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Video | Talk Green Vancouver | City of Vancouver - 0 views

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globeandmail.com: 'We're getting there, just 40 years later' - 0 views

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Calgary's mayor tells Marcus Gee how he plans to realize Jane Jacobs' vision on the Prairies. He just has to convince the developers
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But can he get Calgary to buy in? To an outsider, at least, sprawling, car-dependent Calgary seems to be an unlikely place to realize his Jane Jacobs-inspired ideas about livable cities.
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Building Up: Making Canada's Cities Magnets for Talent and Engines of Development, he argued that the successful city of the future will be a place in which: "People live where they work and play. Density is high. Public transit is a preferred choice. Young people can afford to live downtown. Classes and socio-economic backgrounds are mixed ...
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Calgary seems to violate every one of those principles. With no natural barriers - no lake like Toronto's, no mountains and sea as in Vancouver - Canada's fourth-biggest city sprawls north, south, east and west across the rolling foothills of southern Alberta.
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Density is low. With the same-sized footprint as the five boroughs of New York, Calgary has one-10th the population.
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his own immigrant neighbourhood of Coral Springs in the city's northeast, the proportion of non-white residents has soared to 82 per cent from 50 per cent a few years ago, while in the southern half of Calgary, he says, all but 8 per cent are white.
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three-point plan.
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First, develop unused downtown lands. Calgary has a bustling downtown with thickets of office towers, including the rising Norman Foster-designed skyscraper the Bow. But there is a lot of barren, underused space in between. Mr. Nenshi has high hopes for the East Village, a once-sketchy area that is to be revived with a new music centre and housing projects.
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Second, encourage "spot intensification" of residential neighbourhoods. A recent study showed that 80 per cent of neighbourhoods were actually losing population density as householders saw their children grow up and move out. He would like to see developers build high-rises around transit stops and redevelop low-rise strip malls into mid-rise retail and residential buildings.
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Third, build smarter suburbs. That means more subdivisions with a mix of housing types - single-family, townhouse, apartment block - in place of uniform tracts of identical, knock-off houses. He points to the success of Garrison Woods, a new neighbourhood on former military lands with double the density of a traditional suburb. The developer designed it to be walkable, with shops and schools nearby.
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Mr. Nenshi wants to charge developers higher fees for building on the city's edges, arguing that the city effectively subsidizes suburban development by charging too little to supply infrastructure and services.
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It's not that he wants to abolish suburbs. "We have to recognize that a lot of people want to live in them," he says. "I'm not interested in forcing everybody to live in a high-rise building downtown. This isn't Hong Kong." He just wants the price of a place in the suburbs to reflect the true cost of putting it there.
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When did Jane Jacobs write The Death and Life of Great American Cities? We're getting there, just 40 years later," Mr. Nenshi says.
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When a project called Imagine Calgary asked residents what they wanted from their city in the future, it found that most wanted to live in a place where they could walk to the store, walk their kids to school, get by with only one car and be surrounded by different kinds of people.
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If everyone wants that, why aren't we building that?" the mayor says.
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Flex-time at city hall creates a Friday service wasteland - 0 views

www.edmontonjournal.com/...story.html edmonton

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For decades now, at least one-third of the city's 12,000 employees, mainly office workers and professionals, have had a deal where they can work a bit of extra time each day, then take off every second Friday as a holiday.
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The argument is that you have to do something like this to make the job attractive or else you won't be able to keep staff. But I can't think of anybody I know outside of government that gets every second Friday off. Can you?
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've always thought it's not necessary to retain staff by giving them every second Friday off. ... I'm not buying the logic of the policy."
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Gibbons also says that with a labour shortage coming to Alberta in roughly 18 months, it's not a good time to tick off city staff. "They're happy right now."
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Manpower Inc. - Growing War for Talents Looms as U.S. Economy Continues to Recover - 0 views

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Growing War for Talents Looms as U.S. Economy Continues to Recover
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the world has entered a new age, where employers will be awakened to the power of humans as the future drivers of economic growth as access to talent replaces access to capital as the key economic differentiator.
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Aging workforces, the collaborative power of rapidly-evolving technologies, the need for companies to do more with less, and the problem of the skills young people are being equipped with not matching the skills businesses need are converging, making talent attraction and retention critical in order for organizations to gain a competitive edge
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As the economy begins to click into second gear, employers are hiring but they are doing so with extreme caution. They will only hire individuals who have the exact specificity of skills they are looking for,"
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Hiring crunch Job 1 for new chamber chair - 0 views

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Report Backs Up the Idea That College Shouldn't Be the Goal - Education - GOOD - 0 views

www.good.is/...ldn-t-be-the-goal-of-education education

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Is President Obama's laser-like focus on students going to and graduating from college all wrong?
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According to a team researchers out of Harvard, yes. The just-released "Pathways to Prosperity" (PDF) report claims that instead of making college the ultimate goal, students actually need vocational education for so-called blue collar professions.
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Forty-seven million new jobs will be created by 2018, and although almost two-thirds will require some education beyond high school, they won't all require a college degree. Some of the fastest growing jobs—like construction worker, electrician, dental hygienist, police officer, or home health care aide—only require vocational certificates or specialized training.
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27 percent of current blue collar work actually pays more than many jobs that require bachelor's degree
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narrow-minded focus on college might make more kids drop out of high school.
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solution is for American schools to move to a more European model where students get career counseling and skill-building job opportunities in middle school
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something does need to shift in the way we educate youth and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.
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A comprehensive intercultural city strategy: Education - 0 views

www.coe.int/...education_en.asp education

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Bradford, the education authority found that in some neighbourhoods schools were increasingly polarising into becoming all white or all-non white. This was allowing little opportunity for children to learn more about each other. A process of linking between over 70 local schools has now led to much closer co-operation and joint working between staff and pupils. Pupils have on average made 2.6 new cross-cultural friendships since the project began
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twinning
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TDSB provides for low-achieving students individual support in the classroom and access to language learning in the students’ native language. TDSB supports also efforts to involve parents, neighbourhoods and ethnic communities.
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Toronto
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Omar Yaqub on 03 Feb 11

Elements of an intercultural city strategy: Education

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Elements of an intercultural city strategy: Education</div>

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Fort McMurray - Alberta Labour Market Information - 0 views

www.woodbuffalo.net/linksRESRepo.html trends statistics work

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UN-HABITAT.:. Media Centre | Press Kits | State of the World's Cities 2010/2011 - Citie... - 0 views

www.unhabitat.org/content.asp

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trendwatching.com's February 2011 Trend Briefing covering CITYSUMERS - 0 views

www.trendwatching.com/...citysumers

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Chinese city planners proposed merging the nine cities around the Pearl River Delta into a single metropolitan area, containing some 42 million people: more than Argentina, and covering an area 26 times bigger than Greater London. (Source: Reuters, January 2011.)
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while 'traditional' global powerhouses such as New York, London and Paris are already sharing the stage with Beijing, Mumbai and Istanbul, increasingly cities such as Belem, Chongqing and Guadalajara are ready to make their mark.
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Just 100 cities account for 30% of the world's economy, and almost all its innovation. 
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Tokyo and New York have an estimated GDP similar to those of Canada or Spain
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In thriving mega-cities, whose economic and cultural power already often surpass that of entire nations, CITYSUMERS' identities will often be closely tied to a city's culture
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Cities are increasingly seen as a solution to the quest for environmental sustainability, with high density living promoting a more efficient distribution of resources
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