By Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Cities program manager

(31 October 2007, Montréal, Québec) Welcome to the new Post Carbon Cities blog!

This latest addition to www.postcarboncities.net will feature twice-weekly journal entries, articles, commentary and other insights from Post Carbon Cities staff and selected guest contributors. We'll use this blog to focus on what city officials and staff are doing to prepare for the post-carbon era. We'll also use it to keep you up to date on our work at Post Carbon Cities to support these efforts.

This latest addition to www.postcarboncities.net will feature twice-weekly journal entries, articles, commentary and other insights from Post Carbon Cities staff and selected guest contributors. We'll use this blog to focus on what city officials and staff are doing to prepare for the post-carbon era. We'll also use it to keep you up to date on our work at Post Carbon Cities to support these efforts.

We're launching the blog with this first entry from a neighborhood pub in Montréal. I'm visiting this beautiful city for a day as part of my book tour for our newly-launched guidebook for local governments, Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty. A local pub in one of North America's few true Francophone cities is, I think, a fitting place for this launch in a number of ways. After all, the challenges of preparing our cities for the post-carbon era require us to:

• look beyond our usual practices of city planning and city governance to find fundamentally different ways of managing urban areas (Québec is unique in the U.S. and Canada as having the only land use ownership and planning structure that is not based on English common law);
• look to more human-scale forms of urban development and design than those generally found in most of the U.S. and Canada (old Montréal is a fine showcase of many of the urban design subtleties that make so many European cities eminently "livable");
• look to more local sources for supplying our basic needs (which, in my book, includes great local beer!).

Of course, I'm here in Montréal not just to visit pubs but to make presentations about the Post Carbon Cities guidebook. Yesterday evening I gave my first presentation of this Northeast tour to an undergraduate city planning class (~30 students attending) at Concordia University, hosted by instructors Craig Townsend and Shane Mulligan. This morning I did a similar presentation for about 25 staff at the City of Montréal, hosted by city planners Natacha Beauchesne and François Miller.

The challenges and opportunities facing Montréal became apparent right away, with questions arising after both the Concordia and the City presentations about how Montréal might truly go about rethinking its planning and development practices when it is in many ways subordinate to rural-dominated politics playing out at the provincial level in Québec. Next stop is Burlington, Vermont to attend the CommunityMatters07 conference, and to start the New England portion of the book tour.

We'll update the blog with news from my book tour once or twice a week, with additional contributions from Laurel Hoyt, PCC Program Assistant, and other colleagues and advisers. Please add us to your weekly list of blogs to read, let us know what else you'd like to see discussed on this blog by dropping a note to and drop a note to me or to Laurel.

[Other blog posts on Daniel's Fall 2007 book tour:
Post Carbon Cities Fall 2007 Tour (2 of 3): New England readies for peak oil,
Post Carbon Cities Fall 2007 Tour (3 of 3): New York, Philadelphia, Toronto.]