Originally published in Plan Canada, March 1976, p. 36-47. Titles and some illustrations added.

Reconstruction of the Richmond District in Halifax: A Canadian Episode in Public Housing and Town Planning, 1918-1921

John C. Weaver

Introduction

Canada experienced an urban revolution between the turn of the century and the First World War. Immigration, construction of office blocks, and an escalation of building costs provided ingredients for a housing crisis extending from Halifax to Vancouver. In many communities, civic authorities, reformers, and philanthropists discussed remedies for the shelter problem; similarly, the sudden and seemingly uncontrolled growth of Canadian cities was an eventuality that fostered at least an academic interest in planning.'(1)

While urban problems were thus being acknowledged and remedies proposed, tangible responses were rare. Indeed, it required a disaster to move expertise and resources toward a true public housing and town planning experiment. Even then, except for initial publicity and official tours, a project that had attracted outstanding talent received little attention and certainly did not influence the nature of city development in the inter-war decades.

In effect, the reconstruction of the Richmond district of Halifax was an exceptional episode in the history of Canadian cities, but one meriting attention as an alternative to the private real estate and housing developments of the era. When a housing crisis reemerged at the end of the Second World War, a few civic authorities moved toward some of the concepts put into action in Halifax thirty years earlier. But the new projects, like Toronto's Regent Park, presented no fundamental advances in planning and architecture. (2)

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This document was last modified on March 8, 2000.