A downtown for transients doesn't work

Downtown Winnipeg was developed for transients.

It still is.

The city's development corporation, CentreVenture, is mandated to develop a central business, hospitality, sports and entertainment district.

All transient activities.

Repeating the same action does not deliver different results.

In-and-out office workers and entertainment commuters leave behind black holes when they go home -- blocks of single-purpose buildings for intermittent use. The activity does not matter.

The after-hours emptiness does.

Such developments need the constant heartbeat of life in permanent residence beside and among them, or the spaces they occupy become evening and weekend concrete deserts.

The attitudes, concepts and practices of the last 50 years will not produce a different kind of downtown.

Since the 1960s, each downtown-revitalization project has been compromised by the next as developers lined up for public "development assistance" according to what downtown blocks they could control.

The concert hall and museum "cultural precinct" never got the adjacent Exchange District commercial development it needed. Exchange District development was eclipsed by Broadway office development, that by Portage Place, then by The Forks "destination venue," although some of us tried to divert that to a green alternative.

CentreVenture was created to end that cannibal development.

Last November, demolition kick-started CentreVenture's SHED project, the Sports, Hospitality and Entertainment District south of Portage Avenue, a "vibrant, active, urban and entertainment-focused downtown destination and meeting place."

I read those words in the same story 25 years ago, earning my master's degree in city planning at the University of Manitoba. They promised the upscale wonders of Portage Place, a downtown shopping, entertainment and dining destination to "revitalize" Portage Avenue.

Now it needs revival.

Cindy Rodych of Stantec, CentreVenture's architect of record for the SHED, claims Portage Place can be revived by convincing more companies to move into the central business district, "another thousand workers" to increase the "eyeballs and footfalls" that create revenue.

Sounds like cannibal development to me.

And more transient commuters.

Central business districts developed when merchants had to lug bags of money about to settle accounts and do deals face to face. Communications technology has made them obsolete.

It makes better sense to decentralize shopping, office jobs and entertainment to where the workers and shoppers already live -- the suburbs.

Winnipeg needs a new kind of downtown.

The ground for an exciting living experience is here. The Downtown Business Improvement Zone's 2011 annual report says 16,000 people live downtown. But only 31 new residential projects are planned -- 1,700 residences -- a projected total population of about 20,000.

The cost was not reported, but is likely much less than CentreVenture's SHED. Residential development is in both mandates. It should be their priority.

If the office towers near Portage and Main were residences, what a core of new commerce that would generate.

Worth at least as much public subsidy as a hockey arena?

Downtown needs re-branding.

A city's districts are alive according to the density and variety of people living in them.

The rest will follow.

Ross Dobson is a Winnipeg writer and former public affairs broadcaster.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 6, 2012 A11