HALIFAX - For the 3rd annual Mayor’s Award for Excellence & Innovation in Planning competition, eligible  post-secondary students living in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) were challenged to conceptualize how cities will function in 100 years. Applicants were provided a selection of questions as imagination foder for their entries - questions like,  how will we get from point A to point B? What will our homes look like? What will we eat? And, where will our food come from? The annual competition became a fixture at the recently past IMAGINE conference at Dalhousie University's  School of Planning. In line with the mandate of the conference, the Mayor’s Award was an opportunity for aspiring planners to get creative, to imagine what life could be like in the city in 100 years (or more), and to illustrate the importance of long-term planning. Although only post-secondary students were eligible to submit, the criteria was otherwise wide open, and could include any combination of words and images, hand-made or digitally constructed. The award, worth $500, was solicited by the School of Planning and the Mayor of Halifax, with submitted entries a focal point of discussion and interaction, during the IMAGINE conference. Conference organizers and participants were asked to vote on the most innovative idea, with the award going to Kourosh Rad, whose winning entry is illustrated above.

HALIFAX - Cities, as a rule, almost always outlive their founders, architects, and inhabitants. Despite millennia of transformation, London today retains its essential structure as laid out by the Romans in the 2nd century CE, while the medina of Fez, in Morocco, has sustained waves of invasion and colonization to preserve a built environment and way of life born in the early 9th century CE. Spaces that work, that are built on tenable foundations and principles, tend to last. Thursday evening kicked off a three day conference at Dalhousie University’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, entitled IMAGINE. This year’s annual planning conference was ‘designed to explore and discuss the importance of long term planning’, and, as suggested by Prof. Christine Macy in her opening comments, consider a kind of thinking about planning that goes ‘beyond the twenty year mortgage and the four year political term.’ The conference asks participants to ponder planning beyond our own lifetimes, to imagine the city in 100 years. In his keynote address, however, Prof. Bruce Tonn of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, proposes extending this perspective a touch further: for a planning perspective to become truly sustainable, Tonn has developed a theory known as ‘very long-term planning’, which considers sustainable planning in terms of the next hundred, thousand, even tens of thousands of years. ‘How much longer do we need the earth to sustain human life?’ he asks. Tonn calls the imperative of very long-term planning the central responsibility of young planners going forward, and ‘maybe the next phase of human civilization.’

Open invitation! Spacing Atlantic wants to read your city, neighbourhood, block, street, breakfast corner - niche - in photographic form. Old photos, new photos, ones you didn't even take. Dang, you could even send us a drawing. We want to see the first place, the first intersection, first hole in the sidewalk you think of that captures the who, what and why of where you live. Think of it like this: if you could tell us about the space that you call home in one word, and that ...

[caption id="attachment_992" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo courtesy of the Pier 21 Research Centre"][/caption] HALIFAX - In 2007, Pier 21, the gateway to Canada for over a million people between 1928 and 1971, was publicly voted one of the Seven Wonders of Canada on the CBC. It was cited as ‘intrinsically linked to Canada’s multicultural identity’, and a celebrated national icon which draws tens of thousands of visitors each year. Yet for all of the ‘history’ that the site – piers 19 to 23 and the Immigration Annex – embodies, there actually seems to be a great deal of history missing. Construction of the Halifax Ocean Terminals began in 1917, and finished in 1928. However, the sheds were designed as facilities for the reception and transfer of cargo, not people. Debate in the 1920s between government, immigration, and commercial officials as to whether these cold, dark, and primitive structures were really suitable for the welcoming of trans-Atlantic migrants is evidence of divergent attitudes and practices towards immigration and immigrants in Halifax. Certainly, commercial interests dictated policy on the Halifax waterfront. Steven Schwinghamer, Pier 21's research coordinator, remarks, ''railway companies would frequently be making announcements on behalf of Immigration,'' including where – and subsequently how – the immigration office would operate. Immigration was moved from the more spacious and hospitable Pier 2 in the North End to Pier 21, a freight shed, in 1928 apparently due to pressure from shipping and railway companies.