HALIFAX - “What kind of community do you want to live in? What do you want Halifax to look like?” Jen Powley asked these questions to a packed auditorium in the Ralph M. Medjuck Building located at the Dalhousie University School of Planning campus on March 11th, 2011. Despite the diversity of her audience—students and seniors, the able-bodied and the handicapped, Nova Scotia natives and recently transplanted residents—Powley guessed their answers may be more similar than different. She’s also confident an HRM Greenbelt would solidify a common ground. On the second day of the Dalhousie School of Planning’s Imagine conference, Powley proposed the implementation of an HRM Greenbelt to strengthen the components of the Regional Municipal Planning Strategy.  The conferences intent was to assess long-term planning in general and to review specifically, the Regional Municipal Plan: the 25-year strategy plan is under review this year and is seeking consultation from the public. The HRM Regional Municipal Plan was ratified in 2006 and lays out a strategy for sustainable growth in the HRM that simultaneously preserves the environment and fosters a strong economy. It touches upon what Powley refers to as the three key pillars of future planning: society, economics and the environment. It also addresses them in urban, rural and suburban contexts. While Powley agrees with this approach, she describes the Plan as “130 pages of dense, dense document. I use the image of oatmeal,” she says. “Really, it’s kind of bland.” Powley’s joke isn’t far off-base. According to a recent survey, 53 per cent of polled HRM residents rated the success of the Plan as five or lower, on a one to ten scale. “It’s a good plan,” says Powley. “There’s lots of good stuff in it, but it hasn’t attracted the imagination of the population.”

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.’

ALL OVER - "Jane’s Walk is the street-level celebration of Jane Jacobs’ legacy that combines the simple act of walking with personal observations, urban history and local lore as a way of knitting people together into strong and resourceful communities." Since it's inception in Toronto in 2007, every first weekend of May (to coincide with Jane Jacobs' b-day), Jane's Walk sends swaths of pedestrians out to infiltrate and explore the urban landscape. The walks honour urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs who championed the interests of local residents and pedestrians, ...

HALIFAX REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY -  Obviously, the city needs more bike racks and with all the exciting hype around cycling infrastructure in HRM (surveys and consultations), the city will likely need more bicycle parking. If you could park your bike - not on a fence, not on a parking meter, not on a tree - where would you park it? Submit your creative and/or functional bike rack ideas to the Sustainable Environment Management Offices' (SEMO) HRM ...

DARTMOUTH - Discover Dartmouth with trusted Narratives in Space + Time (NiS+T) collective, as they take teens and adults out for a wandering tour of neglected monuments, abandonned gems (like graveyards) and unexplored paths. With the winter chill upon Nova Scotia, NiS+T recommends to dress warmly, as the Vision Pavilion's first workshop requires weaving through spaces and places in nearby neighbourhoods. Following the tour, participants will be flocked back to Alderney Gate Public Library to learn ...

DARTMOUTH – Take your imagination and/or experience, add Dartmouth and mix it altogether in a mobile phone to participate in the Locative Media Art project, Dartmouth Vision Pavilion.  In tandem with Locative Media Art practices, contemporary artists Leola LeBlanc and Barbara Lounder, who currently comprise the collective Narratives in Space + Time (NiS+T), have put together the community project.  NiS+T are seeking teen and adult participants to narrate a story or a poem inspired by Dartmouth. Join NiS+T tonight, January 13th, 2011 from 6pm-8:30pm to hear the fun low-down (a.k.a. general information ...

HALIFAX REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY - Ever wondered how decisions in this city are really made? Tried to decipher one of City Hall's official reports? Pondered how your councillor voted on the latest issue? Well, ponder no longer. Brand new website, Show of Hands Halifax, aims to provide a one-stop facility for political accountability and dialogue in HRM. Created by Spacing Atlantic contributor Emily Richardson, and described as "an independent resource for city-council goings-on", Show of Hands hopes to better connect councillors to their constituents through the pure power of simple, ...

HALIFAX - Welcome to our "vacant city" ideas hub. If you're a downtown roamer, worker, or driver, you may have noticed a new addition to the city's vacant lots this week: DIY idea bubbles. On this Saturday's 'Public Space Day' — the final event of the 4 Days 'unconference' — Spacing Atlantic cohosted a 'Jane's Walk' inspired walking tour through the downtown's blank spots, leaving behind a trail of participant-generated ideas for interim and long-term uses. Here these ideas will continue to be collected and expanded on, and you're invited to contribute to this virtual gallery of thinking around public space. Starting at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the tour set out to explore a variety of vacant and semi-vacant spaces, with a focus on day-use parking lots and areas awaiting development — the idea being to turn these "anti-spaces" into sites of creative opportunity. With cohosts David Clark and Léola Le Blanc, we learned about new genre public art and locative media projects they have already established in Halifax and Dartmouth, respectively. (Clark's interactive sculpture, Waterfall, remains at the ferry terminal, and a quick ride across the water will take you to Le Blanc's DAMMsel Day — an experiencial piece where participants traverse Dartmouth armed with iPhones which cue a recorded narrative along the way.) With these creative examples to inspire us, we dedicated the next three stops along the tour — the Waterfront Development Corporation's string of harbour parking lots, the graffiti-pit-turned-rubble-pile on Morris, and the site of the once proposed 'Twisted Sisters' development — to our own idea generation, mounting hand-crafted idea bubbles as we strolled. Layered onto this physical trail is also a virtual trail, which can be tapped into via cellphone. The barcodes affixed to each idea bubble, when scanned using a cellphone camera, ask a question of the viewer relating to public space and Halifax vacancies. These questions are: