Alex Reid

From coast to coast, from big to small, the message is that urban green spaces are what qualify “a great city”.

Larry Beasley, Vancouver’s former co-Director of Planning for the City Of Vancouver and chief archiect behind Vancouver’s enhanced downtown core, was in Prince Edward Island last week to speak at a function celebrating the 100th anniversary of Charlottetown’s Experimental Farm. The Farm, as it’s called, is 55-hectares of green space in the town’s centre that Agricultural Canada deemed as “surplus” in 2002. Since then, Charlottetown has been exploring options of what to do with the land.

Beasley remarked that “most cities would die to have that opportunity” of having such open green space. “Most importantly, most cities will never have it,” said Beasley. “If you have big, contiguous, publicly owned open space, you want to be very careful about that.”