Bryan Crosby Dot Ca

In September 2008 I wrote my first SURP-related blog entry.  I was hoping to have some more inspired thoughts for my last entry in an attempt to jive with the first, yet my head remains firmly incapacitated from a very long night of liver abuse.  So I don’t.  I’ve just got this photo. Two years.  [...]

I’m in a transit planning class and our first assignment has us evaluating an intermodal journey.  This basically means we have to walk, skip and jump our way to another city via the street, public transit and some sort of other non-car mode…then write about what we liked and didn’t.  Grad School is tough (honestly [...]

Hmmm…so here I am back in the People’s Republic a little shy under a year after I made my big exit in 2008.  Unlike my previous sojourns, I’m basing out of Shanghai and I’m not working (yay) but nor am I pulling in a nice salary (booo).  I’m at Fudan University on exchange.  Actually, exchange [...]

I need to place a disclaimer at the top of this entry.  I rarely write about my ‘life’ and prefer to avoid the topic as much as possible within the walls of this website.  This isn’t to say that such entries are absent…if you scroll around in the archives I’m sure you’ll dig up some [...]

Planning at its best! I picked up a copy of Suburban Nation (Andre Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, 2000) largely to help fill the reading void this semester created by the impossibly difficult to read Municipal and Planning Law , and nap inducing Land Use Planning Made Plain (literally made plain). The authors (more famously [...]

That was one of the wrapping ideas of architect Donald Chong pushed through during his guest presentation this morning, the notion being that an essential component to improving cities actually begins inside the home embracing the ideas of seasonality and local food markets instead of hoarding food stuffs in giant freezers, pantries and fridges. I [...]

Moscow the most expensive city in the world?  Absolutely! The cheapest hostel I could find in Moscow back in August set me back 40USD for a bed in some dude’s 3 bedroom converted Soviet-era apartment.  Moscow was also where I discovered the terms “face-blocking” and “auto-blocking”.  Both are methods that are apparently used extensively at [...]

I’m currently munching my way through a multiculturalism planning paper so I’m a bit empty headed regarding posting concerns but I think I might post the paper when I’m finished as it is not very long and reads more as a narrative story rather than an essay. Some interesting things from this week: The Canadian [...]

Has a profession developed mainstream appeal and acceptance when a music video is created?  Actually, it’s not really about planning – but definitely has a SimCity vibe to it (again, I’m ripping this video off my instructor…I’m very unoriginal). Some one recently asked me if my numerous hours logged on SimCity 2000 back when I [...]

I was a bit of a library/book nerd when I was an undergrad (actually, probably ever since I became a library helper in grade 5).  Having such an occupation would involve numerous hours browsing around looking for interesting items in a university library.  That’s right…in a university library looking for non-fiction books to read that [...]