Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I suspect it's hard to convey what is happening to somebody unless they're familiar with the city, since it's pretty spread out and what is happening is somewhat unusual.
One interesting aspect is that the city is older but quite degraded with gappy rowhouse and old apartment neighbourhoods with a quirky, narrower older street system. So several new neighbourhoods being created with infill are more like medium-density mid-Victorian-era or older mixed-use areas with some modern buildings. This mix of East Coast city with a lot of high density infill is actually pretty rare. I'm not sure there is any New England city going through this process to remotely the same degree (most have much stronger heritage preservation and slower development). It would be like if Portland ME or Providence built 100 highrises.
It's really interesting around Gottingen which is quite fine-grained but was heavily decayed. It's not just getting new condo buildings but also old laneways come back because they are defined spatially again, etc. If you look in the left foreground of the photo you can see it's still a rowhouse type neighbourhood, a few km outside of downtown, with a row of 3 storey storefront type buildings.
Another aspect to what's happening is that these pictures show the last round of construction. There's a huge round of construction (maybe a dozen buildings in the 30-40 storey range) in the excavation stage. They all happened around the same time and there was a bit of a pause because the city relaxed height and density limits. If even half of them are built the city's going to look and feel significantly larger.
|
Good points. Those former halfway houses (maybe still are)? to the left of the tower in the immediate foreground are perfect for more towers as well as what is coming (which will be more transformative than anything we've seen yet).
The only thing I can equate the pattern to is Australian cities like Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane years ago and *possibly* some places in the UK. There are some parallels to Singapore as well (on the space constraints side due to geography... a literal coast on one side and the peninsula / island parallel).
What is really striking is that, given most development was held back arbitrarily... even with markets seeming to cool... Halifax probably hasn't even got started yet given its regional importance as compared to other mid-sized cities in Canada. And, when I say Halifax, I also include downtown Dartmouth. Bedford has really yet to have anything of height built, but is sprawling with mid size.
It's hard to even find an up to date skyline shot because it's changing so fast and the city is relatively larger in area compared to many (e.g., cities like Saskatoon and Regina are growing, but they have a clear city limit... Halifax is just growing into other communities and filling the gaps).
Prev
Linear Mode
