creative class

Another round-up of the things we’ve been following this week:

Zoning vs. indie performance venues. This week City bylaw inspectors discovered that Little Mountain Gallery near Main Street is operating as a performance venue without a proper permit. The gallery provides performance space for a variety of different kinds of small acts but was apparently not zoned to do so. At the moment, the future of the gallery is uncertain and hopefully this issue can be resolved. It’s a great little all-ages venue for people you’ve never heard of to perform. Vancouver needs more of these kinds of spaces, not less.

Pigeon Park street market. The Vancouver Courier reports that the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council has launched a street market for residents in the Downtown Eastside that gives binners the chance to legally sell the things that they have salvaged from the trash. Though this doesn’t eliminate the issue of stolen items, it provides many people with another legitimate source of much needed income.

Waste management woes. Metro Vancouver is voting as to whether plans to construct a garbage incinerator in the Metro Vancouver region will go ahead. The Vancouver and Cache Creek landfills are filling up and as long as people are still producing garbage at the rate that they are going, then the waste has to go somewhere.

Quiet culture war in Seattle. An article on Crosscut talks about balancing the city’s dual identity as a home for new urbanism and the creative class and as an industrial port. Each has different implications for policy and urban design. A lot of issues raised are pretty applicable to Vancouver’s context as well.

Image credit: Dan Toulgoet, Vancouver Courier