As a general rule, I believe that our cities should be striving for less rather than more parking. Which is why it still baffles me when allegedly progressive cities continue to mandate ludicrous parking ratios (even when the sites are next to transit). You know who you are.

But if you absolutely have to build it, the new 9th Avenue Parkade + Innovation Centre in Calgary is a good example to look to.

Designed by 5468796 Architecture in collaboration with Kasian Architecture, Interior Design and Planning, the project does all of the things to ensure that it doesn't look ugly today and it doesn't need to remain a parkade in the future once we all switch over to electric scooters and flying autonomous vehicles.

Some of the moves include 4m floor-to-floor heights and generally flat floor slabs that only rise 1-2%. This was done so that the floors can be more easily retrofitted to residential and/or office in the future.

And in fact, this flexibility already gotten proven out during the design process. Originally the ~335,000 square foot building was going to be entirely parking. But then an innovation centre called Platform came to the table for 50,000 sf, and a portion of the building had to be converted to flexible office space.

Let's hope this trend continues. But in the meantime, here are some pretty pictures:

All photos by James Brittain.

Perhaps for obvious reasons, I am interested in how important issues get debated. I have written before about how I think the community engagement process for new developments is largely broken. I think it naturally incents certain kinds of feedback.

Recently, I've been playing around with an online platform called Kialo. They call themselves "an easy to use, yet powerful tool to engage in thoughtful discussion, understand different points of view, and help with collaborative decision-making."

The site works by trying to create a structured hierarchy of pros and cons around debatable questions. You participate by making claims (supported by links). Duplicate claims are neatly grouped together. And unthoughtful suggestions are moderated out.

The UI looks like this (top level question shown):

But you can then drill down into specific claim groupings (note the org chart looking graphic at the top):

I'm not yet convinced that it creates the "collaborative reasoning system" that they are after (maybe because I haven't used it enough). But I do really appreciate the structure and civility that they are trying to introduce to topics that are often vehemently debated.

Are any of you regular users of Kialo?

This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow. 

The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #BuildHereNow. The goal was to start to identify properties that could “use a little love" and to encourage city builders who might need a little push to develop a particular property.

I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing information and I love the idea of digitally annotating buildings and spaces. In this case, it’s about pulling together the desires of the community,

Hashtags are a great way to quickly make something like this happen, but I would love to see a purpose-built tech platform do this in a more permanent way. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be about developing. Buildings are rich in information; hopefully so rich that a platform like this could survive.

If you think about it, property titles are already a form of annotating real property. So this isn’t really a new idea. 

But now technology allows us to harvest all kinds of other information – such as what people would like to see built. Imagine the possibilities if we became more effective at collecting, organizing, and leveraging this data at scale.