The Buzzer just posted an interview with Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City:
What’s the place that make you happy and why?
My happy place? Granville and Georgia at rush hour. The tide of people pouring out of the Canada Line station give the corner a thrilling sense of life and possibility.
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And here he is in a happy place in New York City:
Madison Square
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The Buzzer is also holding a contest on just that very subject:
- Take a ‘selfie’ picture at the place in your city or community that makes you happy.
- Tweet your photo to @TransLink and with the hashtag #happycity. You can add a comment explaining the image and hashtags #selfie and/or #selfienation.
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Just checked the reservations for Charles’s talk on March 26 in the “Rethinking Transportation” series. Only 17 left at 4:20 pm. Last chance. Click here.
Just back from this talk which was highly worthwhile. I have a proposal to make, and that is not related to a bad experience today, but from attending many such talks. The question periods at the end are not usually productive. There are a fair number of grandstanders and a fair number of oddball questions the speaker really does not know what to do with. I don’t get the impression that most people like them very much. And now I think things like blogs handle this type of discussion amoung a disparate group of people with disparate interests better than people lining up at mics, or, heaven help us, twitter. And for people who really want a discussion, just going up to the front and discussing is more satisfying. And again, the questions today were not bad, no grandstanders, and some good questions, but I didn’t think that the speaker really enjoyed that format much. He certainly kept dropping broad hints about winding it up and going over to the Charles for a beer and a chat. And for the Happy City Guy, he didn’t look very happy when the twitter questions came out. So the proposal is to replace this Q&A session at the end of the next talk, unless the speaker is dead keen on it, and replace it with an chat at the front of the room and a blog discussion for those that prefer that format. If this was a successful experiment, the new format could be adopted more generally or at least put out there for speakers that preferred that option.