Spacing Saturday

Spacing Saturday highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region.

How well a city invests in transit is reflected in the priority it places on public transportation. In Halifax, Dustin Vallen continues the ‘City Unbuilt’ series to showcase a graduate architecture project for a bold new bus shelter at a prominent corner in the city.

Halifax’s Jane’s Walk was a great success as a good crowd showed up to tour through some of the areas of downtown that are on the verge of some significant change. Spacing Atlantic this week featured a review of the walk, so that anyone can experience at least a little taste of what they may have missed.

Is Stephen Harper using the G8 summit to punish urban voters in Toronto? After reading Matt Blackett’s summary of the Orwellian security measures that will be imposed on the city during and leading up to the summit, you may think so.

Toronto is a city defined by its undefinedness and has long had troubles properly marketing itself to the world. On the eve of a trip to Manchester, Spacing’s Shawn Micallef reflects on that city’s success at defining its image and compares its marketable attributes to our own, wondering why there has been such a difference, and what causes some city’s to a clearer collective image of themselves than others.

Preparing readers for a trip to the exurban community of Carleton Place, just beyond the reaches of greater Ottawa, Spacing profiles a new transit initiative in Lanark County that works to take commuters not just to conventional places and not just at conventional times.

In a bold opinion piece Chris Bradshaw critiquescurrent  rapid transit proposals that are designed to move commuters to and from the suburbs but will only support sprawl. Bradshaw instead presents a case for modes such as streetcars that will serve the dense urban communities of the future.

As the dust settles on our 2009 tax returns, now is a good time to look at the significance of some of the numbers. Spacing’s Alanah Heffez breaks some aspects of her return for readers and in doing so reveals a fantastic illustration of a fundamental problem with Canadian Federalism: the underfunding of municipal government.

Photo of Halifax Jane’s Walk by Katie McKay