Interesting meeting

I met with some planners from Edmonton, Alberta yesterday. They have an interesting conundrum. Their city is booming (the Athabasca tar sands...). They want to harness the growth to extend quality of life benefits to neighborhoods, and to add density in community-supportive ways. And their core values, civic engagement that is real and substantive, equity, and quality design for buildings and places, appear to be pretty rare in the typical world of public administration and urban planning.