Spacing Saturday highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region.
The current Bayview Station in downtown Ottawa
How well do we treat public transit stations as public space? With LRT plans moving forward Jay Baltz writes about the corresponding progress on a Community Design Plan for the new transit corridor and questions plans for making the only areas exempt from minimum densities the stations themselves.
Clive Doucet tackles popular misconceptions about the necessity for suburbs to provide reasonably priced housing. By revealing the subsidy which must be applied to finance expensive suburban infrastructure Doucet paints a picture of the suburbs as dragging the city down.
Crystal Melville reflects on the process of narrowing down a broad set of long range planning goals from the Imagine Halifax session into something which can be sold to the municipality as a complete long range plan by asking questions of where to find value.
The final version of the Draft Bikeways Plan for the institutional neighbourhood of downtown Halifax was presented this week. Crystal Melville profiles the event.
With the bike lane dispute in Brooklyn taking a turn towards the courts, Jake Tobin Garrett makes an appeal for calm on all the sides of the driver-cyclist divide and backs it up by showing how a calmer head could lead to a more productive dialogue.
As part of the No Mean City series Alex Bozikovic talks readers on a tour of the striking Native Child and Family Services building. The incredible interior design of the building includes a stylized and functional long house and council fire.
A set of railway tracks between the boroughs of Plateau Mont-Royal and Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie have long been traverse with informal crossings formed by cutting away the chain link fence. New negotiations between the boroughs and Canadian Pacific could recognize the needs of pedestrian movement and eliminate the current game of cat and mouse.
As the second installment in the Montreal Lit series Gregory McCormick profiles the novel You Comma Idiot and how it captures the working class history of Montreal.
Photograph by Alex Abboud