21st Century (2000–present)

Halifax Regional Plan 2023

2023 · Canada · North America – Canada · Regional & polycentric planning · Planned by Halifax Regional Municipality
Aerial view of Halifax and Dartmouth across Halifax Harbour
Aerial view of Halifax and Dartmouth across Halifax Harbour · CC BY 2.0

Core idea

Centers + corridors + complete communities

Why it matters

Atlantic Canada growth pivot

Description

The Halifax Regional Plan of 2023 is the updated regional municipal planning strategy for Halifax Regional Municipality, the amalgamated city-region covering the urban core, suburban communities and a large rural hinterland in Nova Scotia. It directs the bulk of new growth to designated centres and transit corridors within the serviced urban area, promoting 'complete communities' where housing, employment, shops and services are within easy reach, while restraining scattered rural subdivision. Prepared by the municipality's planning staff, it responds to a period of unusually rapid population growth and a mounting housing shortage in Atlantic Canada's largest city.

Significance

The plan marks a pivot for a region long characterised by slow growth and dispersed settlement, applying the centres-and-corridors model of metropolitan regionalism to an Atlantic Canadian context. It is significant as part of the wave of Canadian plan updates in the 2020s driven by housing affordability pressures and provincial intervention in local planning. Discussion of the plan has focused on how far intensification targets can be met given infrastructure limits, and on the tension between rural character and urban containment in an amalgamated municipality.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.