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It’s Canada Week in Phoenix!

Photo Credit: Leland Gebhardt (azfamily.com)

As a proud Canadian, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Canada Week is about to begin in Phoenix.

It seems that this year organizers made arrangements with Mother Nature to make it a little more realistic with the freezing weather that has hit the Valley the past couple of nights.

Canada Week runs from February 5th to 12th. It promotes cultural, social, business, trade and other ties between Arizona and Canada.

The events are NOT just for Canadians, but they are a great opportunity to meet some of my compatriots, learn something new about you great northern neighbor and congratulate us again on our Olympic Gold Medal hockey victory!

Great Canadian Picnic

shapeimage 1 Its Canada Week in Phoenix! The highlight of the week is the 59th annual Great Canadian Picnic that will be held Saturday at South Mountain Park. (10919 S. Central Ave) starting at 10 am.

Events will include food (Coffee Crisp’s anyone?), live music (Featuring jack Johnson) and games (including a snowshoe relay on real snow!). The event is FREE, but guests are asked to bring a non-perishable food item to help support the food bank. More details.

Can-Am Cup Golf Tournament

Another event of interest to many Phoenix residents and snowbirds alike is the week ends with the Can-Am Golf Cup Tournament at the Aguila Championship Golf Course 8440 S. 35th Ave at Baseline. Registration starts at 7:15 am,and there will be a shotgun start at 8:00 am. The format is a 4-person Scramble.

There is a $70.00 entry fee that includes: green fees, golf cart, range balls, lunch and chances to win great prizes! Mulligans sold separately. Proceeds will help Phoenix’s Youth Ambassador Exchange Program and Calgary’s young burn survivors stay in Arizona’s Camp Courage. More information and registration for the Can-Am.

Trade Forum

Its Canada Week in Phoenix! There will also be a Arizona International Growth Group (AZIGG) forum on trade with Canada on Monday, February 7th at ASU’s SkySong center in Scottsdale. The event will focus Canadian & Arizona businesses and how they impact each other.

Canada is Arizona’s second largest trading partner (after Mexico).

More info: www.canadianpicnic.com

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Urban (Legends) Comic: Here Be Dragons

Urban Planner (and Twitter buddy) George Osner sent me this comic. While not its primary intention, it nonetheless brings a bit of levity and introspection into the often all-too-serious field of urbanism. I especially like the subtle digs at suburbia…

Bonus points if you get the Arizona connection (explain in the comments section).

(Click on image for full size)

About the Artist:

Subnormality is because of WINSTON ROWNTREE (not the author’s real name), who likes to make comics for some reason, will respond to requests for comics-related advice, and will let you use comics from this site in your print/online publication if you ask nicely and are not FHM Australia. Winston is currently available for individual commissions as well, and can be reached at viruscomix (at) gmail.com (prices start at $100, and examples of previous work can be provided upon request. Serious inquiries only). Winston would also like to illustrate your book/short story collection/communist pamphlet/erotic playing card series, and has done such work before for such clients as ECW Press and Cracked.com.

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January’s Top Posts

Here are my top posts in order of unique page views from January 2011.

Did you catch-all of these posts the first time around? If not, here is your chance to read what others have found most interesting over the past month.

2402313877 ff3e603e32 m Januarys Top Posts

By jakobinac (Jakov Vilović) on Flickr

Is your favorite post in this list? Let me know in the comments section.

Site Stats

Visitors

Overall, I had 1,864 visitors and broke 10,000 pageviews for the first time, with 10,488. This is 60% above December and due, in part, to an average of 5.63 pageviews per visit. This means that my readers stick around and read other posts and pages—a good thing for a blogger!

Traffic Source

Google (organic search): 30%
Twitter: 25%
Direct: 12%
RSS feed (Feedburner): 10%
Google Referral: 6%
Facebook: 5%
All Other Sources: 5%
UrbanismNews.com: 3%
Other Backlinks: 2%
Paper.li: 2%

Visitor Locations

I had visitors from 68 countries in January, with the most coming from the US. This is not surprising given that this is a US based blog (for now at least). What is, however, is the comparatively few visitors came from Arizona. While AZ topped the list, there were only 341 visitors from the state (18% of all visitors). California was second with 162 and New York was third with 89. In all I had visitors from 44 states. I would love to hit all 50; I guess I should write a post or two on places in Nevada and Arkansas, among others .

After the US came Canada, with 161 visitors. The UK, Spain and France round out the top five of the 68 countries represented by my visitors. This long tail of readers is interesting. I had at least one visitor from countries as varied as Syria, Ukraine, Nepal, and New Caledonia. The fact that somebody siting in Damascus is reading what I write is pretty cool.

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Friday 5: Articles for Urbanists

Here’s the first edition of my urban news and views in 2011:

Austin, TX (1887). Photo Credit: Augustus Koch; Public Domain

The 5 Smartest Policies Enacted by American Cities in 2010: A look at 5 policies enacted by 5 cities last year that are making a difference. (AlterNet)

The Ever-Rising Cost of America’s Highways: Gas taxes, tolls, and auto registration fees no longer ensure that our highways ‘pay for themselves’ (if they ever really did). Richard Florida asks “What can be done?” (The Atlantic)

Cities on the Prowl: City leaders visit other cities around the world because they know that learning from others is cheaper and less risky than pursing untested ideas and ending up in false starts. (Citiscope)

Measuring the historical diversity of a neighborhood: Jane Jacobs celebrated mixing the old and the new together. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could develop a measure of a neighborhoods historical diversity? (Grist)

The Future of Urban Development: How can we turn cities into even greater engines of innovation and models of sustainability? (The Globalist)

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11 Things NOT To Do in 2011

Photo Credit: Mooi Hsieh on Flickr

It’s a New Year, so it’s supposed to be time for our New Years Resolotuions, right? Not this year. This year I’m committing to 11 anti-resolutions inspired by Chris Guillebeau’s ‘A Brief Guide to World Domination‘ (and recycled in his book The Art of Non-Conformity. He goes into more detail here.

After all, we all know what we should be doing, but how many of us think about what we SHOULDN’T do?

Here’s the list of 11 things I promise not to do in 2011:

11 Ways to be Unremarkably Average (in 2011)

Accept what people tell you at face value
Don’t question authority
Go to college because you’re supposed to, not because you want to learn something
Go overseas once or twice in your life, to somewhere safe like England
Don’t try to learn another language; everyone else will eventually learn English
Think about starting your own business, but never do it
Think about writing a book, but never do it
Get the largest mortgage you qualify for and spend 30 years paying for it
Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work
Don’t stand out or draw attention to yourself
Jump through hoops. Check off boxes.

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December’s Top Posts

Here are my top posts in order of unique page views from December 2010.

Did you catch-all of these posts the first time around? If not, here is your chance to read what others have found most interesting over the past month.

Photo Credit: Curtis Miller (curtm95) on Flickr

About Yuri (Home Page)
10 Great Gift Ideas for Urbanists
Blog (Main Page)
Urban Design in 10 Easy Steps
Yuppie Urbanism: Biting the Hands that Serve Us
25 NIMBY Spinoffs
How I Stack Up on the BBC Reading List
Putting the ‘Urban’ in Urban Gardening
Zipcar Urbanism: Bridging a Gap in the Urban Fabric
Resume

After a record-setting November, overall visits were down slightly in December 2010. This is due, in part, to the fact that I took a mini-hiatus from posting new content over the holidays. On the upside, those of you who did visit stayed longer and checked out more pages than usual; page views were a near record 6,556, almost double that of November.

Is your favorite post in this list? Let me know in the comments section.

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Merry Christmas!! (or Z Rizdvom Khrystovym!!)

In case you didn’t catch it from my first name , I am of Ukrainian heritage. When I can across this picture and description on Neatorama, I had to share it. Though my mother and baba (grandmother) did a great job teaching me about my heritage, somehow I never heard this story.

Photo credit: boliyou on Flickr

Ukrainians hide a spider web ornament on their tree and it is supposed to be good luck for the person who finds it.

The story behind the tradition is that an old widow had no money to decorate her tree and went to bed upset that her children would have an undecorated tree the next day. While she was asleep, a spider decorated the tree with a beautiful web. When the first light of day hit the webs, they turned to silver and gold and the widow and her children never went longing again.

Does your family or culture have a unique Christmas tradition? If so, leave me a comment!

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Friday 5: Santa is an Urbanist Edition

Stockholm (photo by Brian Colson)

Here’s a special Christmas edition of my weekly urban news and views:

Stockholm (photo by Brian Colson)

Santa’s Top 10 Favorite Cities: While Santa is double-checking his “nice” list and his little helpers are starting to load up the sleigh, the data elves at Zillow have been hard at work crunching numbers to mathematically calculate Santa’s favorite cities to visit tonight. (Zillow Blog)

America’s Most Festive Christmas Cities: cities are at their best during the winter holidays — with bright lights, big trees and spectacular celebrations usually at the root of the Christmastime joy. (eHow.com)

Great public spaces make great holiday places: A look at how much the winter holidays bring out in us a shared spirit, often experienced on sidewalks and plazas. (Kaid Benfield’s Blog)

Of course Christmas wouldn’t be complete without one a couple of practical, ‘it’s good for you gifts’ that we hated receiving as kids’…

A Physicist Solves the City: Why do cities grow and thrive? What causes them to stagnate and fall? Geoffrey West thinks the tools of physics can give us the answers. (New York Times Magazine)

Access vs. mobility: Happy people or happy cars? If the fundamental goal is happy people, then we need innovative performance metrics. (New Urban Network)

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ABC+D’s of Placemaking

Last Friday, I was invited to speaking at a Public Allies Arizona professional development workshop. Public Allies Arizona is an intense 10-month apprenticeship program designed to develop the next generation of civic leaders.

The focus of the workshop was “Asset Based Community Development and History of Local Community.” I was asked to present on Asset Based Community Development and Placemaking. Here are my slides from the presentation:

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November’s Top Posts

Photo Credit: xymox on Flickr

Here are my top posts in order of page views from November.

November 2010 was the most visited month in this blogs history, with over 2,600 unique visitors (and 3,800+ page views). This is 1,000 more visitors than October and over 1,600 more than November 2009. It seems as though I may finally be getting the hang of this blogging thing

Did you catch all of these posts the first time around? If not, here is your chance to read what others have found most interesting over the past month.

Is your favorite post in this list? Let me know in the comments section.

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