Brent Bellamy

New life breathed into Carnegie Library

The City of Winnipeg Archives is finally getting a new home, after a decade as a nomad in various warehouses across the city. Council is set to approve $12.6 million in funding to transform the Carnegie Library on William Avenue into a state-of-the-art archives facility.

Reclaiming the spirit of the shopping mall

The origin of the North American shopping mall is a story of irony and frustration that sent an architect back to Europe resenting what his idea had become.

Arts can lead in downtown renewal

Downtown is the cultural and economic engine of our city. It defines Winnipeg’s image and reputation, locally and abroad.

Board impairs civic decision-making

When Manitoba’s provincial government passed Bill 37 last year, it was lost in the headlines of a global pandemic, but its potential impact on the city of Winnipeg was not lost on then-mayor Brian Bowman.

Gaboury favoured organic, regionalist style

When Étienne Gaboury died a few weeks ago at the age of 92, Manitoba lost one of its most prominent, most beloved, and arguably its greatest architect.

The time is right for LRT transition

Winnipeg was built on light rail transit. At its peak, 400 streetcars rode 200 kilometres of track, carrying 60 million riders per year. And almost immediately after the streetcars were replaced with buses in 1955, the debate began over bringing back light rail transit (LRT).

Moving forward requires looking back

For its first century, downtown Winnipeg was a vibrant and diverse urban neighbourhood. Streets were lined with elegant red-brick apartment buildings, terrace housing and grand Victorian homes. Canopies of elm trees shaded the sidewalks of a neighbourhood peppered with schools, corner stores, churches and parks.

More city than we can pay for

As people in Winnipeg emerged from a long, frigid and snowy winter, they found a city with roads bearing a striking resemblance to the surface of the moon. This, despite the City of Winnipeg having had its highest road renewal budget in history for each of the last three years. With drought followed by flood, freezing followed by thaw, Manitoba gumbo has been having its way with our city’s roads.

We can’t change the weather, or the soil, and significantly raising taxes wouldn’t be popular, so how will we ever manage our worsening pothole problem? There is one straightforward answer — build fewer roads and get more people to live on the ones we already have. The solution to managing potholes is simple math that reads like a Grade 9 pop quiz.

If 10 taxpayers live on a street that is one kilometre long, each one pays to maintain 100 metres of road. If 10 taxpayers live on a street that is one and a half kilometres long, each one pays to maintain 150 meters of road. Every tax dollar being stretched more thinly by lower density means reduced maintenance and more potholes. It’s a simplistic example, but this is precisely what has happened in Winnipeg, and in most sprawling North American cities, over the last 50 years.

Since the 1970s, Winnipeg’s low-density, suburban growth patterns have resulted in the population increasing by 37 per cent while the built area of the city has almost doubled. Each taxpayer today is responsible for about 40 per cent more land area and its corresponding infrastructure. Looking at infrastructure such as water pipes, according to the city, each Winnipegger today is responsible for nearly 2.5 times more length of pipe than they were in the 1940s, 70 per cent more than in the 1970s.

EVs not a ‘silver bullet’ solution

As governments across the world struggle to meet quickly approaching climate change targets, electric vehicles have begun to find their way into the spotlight. The “Build Back Better” plan in the U.S. and Canada’s 2022 federal budget both focus efforts to decarbonize the transportation sector on incentivizing “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEVs).

Transportation is Canada’s second largest source of GHG emissions, responsible for 25 per cent of the country’s total. In cities such as Winnipeg, vehicle tailpipes are the source of half of all emissions.

It is also clear, however, that electric vehicles are not an “easy button” solution to climate change. A 2,000-kilogram machine transporting an 80-kilogram human cargo for almost every trip made outside of the home is not a sustainable solution, regardless of the machine’s powerplant.

There are many studies that try to quantify ZEVs’ emissions, and the consistent conclusion is that no car is truly a zero-emission vehicle. For a more complete picture, the current focus on tailpipe emissions must be broadened to include the carbon footprint of all facets of a vehicle’s life cycle.

Bold steps to redefine downtown

The first half of the 20th century brought war, pandemic, drought and depression, and in Winnipeg, a catastrophic flood. As cities emerged from these challenges in the 1950s, they were buoyed by the optimism of a better future and were not hesitant to make bold, forward-thinking moves for the next generation.

In 1955, fueled by the vision of Winnipeg as a modern metropolis, a public transit system that moved more than one hundred million passenger trips per year — twice what Winnipeg Transit currently carries — was completely dismantled. More than 400 streetcars were taken off the road and rails torn up to make room for a future with private automobiles and gasoline buses.

Eleven months later, the city doubled down on this vision, announcing that downtown streets would be converted to one-way circulation, accommodating through-traffic to the growing suburbs. Elm trees lining the downtown streets were cut down, boulevards were removed, sidewalks narrowed, and the streets were made wider to accommodate more cars. In the space of less than a year, downtown Winnipeg was changed forever.

Of course, we now know that the overwhelming prioritization of cars over all other modes of transportation, and the creation of a network of surface highways across downtown, would become a dagger in the heart of our once-bustling city centre. The fearless implementation of such bold and transformative ideas, however, is enviable, and almost unimaginable in today’s Winnipeg.

Perfect storm of construction disruption

Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced several new expressions into our everyday vocabulary. We are learning the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Delta, Omicron), and terms such as herd immunity, vaccine efficacy and flattening the curve have become part of regular conversation.

And more recently, we have been learning a lot about the global supply chain.

We live in a highly connected world. The homes we live in, the smartphones in our pockets and the cars we drive are the product of labour and materials brought together from around the world, through an interconnected web called the global supply chain.

The global pandemic has exposed the fragility and interdependence of the connections in this web, and the construction industry has been on the leading edge of its challenges.

Designing pedestrian promenade

As we emerge from a global pandemic and move into the headwinds of a global climate crisis, change has become the only certainty for the world’s cities. Civic leadership that embraces bold ideas to overcome these evolving challenges, specifically in highly impacted downtown areas, will find the most success in the future.

Unveiled last year, but somewhat lost in the headlines of the pandemic, the new Winnipeg Transit Master Plan presents the city with an opportunity to lead this urban evolution. By marrying transit planning with creative urban design, we can leverage transit investment to create generational change in downtown Winnipeg.

There are three important downtown placemaking opportunities identified in the new plan. Major rapid transit stations will be built at Portage and Main and in old Union Station, establishing two significant nodes of activity. These can be leveraged through creative planning to create a gravity that attracts retail, housing and cultural amenities to support new and existing downtown residential neighbourhoods.

A third impactful move, the closing of the Graham Avenue Transit Mall, will create a kilometre-long opportunity to dream. With buses gone, and cars having been removed 30 years ago, Graham Avenue will become a blank slate upon which we can draw our vision for the future.

Car co-op a progressive success story

Your car is likely your second largest household expense, and studies show that it’s probably parked 95 per cent of the time. The typical Canadian vehicle is driven for just over one hour per day on average, and according to the Canadian Automobile Association, the SUV that most people drive for that time costs an average of $33 per day to own, with all expenses included.

Imagine if you could, sharing a car with your neighbours, and only paying for it when you are actually using it. No more loan payments, or trips to the mechanic, and as a bonus you would be doing something good for the environment.

Ten years ago, this was the dream for a small group of people in Winnipeg who saw the growing car-sharing trend in larger cities across the world and wondered if it could work here. The group organized, found 40 people to pay $500 membership deposits and, in June 2011, Peg City Car Co-op was born. The idea started small, with three cars in Osborne Village; keys were stored in lockboxes and transactions recorded on paper.

As Peg City celebrates its 10th anniversary, it has grown to more than 2,000 members with 60 vehicles parked across 11 central neighbourhoods, and has hopes of growing to 100 vehicles in 2023. Members can now conveniently make bookings online up to a year in advance, for as little as an hour at a time, and they are automatically billed for their time and distance.

Lifestyle expectations influence housing

With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting global supply chains, and consumer demand rising as the economy rebounds, inflation rates are being pushed to their highest levels in almost 20 years. The federal election campaign has seen affordability emerge as a central issue concerning Canadians, and with home prices skyrocketing across the country, much of the discussion has naturally centred on housing.

Any solution to what is being called Canada’s housing crisis will require close examination of both housing and transportation. These two key drivers of inflation are intrinsically linked, and together represent 50 per cent of Canadian household spending.

Comparisons are often made between the baby-boomer generation and millennials to demonstrate how today’s cost of living has increased. Relative to income growth, average house values, the purchase price of a vehicle and the cost of a litre of gasoline have all more than doubled since the 1970s. These are striking increases, but looking more closely, our lifestyle expectations may be having an even greater impact.

Since 1975, the average size of a new home in Canada has doubled, from 1,050 square feet to 2,100 square feet, despite today’s average household size being one person less. Neighbourhoods in the 1970s were typically 30 per cent more dense than today, with fewer peripheral suburbs requiring long driving distances.