Sewell still learning after all these years - Canadian Architecture News

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Sewell still learning after all these years

Archiseek / Canada / News / 2006 / February 3

John Sewell has worried about urban planning and been fighting his good fight for longer than I've been alive -- and I'm 37 years old. As a young law student in 1966, he was asked to attend a meeting concerning an urban renewal scheme that would have seen a little working-class neighbourhood at Queen and Parliament, Trefann Court, bulldozed for a forest of high-rises on par with the newly minted St. James Town. It was an old story: On the city's demolition books since the late 1950s, the in-limbo neighbourhood really was becoming a slum since property owners saw any investment as pointless. Assuming the role of Trefann Court's "David," the underpaid yet overachieving Mr. Sewell and his small, determined group took on the city-as-Goliath and ultimately won. The experience was a crash course in city planning and sealed his fate as an activist.

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