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Originally Posted by beyeas
I am sort of the opposite of the visitor you described in that I live in Halifax but have a cottage just outside Quebec City and spend a lot of time in both cities. But as such, I would say that if you only consider the old city core, Halifax feels not that far off of QC with less historical architecture left but actually more "big city" towers etc. It's when you leave the core that QC definitely has the feel of a much bigger city than Halifax. The density is more continuous and has more urban feel whereas Halifax switches to a suburban feel without too much distance from the core. Both certainly suffer in a mass transport sense from the impact their geography/geology have on their ability to efficiently deliver mass transit open to and from the core.
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It's been a long time since I have been to Quebec City but it's interesting to me in that it's vaguely similar in scale and history (not like say Halifax vs. Montreal or Toronto) but the urban development went quite differently. I think it's much more interesting to contrast the cities than just say that they are from two different planets because of size.
In postwar Halifax it has been open season on building demolition in the old core, land assembly including multi-block and privatizing streets, etc. Quebec City has some of that but proportionally less and some untouched older parts. Then there is Laval and Sainte-Foy which absorbed a lot of development that Halifax has no real equivalent to. I wish Halifax had better preserved old parts like Quebec City, and I believe that it had the inventory to justify that, but I am not sure I'd want to replicate Ste-Foy in Halifax.
The Young St area with Richmond Yards is a bit like Ste-Foy in terms of layout (new stuff by bridge) but is more like a part of the old urban core. It is like how Ste-Foy would be if you slid the bridge to the east by a couple km.
I think in the long run the "peak" urban parts of Halifax are likely to be more vibrant because they'll have a density level that's not really possible in Quebec City. An area like Sackville and Barrington for all the progress made is still only maybe 60% of the way to the max density it could have within a few blocks.
Then on the other hand it seems like Quebec City is getting its tramway while Halifax is stuck at "maybe the province will fund nicer buses someday". It's hard to point to any major new piece of transportation infrastructure built in the last 30 years.
I am writing a novel here but the Province of Quebec and federal government also have wildly different visions of the kind of standard of investment in Quebec City vs. NS and the feds in Halifax.
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