Spacing Saturday

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.

• Suffering from ill-repair and chronic under-use, the future of the Quinpool Education Center (formally Halifax’s St Patrick’s High School) is in doubt. Jake Schabas muses on what could be done to invigorate the building which has been a Halifax landmark since it opened its doors to students in 1954.

• A discussion among Spacing Atlantic‘s Charlottetown contributors led to an interesting look at openness and transparency in city governance both within Charlottetown and the urban community at large.

• The decision by Ottawa’s Hartmen’s grocery store to remove a communal seating area as well as “their ancient rickety mom-and-pop piano” has community members irked. Spacing Ottawa‘s Ian Capstick looks at the positive role the piano and seating area played in the community.

• An ongoing series by Ottawa’s Chris Henschel and Allegra Newman on their first-hand experience of an intensification project affecting Ottawa’s Island Park Drive, is a an excellent case study on how community needs and developer interests get balanced and fought out.

• Chris Erb reviews a proposal that would would phase out free parking for non-residents in Montreal’s Le Plateau-Mont-Royal area.  Erb argues that the plan–which still needs to go through a public consolation process–would have a positive effect on the neighbourhood by, among other things, increasing public transit use and decreasing the presence of vehicles on the streets.

• A public outdoor art project, on view last week on Montreal’s Place des Festival, allowed spectators the opportunity to interact with what resembled a giant “Lite-Bright”. The installation, called Champ de pixels,  featured rows of small motion-activated lights.

• Toronto’s mayoral race has officially begun. For a quick visual overview of the political playing field Spacing Toronto has charted the contenders by their place on the political spectrum.

• Spacing Toronto‘s Hilary Best examines the Environmental Assessment process for the proposed Gardiner Expressway and Lake Shore Boulevard Reconfiguration Project in Toronto. Best’s look at the Gardiner project is only the first in an ongoing series on “the Environmental Assessment process and how it’s shaping Toronto”, that will provide some much-needed perspective on the often long and expensive process “and its success in protecting our environment”.

photo by Simon Pulsifer