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Originally Posted by someone123
I often wonder how visitors who are interested in urbanism perceive the core of Halifax. It would be easy to view it as a small town that's "punching above its weight" but the more accurate way to view it is that it used to be a much bigger city in relative terms, and a lot of what has been passed down decayed significantly by the early 2000's when it had more or less bottomed out.
Gottingen Street used to be part of "downtown" and you hit the edge of a neighbourhood of 100 year old masonry rowhouses when you're a bit over 3 km north of the middle of town, which is bungalow country in almost every Canadian city. A lot of the new construction is not expanding the commercial core but rather renewing areas that withered after WWII. The city is going to feel a lot bigger when this progresses to the point where you can walk from Inglis to North or maybe Young Street and be mostly in commercial areas with consistent medium or large scale streetscapes.
Most Canadian cities have no North End Halifax analogue. Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, maybe Hamilton. It's unclear if such an area counts as "downtown" or not.
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I’d generally consider the “core” of Halifax to be the immediate downtown, St Mary’s campus to the south, Dal and the main part of Quinpool to the west, and the North End south of maybe North or Almon St.
I guess one way of looking at Halifax is that it’s a city that used to be relatively larger vis-a-vis other Canadian cities. I definitely see that. I tend to view Halifax as like a miniaturized big city, though. It feels relatively metropolitan for a city of 400k. Victoria by contrast is in Vancouver’s shadow and feels more provincial. Halifax has a lot of pull over a large geographic area and has a coalescence of various groups of people (creatives, students, businesspeople, etc) that give the city a critical mass of amenities you wouldn’t expect in such a small city.
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Originally Posted by ssiguy
I always found downtown Winnipeg to pull way above it's weight. Ottawa and Calgary are comparable but I have always found Ottawa to be busier at night than Calgary. Edmonton is not only dead but depressing to boot and not even in either one of those city's leagues. After dark, it looks positively apocalyptic.
Vancouver is busy but not close to Toronto or Montreal. Vancouver's downtown is also very small compared to Tor/Mon. Halifax, Quebec, and Victoria are busy and especially in tourist season. London has quite a lively core and it has very busy and upscale Richmond Row. Hamilton also does well and has Hess Village. Saskatoon and Regina only struck me as busy because there were so many drug addicted people living on the streets and asking for change. Kitchener is not dead but I certainly wouldn't say it's vibrant especially because most of the workforce and student population live in Waterloo. St.John's is relatively busy during the day but at night is rockin.
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Big surprise...you have no idea what youre talking about.
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Originally Posted by logan5
Mt. Pleasant is probably 50% apartments, and the houses in Mt. Pleasant are subdivided into 3 to 5 units, so there is a decent amount of density - 24 000/sq mile in an area of 1.35 sq miles. Strathcona not so dense.
But yes, the surrounding neighbourhoods certainly help the energy and busyness of downtown. Mt. Pleasant, Fairview, and Kitsilano add up to 110 000 people living in close proximity to the dt peninsula. The downtown peninsula has a population of 110 000/2.2 sq miles. That's 220 000 people living in a fairly tight area of 7 sq miles.
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Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that central Vancouver outside of the downtown peninsula is sprawling or anything, but in comparison to Montreal, it’s sort of like a more exaggerated version of the Toronto to Montreal comparison. Toronto’s bay-and-gables, while often subdivided or maintained by more than a single family, don’t carry the same weight of Montreal’s street after street of triplexes, at least visually. Now, this is contrasted with more walkups and high-rise apartments and condos, like you say, though Montreal has this too (less on the high-rise end, admittedly).
I think ultimately the traditional Montreal vernacular’s density may give it an edge (though could be wrong), but at the very least having a larger base population in the metro area, larger business centralization, and huge student population give the city’s core a boost over Vancouver, though I don’t think the gap is that great between the two nowadays.
Edit: my idea of Mt Pleasant specifically is also more the part south of Broadway, so that may be skewing my impression.