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. ...

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.

[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.

HALIFAX - Despite a mix of messy Spring and Winter-like weather today, the gardening season is just around the corner and it is time to get inventive. This weekend the Urban Farm Museum Society of Spryfield is holding its 13th Annual Seedy Saturday on April 2nd from 2pm – 4pm at the Captain William Spry Community Centre in Halifax.  This popular event is for new and experienced gardeners of all ages, alike. The annual event encourages swapping seeds and buying seeds, picking up Seaweed compost and other organic supplies, or taking advantage of ...

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 - Once Queen Elizabeth High School is demolished, the land is to be used in the interim as an urban farm - a novel use of the land for the time being (it's slated to be used for expansion of the hospital in the future). The idea to turn the area into an urban farm spawned when Capital Health and the Dalhousie University's Cities and Environment Unit organized a public consultation on November 21, 2010. Spacing Atlantic covered the public consultation and offers ...

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.