Creating Place: Reshaping the Human Experience in Public Space along the Halifax Waterfront

Abstract

This thesis investigates how architecture can reshape the human experience in public to reconnect people with the Halifax Waterfront. Contemporary Urban environments, shaped by privatization and commodification, often produce homogenized, placeless landscapes that lack identity and connection to their spatial contexts. The Halifax Waterfront, although a dynamic public interface, is a highly commodified district that lacks engaging public space. The project repositions the harbour, not a visual backdrop, but as an active part of the spatial experience, reconsidering space in its relationship to place. This thesis reimagines public space along the Halifax Waterfront, proposing an architectural intervention that reconnects the human experience with the rhythms and collective memory of the harbour’s edge through informal recreation. The intervention creates space for play, inhabitation, and evolving relationships between people, ecology, and place, fostering a renewed sense of belonging and identity along the waterfront.