HALIFAX - Lately I have been looking at “snapshots” I took of downtown Halifax about 1967. It made me realize that for most of my life there have been big holes as lots were cleared and remained empty for years and sometimes decades. These not very clear pictures show the corner of Prince and Market Streets looking south east. I did not take them as a real panorama but they almost fit and together they give a more comprehensive sense of the site. The desirable little brick building remained ...

HALIFAX - The process by which Rank Inc.’s new business super-complex, Nova Centre, was approved by HRM Council has lacked significant public input since the early stages of development in 2005. The investment of over $50 million dollars per government has, over the last year, prompted community interest groups, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, journalists, and Halifax MP Megan Leslie to direct attention to the lack of due public consultation, especially since the majority of those polled are against it.  The unanimous municipal, provincial and federal funding raises questions about government responsibility to public interest. HRM Open Projects gave artist Scott Saunders the space and means to address this conflict. His installation of Town Square, 100 mannequin figures wearing business suits strewn across the rubble foundation of the former Chronicle Herald building, is an artwork that is not a solution to the outcome of private wheeling and dealing, but is one response to it.

Today, Friday, September 16th, is PARK(ing) Day! In cities around the globe, artists, activists and citizens will transform metered parking spaces into temporary public parks and other social spaces, as part of the annual event. PARK(ing) Day invites people to rethink the way streets are used and promotes discussion around the need for broad- based changes to urban infrastructure. In recent years, PARK(ing) Day has inspired city governments to create legal mechanisms to extend the public realm into the parking lane. In San Francisco, the Pavement to Parks “Parklet” program provides a permit system for businesses, community groups and individuals to transform metered parking spaces into small “parklets” that are open to the public. In New York City the “pop up café” program offers similar permit system for local cafes wishing to offer sidewalk service. A listing of events scheduled for Canadian cities follows. For more information, visit the PARK(ing) Day project website.

Captivated by the landscape of Canada's east coast cities? Obsessed with the beauty of a public space, the dirty grime of a back alley, a sidewalk's everyday dramas or the evolving skyline of your hometown? Spacing Atlantic wants your urban photos. Please add them to our photo pool and we will select the best photos to be featured on our blog in our articles and in our Atlantic Snapshot series. Expose yourself and shoot away Atlantic Canada (and don't forget to focus!). Sorry, couldn't help myself. ...

SACKVILLE - Last weekend saw Sappy Fest Six energize the otherwise quiet summer streets of beautiful Sackville, New Brunswick. The festival features a diversity of musical acts, workshops and art installations that take place in a variety of venues, including Uncle Larry’s Billiards Hall, the Royal Canadian Legion and a Main Stage Tent that closes down Bridge Street, downtown Sackville’s main commercial thoroughfare. The effect is a unique experience of urban space, where otherwise ordinary features of the town become the backdrops of incredible musical experiences. The festival is an opportunity for Sackville to showcase itself, and submit its streets, structures and parks to transformation and reconsideration by visiting festival-goers and resident Sackvillers alike.

HALIFAX - This summer across the country, the idea that vegetables can and should be grown in the city continues to gain momentum. Urban agriculture is a lot of things, but as a formal movement promotes local, sustainable food systems, renewed inner-city social and physical health, and a shift toward people-oriented urbanism. Inner city food production has obvious impacts on the urban landscape, creating pleasant productive spaces in otherwise unproductive, sterile land. Halifax has many lovely gardens, many of which can be found on the Halifax Garden Network’s user-generated map. You can, of course, engage in urban gardening in a variety of ways, ranging from formalized municipal allotments, to semi-private community gardens, to straight up guerilla gardens.

WHAT: Outdoor Concert, Save the Bedford Reef WHEN: Monday, May 30 6:30 - 8:30 pm WHERE: DeWolf  Park,  Bedford HOW MUCH: Free BEDFORD - Alongside the Ecology Action Centre and the Sackville River Association, join Save the Bedford Reef advocates and musicians this evening for a Free Outdoor Concert at DeWolf Park in Bedford, NS.  Tonights' concert will showcase talented local musicians including Singer-Songwriter Dusty Keleher performing his new song "Mile of Ocean" with Amy Lounder and Jeff Harper.  The concert also features Cassie & ...

"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.