Urban Structure-Halifax: An Urban Design Approach

Peter Martin, of Peter Martin & Associates, is the founding publisher of
the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Halifax has been called Canada’s most beautiful city, but according to
the authors of this book, it suffers the planner- and politician-imposed
ills seen in most North American cities. Urban renewal (mostly in the
1960s) produced a gutted core chopped and sliced by traffic arteries,
deterioration of public spaces, and construction of out-of-scale
business and commercial structures. In Halifax, the historic harbor has
been cut off from the city by a road used by heavy trucks serving the
freight container terminal.

Times have changed as we have come to see the damage done by acolytes
of Le Corbusier (massive, tall single-purpose buildings standing alone
in a sea of grass, linked to others by broad motorways) and Frank Lloyd
Wright (a freestanding home situated on a freehold half-acre for every
household). The first idea destroys people-scaled communities; the
second produces endless sterile and economically absurd suburbs.

The authors keep their passions in check. “This study,” they write,
“is an attempt to organize some of the current understanding of city
form and structure, and to apply it in a comprehensive methodology to
the city of Halifax.” This sounds dry and innocuous, but when they
show us in words and pictures the marvelous siting of Halifax and its
development into the 1950s, juxtaposed with the damage done in the
following decades, readers—Canadians, not just Haligonians—will be
angry.

No specific solutions are proposed, but useful principles are set out:
aim for smaller blocks, diverse streetscapes, and mixed-use
neighborhoods; downgrade the motor vehicle and upgrade the pedestrian.
These precepts are on their way to becoming conventional wisdom, but
this makes them no less valid.

The authors stay clear of politics, giving little hint regarding how to
implement the principles they’ve enunciated. But there seems to be
some hope in the fact that the study is supported by the Downtown
Halifax Business Commission.

Despite annoyingly small type and many illustrations too tiny to be
effective, the book’s message comes through. Urban Structure—Halifax
is a welcome addition to our urban planning literature.