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.
• Spacing Toronto’s John Lorinc assesses the candidates and the playing field in light of Toronto’s upcoming mayoral election.
• The winning design for Toronto’s Fort York Visitor Center was announced last week. Check Spacing Toronto’s flickr page for photos of the winning design.
• Spacing’s Toronto subway buttons (buttons which replicate the design of the city’s station) got recognized by Canada’s National Post last week. The paper named the buttons one of the decades “best examples of how Torontonians are more engaged with their city”.
• Spacing Ottawa’s David McClelland takes a look back at the transformative (but only partially realized) 1950 Ottawa city plan commonly known as the Gréber plan (a name derived from its its chief architect, Jacques Gréber).
• A new community agriculture initiative in Ottawa, called The Vegetable Patch, “partners with homeowners to use their yards to grow organic vegetables and fruit”. Homeowners allow the organization the use of their yards to cultivate vegetables in exchange for periodic vegetable baskets throughout the year.
• Looking out over the nation’s capital from atop Parliament Hill Spacing Ottawa’s Tonya Davidson muses on the historical forces that shaped the Ottawa of today.
• Spacing Montreal’s Alanah Heffez is “unimpressed” by reports that Montreal may be limiting public access to the city’s parks.
• Rising home prices threaten to push Montreal’s Hasidic Jewish community out of the city’s Outremont and Mile End neighbourhoods.
• Anonymously placed plaques depicting wild animals adds a mysterious and unique touch to Montreal’s wooden hydro poles.
• As of last week, Halifax’s Metro Transit has an online schedule providing departure times for its 2200+ bus stops, bus and ferry terminals. Spacing Atlantic’s Jake Schabas argues that, though useful this initiative falls short, and that of a truly transformative system would “switch from simply conveying static schedules… to a system that actually told you when the bus was going to come”.
• Spacing Atlantic’s Steve Bedard looks at the characteristics of a good bike parking space and the state of bike parking in Halifax.
• The Pleasantville neighborhood in St. John’s Newfoundland–a historic military site currently undergoing redevelopment–has a unique Texan twist. Completed in November 1941, the site’s streets were designed to resemble a Stetson cowboy hat when viewed from above.
photo of Hyrdo Pole Art by Christopher DeWolf