The startup landscape in Halifax is going to change in the next year or so, and Spring Garden Road could soon be known for perky young entrepreneurs as much as for shopping fashion-istas.

 The innovation community in the Halifax area is now spread out across an array of pods throughout the urban area, most with their own coffee shops that they hang out at. But there are a few developments coming down the pipe that will change the way entrepreneurs work, gather and recaffeinate in the region’s largest city.

I am not being facetious when I mention the coffee shops. One of the hallmarks of the modern startup culture is the importance of coffee shops, because they are informal forums for ideas and the exchange of information. When entrepreneurs frequently run into each other at the same java bar, the result, over time, is ideas, deals and new companies.

In Dartmouth, there is a clean-technology grouping in the vicinity of the Innovacorp building on Research Drive, while Burnside Park attracts companies with huge growth prospects such as Unique Solutions and SimplyCast. There is a group of companies surrounding Tim Burke, Stephen and Patrick Hankinson (26ones, Tether, Compilr) that dwell in Bayers Lake Business Park in Halifax and the Starbucks at Chapters. Life-sciences companies hang out at Dalhousie University, the hospitals and the Innovacorp building on Summer Street. You will see them at Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op on Spring Garden Road.

There are a bunch of tech companies and most of the support agencies in downtown Halifax. While the support groups tend to favour Two if by Sea or the Starbucks at the Halifax Marriott Harbourfront Hotel, the founders tend to go to Just Us! or Starbucks on Barrington Street.

In the next year or so, a few developments will be finished that may introduce Gottingen Street as a new pod and establish Spring Garden Road as the real stronghold for startups in the city.

It has been reported that GoInstant co-founder Jevon MacDonald is working on opening a workspace called Volta, where startups can pay a discounted rent to work in the same facility.

People familiar with the plans say he is strongly leaning toward locating Volta in the Spring Garden Road shopping district, which means there could soon be a dozen companies in the area. Innovacorp, meanwhile, is renovating the Summer Street facility to add offices, labs and meeting spaces.

That will form a nice corridor of innovation along Spring Garden, with tech companies congregating in the coffee houses near Queen Street and life sciences at the other end of the street. When the two sectors meet (and they do a lot), they would be no more than a few blocks from each other.

Meanwhile, the Hub is finishing a new facility with completely green specifications on Gottingen Street (including concrete bricks made with Halifax-based CarbonCure Technologies’ system). The Hub has been providing communal office space for a range of startups and lone operators for five years, and co-founder Joanne Macrae said they are still working out the plans for the Gottingen facility. Its occupants are likely to be more in the creative industries than the tech and life sciences types on Spring Garden.

What it all means is there will be more space and more activity in a few square miles. There will also be more collaboration. And the startup culture will become a bigger and more vital part of the economy.