City in Motion
In this senior research studio, my partner and I worked with the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) and the Civic Common Catalyst (CCC) to focus on the city of Halifax. There were two main objectives: to analyze the existing problematic underutilization of the built environment in downtown Halifax, then to use this analysis to develop a framework and an in-depth proposal of what opportunities exist to improve the downtown core. The analysis included evaluation of current and proposed policies, data collection and visualizations of the current usage of the downtown and surrounding area, identifying and assessing vacant office buildings, and horizon scanning to identify the larger scale impacts. Our proposal consisted of three proposed vacant office building conversions into residential and mixed-use typologies. The semester concluded with an representational model of our proposal: the City in Motion, a method of facilitating densification and cultural activation by providing much needed commodities including affordable housing and other urban attractors.