EDITOR'S NOTE: Long-time supporter of Spacing, Robert Ouellette, wants residents of Canadian cities to take part in his new project called MESH Cities. Whether they knew it or not, anyone who followed Toronto’s Port Land debacle over the last few weeks got a first-hand introduction to the power MESH Cities have to shape our communities. Let me explain. We’ve been hearing a lot about so-called “smart” cities in the news recently as the major computing and infrastructure players like IBM, Cisco, GE, and Siemens look at the next frontier in the trend towards ubiquitous computing. That new frontier is our cities. Whatever you might think about a computer-driven modernity, MESH Cities are not just smart cities. MESH Cities go beyond the management of infrastructure to the heart of what makes cities worthwhile—their livability. Metaphorically, MESH Cities are the offspring of an improbable marriage between Jane Jacobs' ideals and ubiquitous city computing. Their kids, in this context, are named MESH: M=Mobile, E=Efficient, S=Subtle, H=Heuristics This is how the www.meshcities.com website introduces the concept.

"Machine Space, or territory devoted primarily to the use of machines, shall be so designated when machines have priority over people in the use of territory" - Horvath, Ronald J. 1974. "Machine Space." Geographical Review 64 (2): 167-188. Photo by Danny Cornelissen, Creative Commons ST. JOHN'S - Writing almost 40 years ago, Ronald Horvath wanted to translate technological questions into questions that were explicitly spatial and political. Today linking technology, space, and politics may not seem so strange, but even with Lewis Mumford’s writing preceding Horvath’s, this was still heady stuff at the time. What Horvath does so well is to give our taken for granted assumptions a good shake: the car is not just a technical object, a mere tool to get us from point A to point B. The car is urban North America’s sacred cow, he writes, but “[would] an Indian imagine devoting 70 percent of downtown Delhi to cow trails and pasturage, as we do for our automobiles in Detroit and Los Angeles?”. The language of the comparison might seem a bit anachronistic now – and Delhi's machine space has exploded since the 70’s – but students at Memorial University (MUN) in St. John's, where I teach Geography, love it. Suddenly the technology of the car becomes a lively thing suffused with meaning, symbolism, and myth as well as its own political and economic geographies: “Each year we sacrifice more than 50,000 Americans to our sacred cow in traffic accident fatalities. In search of fodder to perpetuate the existence of our sacred cow, we support despotic governments in oil-rich lands”, writes Horvath.

HALIFAX - Ka-Ching. With a $13 billion dollar debt in NS (cleverly illustrated by Hugh Pouliot), how can we not talk about value? It is ironic really, that HRM with its past spending habits, has not fully assessed the value(s) of, and in, the HRM Regional Municipality Strategy Plan. Thankfully, on Saturday, March 12, 2011, a panel consisting of IMAGINE conferences' key-note speakers - Bruce Tonn, Hugh Millward and Patricia Gordon, as well as city councillor Jennifer Watts - talked about planning values in relation to the HRM's Regional Municipal Strategy and long-term planning, in general. Despite spending a significant value in, on and for HRM in the past, the conference revealed that money rather than planning took a priority in the 25-year Municipal Strategy plan. Millward suggested that a lot of smart growth ideas were watered down in the actual HRM plan; he assumed that it was a result of municipal resources, specifically financial. He also attributed the watering down to the fact that "the plan had to be sold as a package", which may be why certain topics had less of an impact. Watts pointed to the fact that there was and is no conversation about water, despite the fact that there are 46 watersheds in Nova Scotia with a majority of them in the HRM area. Watts suggested that "It would be important to address water and understand the implications of water. I've been hearing lots of land-use planning, but what is our relationship to water? Again though, planning water is really expensive." Gordon indicated that "the scope of any municipal plan is hard to address." When Gordon was working for the City of Calgary, during ImagineCALGARY, they reduced their municipal plan to two key areas that would shape the plan and long-term planning - Energy and Water. Gordon felt that both were missing from the HRM plan and both are really important and necessary to assess now and in the long-term: "To me if you don't have energy (in the plan) you have a problem ... you are going nowhere without energy." Tonn expressed surprise that NS still relied heavily on fossil fuel energy, when the province had access to other sustainable resources. But Tonn also indicated that a challenge of transitioning to sustainable energy resources is that, as evidenced in the USA, the traditional grid energy infrastructures are not capable of distributing the new and long-term energy technology. Watts quipped in indicating that "it is a hard slug and that hands are tied to what we can do." She did indicate however, that council has hired legal teams to write new charters. What is clear though, is that planning is expensive or at least it is under the current bureaucratic (debt) structure.

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 - “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.”

This article was originally published on Spacing Ottawa. The harrowing images coming to us from across the Pacific are heightening the sense of dread felt around the world about the final tally of the death toll in northeastern Japan; at the time of posting authorities were advising the number of people killed by the quake and the subsequent tsunami could well exceed 10,000. The Flickr pool shown above -- which also includeds video clips -- is ...

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, ...

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.