In this special report, Barry Boyce, our quality of life columnist, argues that we need to start now if we want to maintain the happy mixture of urban and green space that makes Halifax Regional Municipality such a great place to live. Boyce will be writing on other aspects of this issue in his regular Monday column on page 2. You can contact him at: qol@hfxnews.southam.ca.
AS JESSIE DeBAIE sits surrounded by maps in her living room, a cool fog rolls in over the islands in DeBaie’s Cove.
Her husband Peter traces his lineage back to the founders of the picturesque cove, nestled on the Eastern Shore near Ship Harbour. Despite living in such a beautiful place, DeBaie seldom reflected on the value natural landscapes add to our lives.
That is, until the Seaside Tourism Association hired her as trail co-ordinator for the Musquodoboit Trailway, which was newly created in 1998 from an abandoned rail bed. Through her work, DeBaie discovered the White Lake wilderness area. It was a revelation.
"It was so amazing back there," she recalls. "I’ve since had so many experiences of the wild back there. It’s very, very special."
Her desire to allow more people access to this land took her to the provincial Environment Department, which told her that public consultation called a "charette" was an important part of the process. Initially, a group of about 20 people assembled at a public meeting in February to see what they could do about planning for the use of green space in Musquodoboit Harbour and the surrounding areas.
Their ranks have swelled to about 30, and their goal is to educate the community about its natural assets, and to identify opportunities and constraints to developing or preserving the area.
This summer, DeBaie’s charette group will display a map of the area in the Caboose museum in Musquodoboit Harbour with an overlay where people can write what they know or think about anything on the map. Months of research will culminate in a two-day meeting in the fall, likely to be attended by about 50 people, including the councillor, MP, and MLA for the area.
It’s a grassroots effort to enhance their community by actively discussing what to develop and what to leave alone.
"This isn’t about fighting," DeBaie says. "I’m not an activist. I’m just a citizen and this is something that makes people into great citizens... We’re deciding together what we want for our community and that means everybody."
Frank Palermo’s eyes don’t meet with fog-shrouded islands when he gazes out his office window at Dalhousie University’s department of urban and rural planning. His view overlooks a parking lot.
Palermo works in the stately, turn-of-the-century Nova Scotia Technical College building. It’s fronted by a lovely lawn with a large spherical sundial mounted on stone. Alongside is a tree-lined esplanade. Next door is the historic Spring Garden Road courthouse and across the street the Halifax Public Library. It’s a well-planned open space.
The idea of communities preserving a greenbelt is "a symbol of control over our destiny as a community," Palermo says. But it comes from an earlier age, before the car changed the makeup of cities so dramatically.
Someone will always want to put a road through a greenbelt, Palermo says, and start the urban sprawling all over again, as happened in Kanata, the booming Ottawa ex-urb.
Instead, Palermo suggests we should preserve open space and create communities as we grow by thinking in terms of green "fingers" or "corridors" that follow the lay of the land.
Moreover, he believes the creation of the Halifax Regional Municipality may be a good start, because a regional focus is the key to smart growth. But what’s happening here now is "a free-for-all," he says.
"We don’t seem to have an amalgamated vision for where it is we want to go. We’re just open for business. Therefore, the region is growing in a pretty scattered way. A subdivision here, a subdivision there, driven by who owns the property and who wants to make a development plan.
"They’re not developing communities, just housing."
Palermo understands that this is partially driven by the fantasy so many people have for a big house and a big plot of land.
"Perhaps it’s time for new dreams," he says. "If we put our minds to it, we could produce many alternatives, not quite so consuming, not quite so environmentally destructive, more attuned to the quality of life that we want to live.
"What the greenbelt idea has embedded in it is a group of people as a community actually controlling their destiny. It doesn’t just happen that we get bigger in any old way. It doesn’t just happen that what was a field or a forest becomes a subdivision. It’s an act of will that says that as a community we want to live in a green area."
Kermit deGooyer spends a lot of time in green areas. As the wilder ness co-ordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, he lives a hybrid life.
He spends a lot of time in the wilderness he seeks to protect and a lot of time in the city, where the work of protecting it takes place. Although he works in the world of complex bureaucracies, fighting complicated fights – such as opposing the building of Highway 113 across a wetland known as The Promised Land – deGooyer is invariably upbeat.
He’s inspired by the vision of a series of wilderness areas and corridors throughout the regional municipality .Call it a greenbelt or a boundary, to deGooyer it’s the jewel in the crown of this place.
DeGooyer, an avid participant in the Nova Scotia Public Lands Coalition, takes out a map and starts drawing a series of proposed wilderness areas in the region from memory. (See map on page 5.)
"Our concept is that HRM would be linked with a series of corridors determined in large part by the requirements of wildlife, which would work for people as well," he says. "The large tracts of land needed for wildlife often make ideal recreational spots. They also maintain the feeling we have about ourselves, that we’re a green city."
DeGooyer also says "compact development" goes hand in hand with preserving wilderness. He takes great pains to point out that land preservation is part of a broad-based effort involving tourism groups, anglers, hunters, recreationists and businesses. And it’s a great way to promote Halifax as a place to live and work.
"What other city would be able to boast over 500 square kilometres of recreational wilderness within minutes of downtown? If you want, you can go for a long hike by day and hear live music in town at night."
In a province filled with magnificent places, Prospect High Head is particularly stunning.
John Charles, the municipal planner who suggested to Jessie DeBaie that she start a charette to study Musquodoboit Harbour’s green space, took me on a tour.
When you look at the Head and are told it may soon be dotted with houses, you want to be very angry. But Charles is not about being angry. He’s about doing charettes.
"Charette" is a French term for a little cart. At the École de Beaux Arts in Paris in the late 19th century architecture students rolled them around to present their plans for consultation. Today it refers to a form of planning that involves people learning together about an area.
"People have a real strong sense of spatial decision-making. Everyone arranges the spaces they live in. You just need to give them a way to work with the larger space they live in," Charles says.
A charette, he says, uses maps in an engaging way to deal with the vast amount of information one needs to know about an area: "You may start with a map that shows the geophysical (rocks, soil, wetlands), and then overlay it with one showing the biophysical (tree cover, animals), and then when you put a map showing proposed development over that. People see what the outcomes are likely to be."
From the back porch of his home in Prospect, Charles sweeps his hand over the town.
"This old fishing village is a perfect example of compact development, cluster design," he says. "Small lots, small houses. The orientation of each house unique to where the house sits. They’re not all evenly set back. They’re not cookie cutter houses. It’s a community."
On the other hand, some people just don’t seem to want community.
"They want two-hectare lots facing the ocean with a private road. If we have that all along the coast, what kind of community do we end up with?"
– with files from Ben Moore