HALIFAX - With the news that after 12 years in office Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly won’t seek re-election this October, HRM has a chance to inject some fresh thinking and revisit some old ideas to improve the quality of public space in Halifax.  Although I've lived away from Halifax for two years, here is my list of priorities I’d look for in a new mayor: Walking With the Metro Transit strike dragging on, transportation is definitely on the radars of most HRM residents. For starters though, Halifax has long been due for some pedestrian infrastructure, like pedestrian scrambles at major intersections downtown, road islands and sidewalk bulb outs to make crossing wide streets safer, benches, street trees and the pedestrianization of streets like Argyle, University or others, either on a permanent, seasonal, weekly or trial period like Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market in Toronto. Cycling For cyclists and cycling advocates, the laundry list of needs is long.

Portland, Oregon gets a lot of credit as cities go. “The city that works” really does work, as I found out when I visited last weekend. An early North American adopter of an urban growth boundary, Portland is in many ways an urban planner’s paradise. With its extensive network of bike infrastructure, buses, streetcars and an LRT system that seamlessly connects the downtown to the airport and suburbs, there’s a lot Toronto could learn from what has become the ‘Portland model' of city building. What Portland doesn’t get enough credit for, however, are its parking lots. Unlike other cities I’ve seen, where downtown parking lots are generally condos-in-waiting or worse, car-filled voids during the day and just plain voids at night, some of Portland’s parking lots are the life of the city.

This is a reprint of an article I wrote for the Dalhousie Gazette. HALIFAX - Despite what you might hear about dropping student enrollment, Dalhousie's student population is booming. In the past decade, seven massive new buildings have gone up just on Studley Campus, the last being the new academic building still being built at Coburg and LeMarchant. This growing list of new buildings includes the Computer Science Building, the McCain Arts and Social Sciences building, the Fountain House extension of Howe Hall, Risley Hall and the Rowe Management Building, all of which have a prominent, unavoidable presence on campus. Believe it or not, we are witnessing one of the most transformative moments in the University's history, the likes of which haven't been seen in 40 years. Surely these new buildings are in some way shaping the lives of the thousands of students who continue to use their lecture halls, live in their dorm rooms, smoke outside their front doors or simply pass by their shiny new facades on a daily basis. But how do they compare to the buildings already existing on campus? Are they an improvement, or a step in the wrong direction?

HALIFAX - Wright Ave is the kind of place that makes Atlantic Canadian cities so great. An almost entirely hidden street in downtown Halifax, many people walk by it all the time and never even know it's there — a laneway-looking road leading off Morris Street full of family-sized semi-detached houses. Backing onto Fort Massey Cemetery, the houses seem as if they were all built at once. Their uniform shape and cladding, big wooden decks and similar paint jobs seem to point to the fact that some developer likely spotted this unused bit of land right smack in downtown Halifax and decided to throw up some houses.

HALIFAX - It goes without saying that there's plenty Halifax could do to improve its pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. Nothing, however, epitomizes this fact so much as the 'gate' on Quingate. One of the best used pedestrian and cycling passageways, the gate is nothing less than Halifax's most glaring bottlenecks. Yet unlike other bottlenecks, the gate happens to be the cheapest and simplest one to fix. A through-fare for many commuters, students and errand runners alike, the high volume of foot traffic and continuous flow of cyclists is literally confirmed by the regular spectators of ...

HALIFAX - Last week, WebUrbanist published a neat article on old star-shaped fortresses still kicking around in the US, Europe and Asia. It struck me that while all the other forts in North America (and some in Europe) looked strikingly similar to Halifax's Citadel — pulling off the "frozen-in-time" look in an equally successful fashion — others in the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, France and Japan looked far more alive and integrated into their modern sites, not just as museum pieces but active urban spaces. That's not to say that Halifax's Citadel isn't active or entirely a museum piece either. During weekdays the monument might attract mostly tourists, but walk up the citadel on a weekend morning and you'll find plenty of locals out for a leisurely stroll; walk up late at night and you'll likely meet another group of Haligonians, this time using the site's isolation to work more illicitly as prostitutes or in other illegal trades. Yet this isolation from the rest of the city surrounding it means the Citadel can be a dangerous place to be at night, for both workers and recreationists alike. So maybe it's time to update our old fort. Our worries of attacking cavalry and need for spaces where cattle can graze are long gone, so why not add trees, benches or even a pond to the currently barren grass fields (specifically near Bell and Sackville streets) surrounding the site — a replacement body of water for the lost Egg Pond now buried under the Commons skate park.

HALIFAX - Looking for a lunch date this Tuesday? Come chat with HRM's urban design head honcho Andy Fillmore. This Dalhousie-Harvard educated architect-come-planner-come-urban designer is the manager of the influential HRMbyDesign Downtown Plan (discussed in detail in a Spacing Atlantic four-part series) and also happens to be the lead urban design advisor on both the proposed New Central Library project and World Trade and Convention Centre site. Currently, Andy is set to take a leading role in creating a masterplan to redesign the infamous Cogswell Interchange. Now is as good a ...

HALIFAX - Big plans are in store for the CBC building site at the corner of Sackville and South Park Streets, reports the Chronicle-Herald. Following four years of study, the CBC's aging structure has been slated for demolition to make way for a new 500,000 square foot development. Neighbours the YMCA — who have teamed up with CBC Radio Canada to come up with a development proposal — currently expect the site to include new YMCA facilities, office retail space, a public atrium, 200+ residential units and a 100 room boutique hotel. While we'll ...