It’s 2020 and you and your spouse, a professor at Dal are living and working in the urban core on the Dartmouth side of the harbor with your two children ages 3 and 7. It's Friday morning. Walk us through your day in the ideal Halifax Urban Core of 2020. What do you do, how do you get there, what do you see, how does it feel?
So it’s 2020 -- another day in the life of my family. For some reason today I am in a reminiscing mood....
As always, I am up at 6am and enjoying the great view I have of Russell Lake. I have my fair trade coffee brewing, I butter up a healthy homemade muffin (made with affordable and readily available organic and local products). I open up to the front page of the paper and I see the following headlines on the front page and in the business section:
- Halifax receives international recognition as destination of choice for newcomers: Foreign Credential Recognition pilot program pays off.
- Small and Medium Enterprise continue to thrive as city deemed one of the most entrepreneur friendly in North America. Special emphasis placed on incenting green conscious companies drives substantial growth in fourth quarter.
- Delegation arrives to review Halifax universal childcare model.
- Government invests in phase 2 of Energy sustainability cluster.
- Community Gala at Convention Centre raises $2 million for local habitat homes.
I smile at the thought of the shift to more substantive news issues on the front page and also our evolved ability to celebrate broader community successes. Somehow we’ve brilliantly managed to become a community driven by innovation, yet we still remain true to our roots...
Our family heads out the door -- I quickly water my urban garden and we walk to a stellar public school just down the road to drop off our older child. We are thrilled that all schools are now bilingual and have mandatory civics courses!
My three year old, husband and I jump on a rapid transit bus (ones similar to those you see in Ottawa which are essentially bus only roads). I notice a sign on the bus that says “THANK YOU! Halifax ridership reaches 75%.”
I run into my friend Sarah who hops on the bus at Kings Wharf (she’s got a south facing condo- beautiful view of the Harbour and City). She’s just come from the gym in her building. She’s heading to the Nova Centre (one of the newer developments in the city and one that many say sparked real revitalization of the downtown core). We get talking about that Centre and we both acknowledge that we’re proud that the community rallied around that investment because it is not only an exemplary green building and has seen an overall good return on investment; it has also become the window of the world to Halifax, it’s a knowledge hub and innovation is brimming from its walls. As importantly, it has become part of the pulse of our community. The activities there -- everything from a thriving arts, culture and music scene, to the artisans and farmers market set up on the blocked off street outside, to the community space used so frequently for fundraising -- show that it has become a reflection of the best of us. Sarah and I briefly comment on the incredible transformation of downtown Halifax. It’s good to see the density built up again. Our city has now got such a brilliant mix of history, green space and new platinum standard green buildings. It has become a walkable city. The streets are lined with outdoor cafes and the downtown just feels alive! Businesses are thriving and people are walking, biking, busing around. It’s even cooler because you can get the same vibe on the Dartmouth side. The urban core has become a mecca for young families.
In the distance I see Nova Scotia Community College Waterfront Campus and I am proud to say I was a part of building one of the most entrepreneurial institutions in North America. I am especially proud of the work they’ve done to team up with Government and Local universities to offer innovative learning models for several new programs. Applied arts students, technology students, business students and environmental studies students are put in functional teams for 50% of their program as Government aims to look at policy development and strategy in a more integrated way.
I think back to a time that silos were a part of our psyche as a community and I am so happy that leader at some point started to recognize that we are all in it together and that we all have a role to play in success.
I can distinctly remember the shift around 2010 - 2011 where people started to reject the siloed risk averse attitude. Business, government, academia and the not for profit sector actually started to really work together to develop more holistic community priorities. Once we all came together in an ‘all for one’ mentality- our collective ambition took off.
It’s what started the path to Halifax being the incredibly innovative and sustainable city it is today in 2020. It’s like a light came on and we realized we were in it together -- we all brought strengths and if we didn’t start to work together -- we would be left behind...we recognized that the status quo was mediocre and we wanted more. (See there I go reminiscing again).
Anyway, I say goodbye to Sarah and I get off the bus downtown where I work and where my 3 year old is in childcare (right at my work by the way) and my husband says goodbye -- goes over to a bike rack, swipes his credit card, grabs a bike and heads up to drop it off at another bike depot at Dalhousie.
I am only heading into the office for a couple hours because I work my own hours for my employer -- come and go as I please really. (Oh and did productivity ever soar when businesses started to introduce this model) That is also when Halifax started to be recognized as a destination of choice for young professionals. We’re now recognized as one of the most attractive places to live for people under 40...flex time, work life balance, innovative work, entrepreneurial culture -- that is the next gen definition of quality of life. Throw in some state of the art amenities and a beach or a natural park 20 minutes away and you’ve got a great value prop.
On the way into the office, I run into my friend Level who is about to go do some work on his IPad in one of the many great green spaces downtown.
He and his wife Melissa and their kids and our family are heading out to our cottage (which we share with another family I’ll tell you about in a second). We’re having a barbecue tomorrow and he mentions that he’ll stop at the Alderney Market and the local butcher on the way home to pick up anything we might not already have in the community garden (after all Alderney Market is open and busy everyday!)
We agree also to rent a Car Share for the trip out to the cottage.
I bid him goodbye and I call my friend Jen (the third owner of the Cottage). She also has a three year old and she is currently at our newly remodeled Alderney Library. We confirm we’ll meet at our kids public school for lunch to volunteer as we do every week. It’s Food Friday. We are there to help harvest the food from the School garden to prepare our lunch that we’ll all share. It’s all part of how we teach our kids now. In fact Jen is the President of the Buy Local/Urban Gardens Consortium and 75% of the community are members.
After lunch we’re going to the local community centre for a child mommy yoga class.
I grab my brood on the way home. I am at the house by 4pm and gearing up for a great weekend at the Cottage.
As I see my kids running around in our backyard, and I wave to my neighbors (who have all become great friends), I smile. I think back just 10 years ago. Halifax was on the cusp of something great. At the time we were really starting to talk about the things that mattered in moving our city forward... but in many ways we were all still sitting on the bench watching the game. We weren’t in it. I remember thinking at the time that this city could have gone either way. It could have stayed the course, we could have talked a little about progress and the need to move forward... and it could have just as easily passed us by.
But fortunate for us (and our kids and their kids) the collective ‘we’ decided we wanted more. We decided that we weren’t bench warmers... that in fact we stood for something -- we stood for a lot of things.
We realized the only thing holding us back was us. We had every ingredient for success in the makeup of our city. We just had to leverage those assets to go to the next level.
We decided we wanted a city that was pedestrian friendly and one with a world class sustainable transit system.
We wanted a city whose future was not black and white -- but only shades of green.
We wanted a city that showcased our incredibly arts and culture community.
A city where businesses could thrive. Where local markets became part of the fabric of the community.
We decided that we wanted to reinvigorate our downtown core and we were willing to make investments back then that would pay huge dividends for future generations.
We decided to embrace mixed use developments and to showcase the best of our past and heritage with the best of the future.
We decided that newcomers and young people really mattered and we should invest in them and that they would in turn invest in us.
We decided we stood for cultivating the entrepreneurs of tomorrow to create a better tomorrow.
That we were going to let go of silos and embrace authentic engagement. We were going to leverage our strengths to pick winners.
We decided we stood for vibrancy. For energy. For pride of history and the power of innovation (and we weren’t going to be afraid to bring the two together).
We decided were going to start to compete with the world and not with Moncton. We intuitively knew that it was ok to share prosperity with Moncton.
Most importantly, we decided that it was ok to celebrate the collective us and that we were going into the game of the future as a team. Together, we were going to identify our priorities, and stand for something. And we weren’t going to sit on the bench anymore.
We were going to LEAD. We decided that it was high time the people of Halifax stood for something and that we put our stake in the ground on that collective vision we all had and that was bubbling below the surface... and yet somehow before this we had always assumed the vision would just be cultivated by thinking about the vision. We took the thinking to action. We developed community priorities, we engaged everyone and we worked together to realize those.
It was a tipping point for our city... one that each of us can be proud of. In 2020 that action is now a legacy we can feel good about for our kids today and their kids tomorrow.