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.

• Sidewalk sandwich boards–a creative tactic for small businesses to attract customers? A way to add vitality to city streets? Or commercial intrusion on public space?  These are some of the questions being asked as Halifax’s 2006 Temporary Sign By-law–a measure which essentially bans all commercial sandwich boards–comes up for review. Spacing’s Emma Felts examines the issues at stake and finds that the diversity of neighbourhoods, businesses and sign types calls for  more nuanced signage regulations.

• A proposal, by developers PlazaCrop, to turn a large area of Charlottetown farmland into “yet another cookie-cutter Big Box asphalt lagoon” has Spacing’s Joshua Biggley concerned about the future of the city. Biggley explores the environmental, social,  economic and cultural detriments this type of bland big-box development could bring to Charlottetown .

• Spacing’s Abad Khan dissects Halifax’s new 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. winter parking ban. Khan argues that while the spirit of the ban is commendable, its rigid wording and sweeping applicability fails to fully consider the needs of Halifax residents.

• Toronto architect George Dark, recently tasked with overseeing the design one of Ottawa’s “biggest city building projects in decades”,  went on an afternoon stroll with Spacing Ottawa where he revealed what he loves most about the city he’s now part of creating.

• A photo series of Ottawa monuments, courtesy of Ottawa website apartment16 and photographer Meaghan Walton-Perreault , pays homage the city’s rich historical landscape and its “responsibl[ility] for the nation’s collective memory”.

• According to Spacing’s Devin Alfaro, Montreal’s “long overdue” tax on parking spaces in downtown is an important step in reducing the city’s over-abundance of surface parking and in creating better uses of public space.

• A video on Spacing Montreal looks at the struggle of the Tannery Village community. Situated alongside Montreal’s Turcot interchange, the neighborhood is at risk of extinction if the province goes through with its controversial plan to rebuild the elevated highway.

• In light of the ongoing debate about the future of Toronto’s World War II era Downsview Hangers, Marcus Bowman argues that their destruction would be a tremendous loss to the city. The post also features Spacing Radio’s David Michael Lamb’s amazing photographs of the hangers in their current state .

• Spacing’s Dylan Read tries to find an explanation for the tragic pedestrians fatalities that have been occurring in “freakishly” high numbers over the past two weeks.

• With councillor Shelley Carroll now out of the mayoral race, it looks like Torontonians will be choosing from a roster of all-white all-male candidates. John Lorinc muses about the lack of diversity in the race for Toronto’s next mayor.

photo by Emma Feltes