SAINT JOHN - It’s official. The City has finally implemented a new municipal plan to replace the outdated 40 year-old plan whose policies have ransacked the city. Sprawl, encouraged under the old municipal plan, has shifted the population around, outside the city’s borders, and created a doughnut hole where a densely populated city once stood. Of course, this is an easy conclusion to reach with hindsight at our disposal but, to be fair, I’m sure the Council, city staff and consultants of the day had the best interests of the city at heart. In the prevailing 40 years, however, the trends and practices in urban planning have made a massive about-face. No more of this idyllic “city-country” state, the suburbs, but a focus on density, walkability, and sustainability. The residents of Saint John appear to have sensed the impact of these old outdated policies and have begun rejuvenating the city even in the absence of a new municipal plan. The city is seeing a natural resurgence and the new crowd-sourced municipal plan will be a fantastic guiding document and development tool reaffirming the direction the city is already heading in.

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. ...

This article is kindly cross-posted from the Halifax Media Co-op. Check out the original here. HALIFAX - Bedford’s gain will be Bayers Road’s (and the taxpayer's) pain. And the pain will be considerable. This was the warning that the HRM Peninsula Community Council provided at a public meeting at City Hall on Monday night.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Suburban development, Kingswood, Hammonds Plains, HRM."][/caption] HALIFAX - The Ecology Action Center's Jen Powley has been busy since she presented the idea of an HRM greenbelt at Dalhousie's School of Planning Imagine Conference in March. There, Powley positioned the potential greenbelt as providing common ground among residents and a mechanism to achieve the goals and objectives laid out in the Regional Plan. On May 25, 2011 — a short two months later — Powley took centre stage yet again (with other project partners) to announce the formation of Our HRM Alliance. The Alliance aims to shine light on the social, environmental, and financial costs associated with sprawl, while proposing mechanisms to curb it.  In addition to the establishment of a greenbelt, this would mean changes to the commercial tax structure. The proposed changes would go a long way in strengthening existing community centres by encouraging reinvestment and better defining growth boundaries within HRM. “We want to see liveable suburbs and viable town centres, including downtown Halifax,” says Powley in a recent press release for the Alliance.

I like it here. So why is my neighborhood and thousands more like it, so often ignored by architects and architecture schools? The very environment where a good number of students were born and raised is relegated to a bench seat when it comes to academic discourse, or - even worse - treated with derision or scorn. "Leave it to the developers," is the refrain. I whole-heartedly disagree. There is fantastic essay by Albert Pope, a professor at Rice University in Houston, where I received my education, entitled "The Primacy of Space." In it, Pope writes: "The contemporary city, the city that is, at this moment, under construction,  is invisible. Despite the fact that it is lived in by millions of people, that it is endlessly reproduced, debated in learned societies, and suffered  on a daily basis, the conceptual framework that would allow us to see it is conspicuously lacking. While the contemporary city remains everywhere and always seen, it is fully transparent to the urban conceptions under which we continue to operate." In other words: old rules don't necessarily apply. The formal ideas which stem from urbanity are often rendered powerless or irrelevant when haphazardly overlaid on suburban spaces. We need new tools in the toolbox. Hell, we need a whole other toolbox. HALIFAX - The above image and text is care of Halifax Architect, Eric Stotts and was originally published on the blog, Building Social Value; a blog about Socially Responsible Architecture that features writings and observations by Stotts, as well as Angela Henderson. Stotts' above text and photo montage will likely provide an interesting entry point into his PechaKucha (PK) presentation (20 images, shown for 20 second each) tonight at The Carleton, and is likewise fitting for his PK presenters tag name - 'Suburban Apologist'.  Angela Henderson, will also be giving an engaging presentation at PK#7. From her blog entries on co-design, community building, public space, and place-making, I can understand the correlation between her two-word PK presentation descriptor - 'Incurable Humanist'.

HALIFAX -  In 2005, Halifax's north end collective consciousness came together to sprout Imagine Bloomfield in an effort to renew and preserve a nexus of history, community and cultural activity relevant to the needs of the area. Since 2005, needs assessments have been conducted, consultants hired, volunteers amassed and finally in 2010 a MasterPlan for redevelopment of the site was tabled and accepted unanimously by Halifax Regional Council. Recently, Imagine Bloomfield reported that “an implementation process report is expected to begin being acted upon in 2011.” Without saying, Imagine Bloomfield is an incredible project which has been inspired by the the passion and dedication of a group of people and has successfully inspired city planners to imagine new ideas for their property to move a little quicker to get this development off of the ground. Based on my own observations and experiences of developments and planning in Halifax for the last 9 years, the skeptic in me still wonders when this project will in fact bloom. Seriously - IMAGINE - planning in Halifax. From March 10- 12, 2011, Dalhousie University graduate students from the School of Planning have organized a conference titled IMAGINE. The intent of IMAGINE is to explore long-term planning through speakers and activities to create an understanding of how long-term planning should and can influence how cities are planned today. The conference will facilitate the sharing of ideas and lessons learned between professionals, academics and the community, while exploring a combination of initiatives and ideas from a wide range of speakers with diverse backgrounds.

HALIFAX - Last Thursday, Tim Bousquet wrote a great article on the potentially damaging impact of the ‘tax reforms’ proposed by HRM's Tax Reform Committee. The general thrust of the piece exposed how the tax reform plan essentially hopes to replace the traditionally progressive notion that the more your home is worth, the more you pay in taxes, to the more urban-friendly idea that property tax should be based on “the cost of the services actually received by the property owner.” I like to think of myself as an urbanist — someone who believes that healthy and vibrant cities hold the key to a better future for us politically, socially, environmentally and culturally — so seen through this lens, making suburbanites pay for the strain they impose on civic infrastructure through sprawl, car-based transportation, etc. holds its appeal.  I think to myself, maybe that’ll be the kick in the pants they need to finally leave their McMansions and move downtown? But we no longer live in the 1970s. This is no longer the era of “white flight” where the suburbs are populated by middle and upper-class Caucasians fleeing the blight and increasing multiculturalism of urban centres. When we refer to ‘inner city’ struggles today, issues like gentrification, condoization, historic preservation and public space debates are generally what come to mind, not topics like violent crime, poverty and racialized ghettos — problems which peaked in the downtowns of cities decades ago and have since slowly receded into the background, often literally.

HALIFAX - Spryfield’s public spaces aren’t often associated with art. In many people’s minds, the suburban neighbourhood is associated with violence, graffiti tags, and low-income housing projects, but that could be all the more reason to make art in the community, says Miro Davis, a Spryfield-based artist. “You hear about it,” she says. “You hear all these stories about it, all this trouble...all the problems.” Yet Davis strongly believes that art – and particularly community art – has great power to bring together people and space in a visual way. “Introducing something that is a spectacular process, that’s happening in a place that has a rough reputation, shows the beauty in that particular place,” she says. Davis has been commissioned to involve the community in a public art project, which will be called Water Falls — a 15-foot-tall project of plastic, metal, and lighting. The project is going to be installed in the Captain William Spry community centre.