General Sisters,General Store / Big Rock Candy Mountain

The article is a summary of conversations with two artist pairs: Dana Bishop-Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi of the collective General Sisters, General Store in North Braddock, USA, and Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling of the project Big Rock Candy Mountain in Vancouver, Canada.     

On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver

The paper contributes to understandings of contestation and resistance in urban politics, using a land use struggle against a “big-box” development in Vancouver, Canada as an example. It surveys Foucault's work on “governmentality,” highlighting the centrality of the notion of resistance in this work before focusing in particular on Foucault's yet underexplored conceptions of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”. These concepts offer an analysis of urban politics beyond the binary of successful implementation of city policies or their failure, and of cooption or revolt; therefore, proving especially useful in the analysis of urban governance which is increasingly characterised as “post-political”.     

The maturity model in practice: chaos,reaction, evolution,and inclusion in law enforcement analytic models

This article discusses the analytic maturity model that was developed by the Vancouver Police Department. The maturity model was developed to self-asses the agency’s analytic process and determine to what degree it was operating. The article explores the various stages of the analytic model and applies them to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and FUSION CENTERS in an attempt to show how the maturity model can be utilized by other agencies as well in self-assessing their analytic process. The article concludes by suggesting best practices which are to be utilized in conjunction with the maturity model.     

Predictive crime mapping

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have emerged as a key tool in intelligence-led policing and spatial predictions of crime are being used by many police services to reduce crime. Break and entries (BNEs) are one of the most patterned and predictable crime types, and may be particularly amendable to predictive crime mapping. A pilot project was conducted to spatially predict BNEs and property crime in Vancouver, Canada. Using detailed data collected by the Vancouver Police Department on where and when observed crimes occur, the statistical model was able to predict future BNEs for residential and commercial locations. Ideally implemented within a mobile GIS, the automated model provides continually updated predictive maps and may assist patrol units in self-deployment decisions. Future research is required to overcome computational and statistical limitations, and to preform model validation.     

Market Rental Housing Affordability and Rapid Transit Catchments: Application of a New Measure in Canada

Abstract

In high-income cities, the availability of affordable rental housing in locations served by fast and frequent public transportation enables low-income households access to more opportunities, including jobs, without the costs of owning and operating automobiles. This study operationalizes a residual income approach to identify market rental housing that is affordable to two household configurations (couples with children and couples without children) in two categories below the median income. The study is carried out on Canada’s least and most expensive major metropolitan housing markets, Montreal and Vancouver. In addition to spatially disaggregating the results into inside and outside rapid transit walking catchments, the results are spatially disaggregated into four zones (Urban Core, Inner City, Inner Suburbs, and Outer Suburbs). Implications of the uneven distribution of affordable rentals with respect to transit access are discussed.