VICTORIA STREET GREENWAY

, ,

The Town of Digby, Nova Scotia, like many other small municipalities in Eastern Canada, is faced with a need to renew its aging infrastructure, while maintaining community liveability, vitality, and pride in its sense of place. Since 2014, Snow Owl has designed and managed several important projects for the Town of Digby, to further these sustainable community goals.

Victoria Street, out back along the west edge of town, did not feel like a place for pedestrians or a welcoming secondary gateway to the community of Digby.

We united disparate existing features and issues in this part of town with a mindful design approach, and cohesively solved a number of infrastructure problems while creating a whole new greenway for the people and visitors of Digby to enjoy.

  • We added sidewalk and trail links to create active transportation connectivity and improve pedestrian & vehicular safety between the walking route to downtown, Victoria Street, and the local rail trail corridor.
  • We turned the intertidal Raquette Pond, on the foreshore of the Annapolis Basin, from a drive-by water feature into a walkable community park.
  • We designed an engineered ecological bioretention stormwater management system into the new municipal campground entrance, a landscape feature with robust native perennial plantings, that also protects the Town’s drinking water source and the Annapolis Basin from contaminated road runoff.
  • We worked with the local non-profit Clean Annapolis River Project to help them develop and plant new runoff-filtering rain gardens that buffer Raquette Pond from runoff pollutants.

Our services included a full design and construction document package, engineered stormwater management, traffic and active transportation engineering, and capital planning.