Spacing Saturday is a new feature that highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region. Spacing Saturday replaces the weekly features Montreal Monday and Toronto Tuesday.
• Public space activists in Toronto cheered this week as City Council voted to implement a new bylaw and tax on commercial billboards.
• Spacing Toronto‘s Shawn Micallef writes about the “overwhelming” experience of visiting Richard Serra’s hidden and mysterious “Shift” sculpture unusually located in an empty field near King City (a small community just north of Toronto).
• John Loric explains the value of preserving two historic and iconic Toronto structures, Canada Malting towers on the waterfront, and the decommissioned airport hangers at the former Downsview airforce base.
• Montreal’s City Council recently approved the construction of two 32-storey towers near the corner of Guy and Sherbrooke streets raising the ever-present urban debates around intensification, neighborhood preservation and architectural integrity.
• Montreal’s new City Council, met for the first time this week since the November 1st election. Devin Alfardo examines the dynamic of this new city government.
• Communauto, the Montreal-based car share service and the oldest network of its kind in North America, enters into its 15th year this year and is still going strong with over 20,000 users and a fleet of 830 vehicles.
• The historic York Street Railway Station, a Fredericton landmark whose future has been in question for years, is finally getting restored. But the proposal to turn the “beloved” (but dilapidated) station into the central flagship location for New Brunswick Liquor has been met with mixed reaction.
• The construction of a giant plastic waterfall in the Halifax suburb Spryfield, brings community members together as more than a hundred residents participate in the project.
• Funding approval for yet another transit study in Halifax, has Spacing Atlantic Contributor Alex Boutilier wondering whether City Council is more committed to studying its transit problems then to solving them.
• Spacing Ottawa‘s Tonya Davidson writes a fascinating piece about the portrayal of masculinity and femininity in the 70-plus statues and monuments that dot the nation’s capital.
• Empty for the past 17 years, Ottawa’s Ogivly department store remains a well-loved historical landmark. Spacing Ottawa‘s Chris Warden looks back at Ogivly’s historical place in the city and what might be in store for its future.
• A multi-part series focused the effect of a new intensification project in the Island Park neighbourhood started this week on Spacing Ottawa. The first post of the series (which will follow the experience of neighbourhood residents and environmentalists Chris Henschel and Allegra Newman) outlines the details of the intensification plan and the concerns of current the residents.
photos by Giovanni Paquin