, the process was a unique kind of “crystallization” of community needs and concerns. More …