Need more congestion? Route 90 plan is the $500-M ticket

The projected cost of the city’s plan to widen Route 90 is equivalent to a 6.9 per cent property tax increase for every Winnipeg homeowner. It will take 30 years for Winnipeg taxpayers to pay off the new road, and in the long run, traffic congestion will get worse.

The City of Winnipeg is currently asking for public feedback on a new design for widening Kenaston Boulevard between Ness and Taylor avenues, including related sewer upgrades and an expansion of the St. James Bridge. The city is hoping that other levels of government will share the cost, but Ottawa has already rejected applications twice before, in 2015 and 2018, and the province’s Multi-Year Infrastructure Investment Strategy makes no mention of the project. This likely leaves Winnipeg taxpayers to foot the bill on their own.

The cost of widening Kenaston is typically reported to be $500 million, but a 2019 city document, Unfunded Major Capital Projects Detail, provides a more accurate picture of the total costs. Using the $500 million construction value, it projects that when borrowing and operating costs are included, the project will require annual payments of $38.7 million, (6.9 per cent of the city’s operating budget) amortized over 30 years.

This represents a true project cost of $1.2 billion, and is predicated on construction values not increasing further, having already risen steadily from $129 million in 2009, to $375 million in 2015 and $450 million in 2018.

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.

Design must account for climate change

I don’t often write about personal experiences, but the last few weeks have been impactful. We all learned the new phrase “heat dome” and watched temperatures in the western half of the continent skyrocket to historic levels. The unrelenting heat is believed to have killed as many as 500 people in the province of British Columbia alone, along with millions of marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast.

The small village of Lytton, B.C., recorded the highest temperature ever seen in Canada on three consecutive days, and on the fourth day, it was destroyed by wildfire.

As this climate-change-driven disaster unfolded across the West, I spent the week helping a client apply for a federal government green building grant through Infrastructure Canada. Called the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Program, it asked for many of the typical requirements — energy-use reductions, lowered greenhouse-gas emissions targets — but the last half of the application focused on how the project will be resilient, how it will survive, in the face of the climate reality.

No longer is sustainability solely about carbon reduction to prevent or mitigate climate change; it is now also focused on adapting to what is already here and what is unavoidably coming toward us. It was a powerful realization.

Alberta cities excel in urban change

For many years, the fast-growing cities of Calgary and Edmonton have been the stereotype for sprawling, car-dominant urban planning, but recently they have begun to shed that image and are in many ways becoming North American leaders in progressive urban design and city building policy. Other cities might take note.

Private vehicles have shaped our cities more than anything else over the last century, but the environmental, economic, urban quality and social equity impacts of cars has progressive cities looking to diversify mobility options. Calgary and Edmonton both made the investment in light rail transit more than 40 years ago, when they had less than two-thirds of Winnipeg’s current population.

Today, broad public support is fuelling transit investment and expansion in both cities. Backed with significant federal funding available to all cities, current construction of the Valley Line in Edmonton will more than double the city’s 24-kilometre-long LRT system by 2026, and Calgary will soon begin construction on the 20-kilometer-long Green Line, adding to its current 60 kilometres of rail transit. In Calgary, 45 per cent of people who work downtown commute by train. The network is used by more than 300,000 people per day, making it one of the busiest LRT systems in North America, second only to Guadalajara, Mexico.

Calgary has also demonstrated leadership in active transportation development. In 2014, the city installed a complete, temporary downtown grid of protected bike lanes, all at once. The network has since been made permanent and the results have been significant, with more than 18,000 cyclists entering or leaving downtown daily, an increase of more than 300 per cent over 20 years.

Infill guidelines offer prudent way forward

The average cost of a detached single-family home in Winnipeg is $384,773, an increase of almost 20 per cent over last year. More than 40 per cent of Winnipeg’s population does not live in a house, and with demographics aging, ownership costs rising and new lifestyle preferences emerging, that proportion is growing.

Less than 30 per cent of all new homes being constructed today are detached, single-family structures. In the year 2000, that number was almost 90 per cent.

Despite these trends, the priorities of those with the means and desire to purchase a house dominate how we build our neighbourhoods. The word “condo” is used as a pejorative, renters are often characterized as less important members of the community, and when anything more than a new house is being proposed, Facebook groups rally to protect the “character’ of their neighbourhood.

Walk through the old neighbourhoods in Fort Rouge, however, and you will see small apartment blocks, new and old, sitting comfortably on tree-lined residential streets. Three-storey houses, now broken into multiple apartments, have been neighbours with small bungalows for more than a century, and duplexes go unnoticed in the middle of a block.

Research supports reduced-speed initiative

Over the last 10 years, six million vehicles have been added to Canadian roads, an increase of almost 20 per cent. Since the 1990s, the average vehicle horsepower has almost doubled, average vehicle weight has increased by 26 per cent, cars are 17 per cent larger and 80 per cent of vehicles sold in Canada today are trucks and SUVs.

In Manitoba, more vehicles and larger, faster vehicles has led to a 50 per cent increase in collisions resulting in injury during the past decade. On Winnipeg streets in 2019, the last available statistics, every second day a pedestrian or cyclist was struck and injured by a driver seriously enough to be reported. Every third day a pedestrian or cyclist was sent to hospital, and almost once a month one was killed.

Across the country, nearly one out of every five people killed or seriously injured in vehicle collisions is not in a vehicle.

All these statistics are inspiring a wave of change across Canada, as cities are one by one lowering speed limits on residential streets to make neighbourhoods safer for all road users, and more comfortable for pedestrians and cyclists.

‘Abilities Village’ plan filled with possibility

Provencher Boulevard has a long history as the commercial heart of St. Boniface and Winnipeg’s francophone community. With wide sidewalks, a few historic buildings and local shops, it has the bones to be an active pedestrian street and centre of community life.

Unfortunately, as a busy truck route and commuting thoroughfare, Provencher is challenged to be a welcoming place for a shopping stroll or break on a sidewalk patio. Several surface parking lots and vacant properties further diminish the pedestrian experience, and a low population density in the surrounding neighbourhood offers an insufficient base to support a vibrant commercial street.

The neighbourhood plan for St. Boniface and Provencher Boulevard looks to address some of these issues by supporting development of higher-density and more diverse housing options, encouraging good urban design that is pedestrian focused, enhancing existing parks and celebrating the neighbourhood’s cultural assets.

The City of Winnipeg currently owns two of these cultural assets on the street: the former St. Boniface city hall and the adjacent, long-abandoned fire hall. In November 2019, a request for proposals was issued to find a new owner for the buildings and adjacent parking lots, with the goal of leveraging them to breathe new life into Provencher Boulevard and the surrounding community.

Parking minimums stifle development

For the next few weeks, the City of Winnipeg is seeking public feedback on the Winnipeg Parking Strategy, a five-year vision to manage vehicle parking across the city. It may not sound glamorous, but parking is quietly one of the most powerful forces shaping our cities, having a fundamental influence on cost of living, neighbourhood form and character, and building design.

Six months ago, Edmonton became the first major Canadian city to eliminate parking minimums for new development. The new strategy presents an opportunity for Winnipeg to follow this lead.

Parking minimums are municipal-government regulations that dictate the number of parking stalls a new development must include on its property. The ratio is derived from a decades-old formula based on building size and whether it’s a new house, apartment block, commercial building or other use. In Winnipeg, outside of downtown, 1.5 parking stalls are required for every residential unit, reduced to 1.2 in some inner-city areas.

An important shortcoming of these blanket ratios is that they do not account for variables influencing the amount of parking actually required, such as vehicle ownership in the neighbourhood, adjacent amenities, transit access, suite sizes, demographics and evolving mobility trends. Mandated parking levels have resulted in significantly more parking being built than is required.

City faces limits on sewage

With recent headlines dominated by the American election and Manitoba’s COVID-19 spike, it is easy to understand how a seven-page administrative report presented last week to Winnipeg’s standing policy committee on water and waste might have slipped under the radar for most people. At the best of times, that committee rarely attracts public interest, but this report will have critical repercussions on our city for the next decade.

The simple explanation of the report’s findings is that Winnipeg’s ability to treat its sewage is quickly running out of capacity, and it will soon restrict the city’s ability to grow. The North End Sewage Treatment Plant is coming to the end of its service life, and replacing it requires a $1.8-billion investment, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history. The project has been at the top of the city’s priority list for many years, but the scale of investment has led to kicking the can down the road for just as long.

The public service estimates the remaining capacity of Winnipeg’s sewage treatment is the equivalent of adding about 90,000 people to the population of the city. With Winnipeg growing by about 12,000 people per year and the sewage capacity divided between residential, commercial, and industrial uses, the projection is that the system will hit its limit in as soon as five years. A best-case scenario is a new treatment plant will be operational in eight years, creating a real possibility that development could be halted in the city.

Winnipeg’s economic and population growth has been driven largely by international immigration over the last decade and the federal government has already announced that it will increase immigration to record levels over the next three years in a bid to stimulate the post-pandemic economic recovery. Ensuring that we leverage this growth to maximize its impact will be critical to the city’s own fiscal rebuild.

Transit hub could transform downtown

At the beginning of this year — back when we could shake hands and see each other’s faces – the city of Winnipeg announced it was no longer planning to build dedicated bus rapid-transit corridors. This came shortly before the opening of the Southwest Transitway, the city’s first completed line. The announcement felt like the end of Winnipeg’s rapid-transit dream.

Two weeks ago, however, the city released a new vision for the future of rapid transit, as part of the Winnipeg Transit Master Plan. The new concept shows a dramatic departure from the original plan of dedicated bus-only roadways, a system that would provide fast service between end points, but — as the Southwest Transitway demonstrates — one with important shortcomings.

The costly and slow-to-implement system runs largely through open fields, with several stations built far from where large numbers of people live, and without access to many of the destinations potential users would want to go.

The new plan focuses on integrating rapid transit onto existing major roadways, using priority signal lanes. Outside of downtown, the plan is to build dedicated transit lines on roads such as Main Street and Portage Avenue that run down the centre of the road, with stations located in the median, similar to Winnipeg’s old streetcar network.

Collective response is the best strategy

Remember when we thought schools taking an extra week off at spring break would give us time for the COVID-19 pandemic to pass? It seems laughable in hindsight, but it was not a unique reaction. For decades, we have been racing toward a climate crisis with a similar “It couldn’t happen here” naiveté.

This pandemic could well be a dress rehearsal for the main show, climate change — a far more catastrophic global emergency, with no hope of a vaccine to save us.

The coronavirus has demonstrated that our world is a fragile ecosystem, and when we push it too hard, it breaks. It has proven that a global problem is everyone’s problem. Old tropes, such as the suggestion the climate crisis is the sole responsibility of major polluters like India, China or the United States, no longer fly.

Like tackling a pandemic, the solution to climate change can only be realized through collective response. Global warming has been created through the cumulative effect of billions of small actions, and the only response is an equal number of small solutions.

Building design needs breath of fresh air

The first day of school is always a nervous time. The anticipation of changing routines, new friends, and unfamiliar teachers can fill a student’s stomach with butterflies. This year brings a heightened level of apprehension, not only for students who will be living with new protocols, but for parents frightened that they are sending their kids into a dangerous situation during a global pandemic.

School administrators have been working to create procedures and classroom setups that will help minimize viral transmission, guided by the “fundamentals” of physical distancing and regular hand-washing, the primary recognized defences against respiratory droplets expelled from infected people.

As scientists learn more about how COVID-19 is transferred, an increasing number of studies are finding that aerosol transmission poses a higher risk than initially thought and should also be carefully considered as schools reopen. This type of infection comes from very small particles, released during normal breathing and talking, that remain airborne for longer periods of time and travel greater distances within a room.

The solution to aerosol transmission sounds easy — reduce air recirculation and increase fresh air ventilation in classrooms to dilute and wash away the tiny airborne particles collecting in the room. In practice however, this can be difficult to achieve. Every school’s ventilation is different, but the ability to significantly alter the performance of a building’s mechanical (HVAC) system is generally limited without major reconstruction.

Impact-fee decision presents opportunity

In early July, the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench declared the City of Winnipeg’s impact fees, a charge levied on new construction in suburban housing developments, are not within the city’s legal jurisdiction, and ordered that the money collected be refunded to developers.

The controversial fees, which exist in some form in most Canadian cities, were implemented in 2017, attempting to balance the disproportionate cost of infrastructure and services required to support the sprawling, low-density city we have built over the past several decades.

Our city once grew by simply extending the existing roads, sewer pipes and streetcar lines, adding new grid-pattern residential streets along them. One neighbourhood blended seamlessly into the next. Walk south along the length of any street in River Heights, for example, and on the first block you’ll see houses built in the 1910s, with every few successive blocks representing a new decade of growth, until you eventually arrive at the homes built in the 1970s.

That’s when we started building new subdivisions as disconnected islands, far from existing neighbourhoods — a development model that stretches new infrastructure and services across great distances at great cost.

Housing key to deracializing cities

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has ignited a vital conversation about systemic racism across all sectors of our society. An important part of this discussion is how we design our cities, which has been guided by policy rooted in racist history, and reinforced by decisions that continue to divide our cities and create social barriers today.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the racial inequity that exists in North American cities, with racialized neighbourhoods being hit disproportionately hard by the virus. The solution to combat systemic racism in urban design reads much like the solution to make cities more resilient against future pandemics. At the foundation of the challenge is housing.

Where a person lives affects all aspects of their life. Reduced access to socioeconomically integrated schools can affect performance and graduation rates for lower-income students, disproportionately divided along racial lines. House values in less diverse neighbourhoods are frequently suppressed. This often has the effect of reducing accumulated wealth for families, an important means of building intergenerational opportunity. Employment, recreation and green space are often concentrated in wealthier, less diverse neighbourhoods, creating barriers for people to improve their economic status and quality of life.

Zoning regulations control where people live and how our neighbourhoods look. By assigning properties into different categories of parkland, commercial, residential and industrial uses, zoning establishes the rules for development. Zoning was created a century ago to ensure factories were not built near houses, but it has a darker history that influences social and racial divisions in our cities today.

Pandemic shows need for affordable housing

As half the world hid in their homes trying to avoid a deadly virus, we had a lot of time to wonder what our “new normal” would look like. As we watched New York melt down, Gotham City imagery of skyscrapers, bustling streets, and tiny apartments made it easy to assume that population density might become a COVID-19 casualty.

Drawing a line between population density and viral transmission seems like simple logic. New York is the highest-density city in the United States and its biggest hot spot for COVID-19. Living near more people intuitively means closer contact with others. It seems to add up.

Closer investigation reveals that density does matter, but it depends on your frame of reference.

At the scale of a city or neighbourhood, population density has not been a key determinant in viral transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the very least, it is so far behind other factors such as travel, public policy, collective behaviour and income levels, that little correlation can be drawn.

Pandemic presents obligation to change our world

Crisis creates opportunity and leverage for change. As governments prepare to make once-in-a-generation stimulus investments to fight a global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are faced with an opportunity, if not an obligation, to use it to change our world.

We are faced with a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds, but we are not powerless against it. The choices we make today will create the tomorrow we live in. Our decisions must be guided by a vision for the future, holding every public dollar we spend up to the light and asking ourselves, what will this do today, and what will it do tomorrow?

Changing our world doesn’t mean we need to start building wind turbines, autonomous vehicles and solar panel factories. The future can learn from the past. It can be simple, low-tech, but effective.

There is an old, not-very-sexy machine that could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more liveable, and more just — the humble bus. Public transit use has cratered during the pandemic, and it will likely be a lasting casualty. The only way to change that will be with high levels of investment to improve service and reduce crowding.

Rethinking infrastructure after the pandemic

In our desperate battle to slow the spread of the coronavirus, almost four billion people, half the world’s population, are living under stay-at-home orders. In a rare united effort, governments, industry and citizens alike are working together to combat a common global enemy. The scale and speed of societal change left in its wake would have been unthinkable only a few weeks ago.

As we move through and out of this fight, the power of this new social cohesion presents us with an opportunity to boldly rebuild a country that is more economically resilient, environmentally sustainable, socially just and physically healthier. Cities will be at the front lines of this opportunity, and re-thinking the way we move around them will be fundamental to these goals.

We have suddenly learned the importance of physical distancing, and with more people out walking, we are also learning how little pedestrian space there actually is in our cities. Across the world, streets are being closed to cars, as cities scramble to create temporary public space for people to access sunlight and fresh air while maintaining safe distances from each other.

As the increased need for easily accessible space to walk and ride a bike becomes more permanent, so will these solutions.

Our decisions today create our children’s cities tomorrow

As the new year arrived, news headlines celebrated the fact Oslo, Norway, had just become the first city to ban cars from its downtown. The notion of banning cars sounds extreme, but they didn’t just throw up concrete barriers on New Year’s Eve and walk away. It was a natural progression in a decades-long journey for the Nordic city.

Comparing a Canadian city such as Winnipeg to one in Europe is always met with skepticism, but there’s an interesting parallel to be found between the decisions made a generation ago in two cities of similar size, leading to one that would ban cars and one that continues to ban pedestrians from parts of their respective city centres today.

Oslo is a much older city, but it had a similar population to Winnipeg when cars came on the scene in the 1920s. By the 1970s, both were experiencing the effects of the vehicle age, seeing an exodus of population from central neighbourhoods and high growth in new suburbs on the edges of the city.

Each had lost about 25 per cent of its population density over 20 years and both downtown cores were struggling. Surprisingly, by 1970, the mature neighbourhoods of Oslo and Winnipeg (ones with grid streets and elm trees) had similar population densities of about 5,000 people per square kilometre, and similar overall populations of about 200,000.

Architecture central to Christmas story

Architecture isn’t something most people think about very much, but the buildings that surround us tell a story of who we are and where we come from. We might not pay much attention to it, but architecture is even deeply embedded in our Christmas traditions, an evolving character in our stories that helps set mood, recall a memory or reinforce the messages being told.

In the year 1223, Italian preacher St. Francis of Assisi created the first nativity scene, hoping to establish a visual connection to the birth of Jesus for his congregation. Since then, setting up a nativity has become an important Christmas tradition in homes across the world.

Most people are familiar with the cast of characters — Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the wise men and shepherds. The often-overlooked character is the stable itself, generally depicted as a fragile wooden frame holding up a peaked roof. It may be an unassuming architectural representation, but it conveys a powerful message with deep religious meaning.

In the nativity, architecture is used to express the humble beginnings of a king. A simple roof says very simply, “He is one of us.” As a character in the scene, the architecture tells more than just the location of the event — it is a clear illustration of how Jesus would live his life and a representation of the idea that he had come for everyone, an important message at the foundation of the religion, delivered through architecture.

Zoning affects a city’s social fabric

All North American cities use zoning to regulate the development of land and buildings. By assigning properties into different categories of parkland, commercial, residential and industrial uses, zoning establishes the rules for what can and can’t be built. The vast majority of residential neighbourhoods in Canadian cities fall under a single-family zoning category called R-1, which generally mandates a land use of one detached house per lot.

The first municipal zoning ordinance in North America was established in Los Angeles in 1908, to ensure factories were not being built beside houses. The move toward specific single-family zoning, however, has a much more disturbing origin, rooted in deliberate social impacts that continue to affect cities today.

In the early 20th century, American cities used racial zoning to establish segregated residential neighbourhoods, by restricting where non-white residents could live. In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the concept of race-based planning, but municipalities, under pressure from residents, quickly circumvented the ruling by implementing a new form of exclusionary zoning. They would make it illegal to build anything but a single-family home in certain neighbourhoods, often with minimum lot and house sizes.

This new policy, overt in its intention, delivered the same results. By ensuring that only people who could afford the most expensive housing type would have access to single-family zoned communities, neighbourhood segregation continued for less affluent residents, which was often connected to race. The practice was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1926, leading to more racially and socially segregated neighbourhoods in cities across the United States and eventually Canada.

City’s expanding footprint has high cost

Planners at the City of Winnipeg are currently in the process of writing a residential infill strategy to guide new development in the city’s older neighbourhoods.

The task is challenging. People love their neighbourhoods and have a natural resistance to seeing them change. It’s difficult to use statistics to debate emotional attachment — mathematics rarely wins over the heart — but the hard numbers outline why planning policy has for many years promoted higher density infill growth, despite its unpopularity with residents.

Winnipeg has more old homes than any other city in Canada. Almost one in 10 houses in Winnipeg are older than 100 years, 10 times more than Calgary and Edmonton, twice as much as far older cities such as Montreal and Halifax. The mathematics suggests that change is inevitable for Winnipeg’s mature neighbourhoods.

As part of its public consultation, the city recently released a jaw-dropping graphic that clearly explains why increasing density is considered a priority, as this change occurs. The graphic compares the built-up area of Winnipeg in the 1970s and today. In that time, the footprint of the city increased by 96 per cent, almost doubling, while the population increased by only 37 per cent. The conclusion was that the city is currently growing three times faster in area than it is in population.

Shared streets create vibrancy

When it comes to moving around our cities, Canadians live in a world of rules — green lights, yellow lights, red lights, speed limits, crosswalks, countdowns, no parking, no stopping, no riding on the sidewalk.

All these rules are intended to order pedestrians, drivers and cyclists into individual corridors where each can move with blind obedience to lights and signs. They are designed to keep vehicles moving quickly, and naturally prioritize traffic flow for the largest, fastest and most dangerous road users.

Sometimes a street has a different purpose, a different story to tell. Some streets are more importantly a great place than a great connector. To be this, they must be designed first as somewhere to linger, not to move quickly through.

A street can be the social and economic heart of its community. Those with a strong sense of place can entice people to the sidewalks and public spaces, key to making urban neighbourhoods attractive places to live, work, shop and socialize. But when vehicle speed is prioritized, these streets feel less safe and become less attractive to sit near, live on or walk along. And as they attract fewer people, the businesses falter, the appeal to new residents decreases and the neighbourhood begins to decline.

Narrowing sidewalk a step backward for pedestrian access

Almost since the invention of the automobile, downtown Winnipeg has been shaped by cars. In 1931, right turns on red lights were introduced, diagonal parking was removed and one-way streets began to appear. In 1955, streetcars were discontinued and the elm trees that lined the once-residential streets were cut down to widen the roads.

Housing was slowly bought up and turned into parking lots. Today, with more than 32,000 stalls, a staggering 40 per cent of downtown’s land area is dedicated to parking.

This slow evolution of prioritizing cars over places for people transformed the character of downtown — its pedestrian barricades, wide roads and windswept parking lots left few places for people to linger and enjoy. We designed for cars and we got cars, lots of them. Our once-bustling sidewalks today see the fewest pedestrians and are lined by the lowest number of retail storefronts of any major Canadian city.

There is no longer a downtown shopping street, and even the Exchange District, with all its charm, has fewer storefronts and restaurants than similar areas in other cities.

Mennonite history lives on

Just west of Altona, near the U.S. border, sits a little-known collection of buildings that tell a fascinating story about Manitoba’s past.

Celebrated as a National Historic Site in 1989, the village of Neubergthal is recognized as the best preserved example of a Mennonite street village in Canada. Its distinct town plan and architectural styles are a living illustration of Mennonite building traditions, brought to Manitoba in the late 19th century after 200 years of development in Europe.

The origins of the Mennonite farm village began centuries ago on the lowlands of Prussia. Typical homesteads were organized in long, narrow strips running from higher ground along the river to low-lying marshland. This resulted in multifunctional farm buildings being clustered at the front of each property.

After relocating to Russia, Mennonites began settling in villages for protection and ease of sharing labour and tools. The traditional settlement configuration was maintained, but the river was replaced by a central street.

Mansion protest tests limits of infill goal

A stately old home that has watched over Winnipeg’s most prestigious residential street for the past 110 years has suddenly become the centre of a protracted neighbourhood battle. The mansion at 514 Wellington Cres. was slated to be demolished, potentially making way for a multi-family development, but neighbours rallied in opposition, picketing the site and blockading construction vehicles to save it from the wrecking ball.

On June 7, the home received a temporary reprieve when it was announced that the Crescentwood neighbourhood is being considered as Winnipeg’s second heritage conservation district, which would create new guidelines and review processes for any demolition in the area.

Winnipeg’s first heritage conservation district was created in Armstrong’s Point last April. A neighbourhood that is identified as having special architectural and historic significance can apply for this designation to ensure the unique character of the area is preserved over time. Once an area is so designated, a series of design guidelines and policies are established in consultation with community residents. A committee is set up to review and approve everything from existing home exterior renovations and additions to demolition and new construction, which must receive a heritage permit before proceeding.

Winnipeg’s character is defined by its beautiful tree-lined neighbourhoods, and heritage conservation districts can preserve this legacy. It is important, however, that mature neighbourhoods be allowed to grow and change.

Transcona a model for the future

Last week, Re/Max released its 2019 Livability Report, which examines a range of quality-of-life factors to determine which Canadian neighbourhoods are felt to be most “livable.” A surprise finding was that Transcona, often considered to be Winnipeg’s Newfoundland, was identified as a hidden gem. Despite often being the punchline of bad jokes, old Transcona stands as a very good example of what modern suburb design should strive to be.

As cities have sprawled over the past several decades, lower densities have resulted in reduced services and crumbling roads as tax revenue is spread more thinly over a greater proportion of civic services and infrastructure.

Our lifestyles have been transformed by modern suburban design, with almost every activity beginning with a drive in a car. Vehicle use and ownership have increased dramatically, while traffic congestion and commuting times have grown. Children no longer walk to the corner store, and while nearly 60 per cent of their parents walked to school as kids, today 75 per cent of children are driven.

Vehicles are responsible for half of Winnipeg’s total greenhouse gas emissions, by far the largest contributor. According to the city’s climate action plan, the people of Winnipeg drive a combined 5.5 billion kilometres per year, equal to every person over the age of 16 driving alone in a car 26 kilometres every day.

Heritage designations are not something to fear

“Building owner opposes heritage designation” has become a regular headline in Winnipeg over the past few years. One by one, buildings are being nominated for designation — the Bay, the Manitoba Club, the University of Manitoba — and, one by one, owners are trying to fight it.

The genesis of these battles dates back to 2014, when the city passed the historic resources by-law. This transformed heritage designation in Winnipeg from an ambiguous three-tiered grading system to a model in which the specific character-defining elements that are felt to establish the heritage value of individual historic buildings are identified and listed for protection.

For most buildings, key facades are protected, along with important internal elements such as ornate staircases, lobbies or ceiling treatments. Building owners often feel that this will limit development potential, but the system is not intended to freeze a building in time. Once these elements are identified, significant flexibility remains for a building to change and evolve.

Over the past 10 years, more than 30 buildings in Winnipeg’s Exchange District have been significantly altered and given new use while under heritage designation. The latest and most dramatic development is the James Avenue Pumping Station. After sitting empty since 1986, facing demolition several times, the handsome structure with its elegant double-gable roofline has been reborn as a spectacular modern office space, hovering over century-old industrial machinery.

Winnipeg needs infill-strategy road map

Winnipeg city council will soon be presented with details of the new residential infill strategy, a guide for development in the city’s existing neighbourhoods that represents an important opportunity to manage higher-density growth and define what our communities will look like in the future.

The idea of increased neighbourhood density is something that makes people instinctively recoil in opposition, but it is critical to the city’s long-term economic, social and environmental sustainability.

The mathematics of higher density is simple: the more people paying for things, the better. A simplified scenario demonstrates the concept. With 10 houses on 100 metres of street, the property taxes from each maintain 10 metres of road. With 10 houses on 200 metres of street, the property taxes from each maintain 20 metres of road. The result of lower density is either taxes rise, or maintenance is reduced.

This formula works for all infrastructure and services, including sewer, water, snow clearing, garbage collection and emergency services. Our pothole-covered roads and stretched civic budgets are the result of a low-density city, growing more than twice as fast in area as it is in population.

Winter cycling isn’t extreme

“The majority of people who are biking in the winter, they’re the extreme. They’re the extreme cyclists and I don’t see that changing.”

Coun. Jeff Browaty made these comments last month at city hall, while questioning the value of clearing snow from Winnipeg bike lanes in the winter. His statement made headlines, but the sentiment that Winnipeg is too cold to support winter cycling is not seen as an extreme viewpoint.

We don’t label cross-country skiers “extreme.” It is not extreme to let our children play in the schoolyard at lunchtime. A game of shinny on an outdoor rink isn’t extreme, and the only thing extreme about skating in the middle of Winnipeg’s frozen rivers is the lineup for skate rentals at The Forks. So, why is riding a bike in the winter seen as extreme?

The difference, of course, is that cross-country skiers don’t share their tracks with 2,000-kilogram machines travelling 60 km/h. Winter cycling is seen as extreme not because of temperature, but because riders must compete with cars for space on slippery, ice-covered roads.

Urban lifestyle keeps young people here

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column mentioning that an alarmingly large number of people are leaving Manitoba for other provinces. The point appeared to inspire enough discussion that further investigation seems warranted.

Statistics Canada data indicate 9,199 more people moved away from Manitoba than came to the province from June 30, 2017, to July 1, 2018. This net loss in provincial migration was the highest number since 1989. Statistics for the third quarter of 2018 show the decline continuing, with the province losing 3,000 more people over that three-month period.

Most of Manitoba’s interprovincial migration losses come from Winnipeg. In 2016-17, Winnipeg lost the second-highest number of people in the country, losing far more than any other city as a proportion of overall population. Typically, about 40 per cent of this migration is people between the ages of 20 and 34.

Winnipeg and Manitoba are continuing to grow through natural increase and international immigration, but the loss of so many young people is a disconcerting trend for the city and province. In an increasingly mobile world, cities that find strategies to successfully attract young people realize the highest levels of economic prosperity.

To grow, Winnipeg needs to think big

In the fall of 2014, Winnipeg was engaged in an election campaign that captured the city’s imagination. Three progressive candidates went toe to toe, presenting big ideas to take the city in a new direction.

The recent civic election campaign was a stark contrast to four years ago. Few progressive ideas were debated, and city-building dialogue was again dominated by potholes and crime.

There was a lot of celebration about Winnipeg growing towards a population of one million, but little discussion about how to sustainably manage that growth. In the past year, Manitoba saw an unprecedented number of people moving away. Almost 9,000 more people left Manitoba for other provinces than came to it, by far the highest number in two decades. A large proportion of these left Winnipeg and around 40 per cent of them were young people between the ages of 20 and 34.

Despite this disturbing trend, few ideas were presented to make Winnipeg more attractive to a young, mobile workforce — who, in greater numbers than ever, are looking for a diversity of lifestyle choices beyond the overwhelmingly suburban, auto-centric city we are building. The election campaign offered few ideas to ensure Winnipeg keeps pace with other Canadian cities that are moving swiftly forward, implementing progressive urbanist ideas that attract investment and immigration and retain young people.

Investing in pedestrian movement pays off

Walking is good for you, and good for the economy. Cities across North America are investing in infrastructure to encourage walking in urban neighbourhoods as a way of improving health, accessibility, quality of life and safety while promoting urban renewal and economic growth.

Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton, cities that Winnipeg competes with for investment, tourism and immigration, all have official pedestrian strategies to guide policy, increase pedestrian numbers and make those cities better places to walk. In contrast, Winnipeggers are voting on the idea of keeping concrete walls, in the heart of our city, that have intentionally repelled pedestrians for four decades.

The key principles of designing an urban area to be walkable are creating direct and simple pedestrian connections along a network of diverse destinations, as well as establishing physically interesting and comfortable places to walk that feel safe and promote social interaction.

Walkability has been quantified by the website walkscore.com using a 100-point scale that measures pedestrian connectivity and distances to employment, education and other amenities. A significant body of research has proven that when neighbourhood walkability increases, so does desirability, and in turn residential property values and the tax base.

Shedding light on Portage and Main

For 40 years, we have been arguing over adding 18 seconds in the morning and 54 seconds in the afternoon to a daily Winnipeg commute that averages 24 minutes each way.

The idea of letting people cross the street at Portage and Main has long evoked images of gridlocked cars lined to the Perimeter Highway, but with a public referendum now foisted upon us, it is time to investigate the facts.

Last year, the respected engineering firm Dillon Consulting completed the Portage and Main Transportation Study, a comprehensive 95-page document which looked at the effects of introducing pedestrians at each corner, during both the morning and afternoon rush hours. Dillon compiled extensive, real-world data and used it to create precise computer simulation models, with cutting-edge software that is considered a global leader in accuracy and precision.

The study found that the greatest impacts to traffic will be experienced in the peak of afternoon rush hour, when the average time it will take for cars to get through the intersection will be 33 seconds longer than today. When the impact of this is telegraphed across downtown, the average time of an overall commute will increase by a total of 54 seconds (cumulative delay for all cars/number of cars).

Cities recognize basic sanitation is a right

For several years, a soaring glass tower has risen from The Forks, designed to inspire discussion and awareness of the importance of human rights in our society. This summer, a little orange structure has appeared a few blocks away that is intended to provoke a similar discussion.

Pop-Up Winnipeg Public Toilet is a temporary washroom facility that is the latest incarnation of a decade-long campaign by architect Wins Bridgman to make universally accessible toilets a permanent piece of public infrastructure in downtown Winnipeg.

In 2012, Canada signed a United Nations document recognizing basic sanitation as a human right. As Canada’s social divide widens, access to washrooms has become an issue for a growing number of people in our cities. Possibly more than any other human-rights issue, sanitation is intrinsically linked to the idea of human dignity and is an underlying determinant of physical and mental health.

Lack of proper sanitation for the most vulnerable people in our society can increase incidents of abuse and discrimination, exacerbate the cycle of poverty, drug addiction and health problems and ultimately create greater barriers to a basic quality of life and self-determination.

Time to think different about transit

The City of Winnipeg is currently seeking public input on the proposed alignment for its next Bus Rapid Transit line. The eastern corridor will connect Plessis Road in Transcona with Harkness Station on Stradbrook Avenue, where the existing Southwest Transitway currently terminates. Two routes are being presented, one running through Point Douglas and one through St. Boniface.

The plans begin by proposing an exciting option to locate the transitway on the elevated rail line between The Forks and Main Street, using Union Station as a magnificent transit stop. This creates the potential for the historic structure to become a multi-modal transportation centre for downtown, operating as a central hub for such things as cycling and transit, water-bus, taxi, airport shuttles, and tourist trolleys.

The spectacular central hall of Union Station once again bustling with activity represents an opportunity to stimulate growth around south Main Street, by bringing pedestrian traffic to the sidewalks and drawing the vibrancy of The Forks and its future railside community into the rest of downtown.

Beyond Union Station, the two proposals diverge. The Point Douglas option either continues up Main Street or passes through the Exchange District to Higgins Avenue, before crossing the river on a new bridge. The St. Boniface alignment crosses the river on the existing Provencher Bridge and then runs down Provencher Boulevard to Archibald Street and Nairn Avenue.

Pedestrian bridges a welcome direction

Winnipeg’s rivers have divided its neighbourhoods since the days when St. Boniface was an independent city with ferry service to the English side of the river. The physical segmentation of Winnipeg, by rivers and railyards, has made it a city of unique neighbourhoods. Communities that are geographically adjacent, but without direct pedestrian connections, have often developed with a distinct character, demographic, economy and history.

Designed primarily to funnel people through neighbourhoods, and not be connectors between them, the city’s many vehicular bridges have had limited success breaking down the traditional divisions between Winnipeg’s communities. A new pedestrian and cycling bridge, however, proposed to span the Assiniboine River and connect the cycling infrastructure of Osborne Village and downtown, might present a new model to effectively link many of Winnipeg’s communities at a more intimate scale.

As always, there is public debate about the cost and details, but the new bridge represents an important opportunity to change the dialogue about mobility in Winnipeg. Done well, it can be a symbol of a progressive and inclusive city that is broadening its transportation options. Calgary’s similar Peace Bridge, designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has become a postcard image, representing a forward-looking city. There may be other bridges with shoulders and sidewalks for cyclists and pedestrians, but a dedicated crossing changes the experience of those activities and by giving them priority, elevates the value of active transportation in the city and attracts more users.

With construction costs of about 10 per cent that of a car bridge, cycling and pedestrian bridges could affordably be replicated in strategic areas across the city, introducing a new network of connectivity between Winnipeg’s divided neighbourhoods. This web of active mobility could link communities together and potentially change how we define our neighbourhoods. It could transform how we move around our city, increasing economic opportunity, neighbourhood vibrancy and quality of life.

Sweeping new plaza designed to engage

The Winnipeg Jets’ playoff run has cast a spotlight on our downtown. Images of hockey-crazed fans dancing in the streets have caught the imagination of the country.

Next year, the whiteout celebration will move from its temporary setup to a permanent home at True North Square. The sweeping new plaza, anchored by a six-by-nine-metre video screen, has been planned to accommodate several thousand people for concerts, festivals and other public events, but understanding the potential scale of street parties, the event space has been designed to expand to incorporate Carlton Street to form a huge, block-long festival area set within the four towers of the development.

The long-term success of True North Square as a public space will be measured, however, not only by its function during NHL playoffs, but also by its ability to engage the city and the people who use it every other day of the year. Large public spaces can be a difficult challenge in low-density cities such as Winnipeg, particularly in a downtown that has been designed with much higher priority given to vehicles than pedestrians. Without a determined focus on bringing people to the site and keeping them there, large public spaces can become desolate and unsafe.

The design team of True North Square, Vancouver’s Perkins+Will and PFS Studio, and Winnipeg’s Architecture 49 and McGowan Russell, have developed a plan that grew uniquely from the public spaces outward. Pedestrian connectivity was first considered, establishing pathways and sight lines through the development that link the major buildings in the area, including the arena and convention centre.

Kapyong a unique opportunity to innovate

After 14 years, an agreement in principle has been reached between the federal government and Treaty 1 First Nations, regarding the future of Kapyong Barracks.The abandoned 160-acre site, about three times the size of The Forks, will be divided into two parcels; one-third will be developed by Canada Lands, a federal Crown corporation, and the rest will be held in common by seven First Nations that intend to develop it as a joint urban reserve.

With issues of ownership soon behind us, we can begin to dream as a community about what the site could be, the possibilities for Winnipeg, Canada and all Indigenous people, limited only by our imagination.

Imagine a place that is a crown jewel of Winnipeg — a dynamic urban reserve that stands as a lasting monument to reconciliation, a source of pride for Canada, a source of prosperity and symbol of hope for Indigenous people, and a catalyst for establishing a new relationship between First Nations and the modern Canadian city.

With 91 per cent of all new growth in metropolitan areas happening in car-dependent suburban development, the future prosperity of Canada’s cities will depend largely on how we build new suburbs. The sprawling, low-density growth patterns of the past have led to an economically and environmentally unsustainable urban form. Because of urban sprawl, civic infrastructure is crumbling, public services are being reduced and taxes are rising.

Kenaston pitch deserves a rethink

With $450 million, one could build 90 community libraries, or 18 new schools, or 25 two-rink recreation centres. That sum represents the city’s total road maintenance budget for four years.

Winnipeg Transit’s entire 600-vehicle fleet could be replaced with new electric buses for $450 million — with enough money left over to buy 300 more.

Or, $450 million could build one car lane, two kilometres long, on each side of Kenaston Boulevard.

The city of Winnipeg has restarted the consultation process for widening Kenaston, between the St. James Bridge and Taylor Avenue, in an effort to reduce congestion.

Parkade plan shows forward thinking

There’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with finding a great parking spot. We feel good about ourselves, and brag about it to our friends. As Canadians, we expend a lot of time and energy looking for parking, and it’s no wonder: we own a lot of cars. A million driving-age adults in Manitoba own almost 900,000 vehicles.

Parking all these cars takes up a staggering amount of space. Assuming the province is typical to other North American jurisdictions, with about three parking stalls built for every registered car, the total land area dedicated to parking in Manitoba could be as much as 70 square kilometres — about the size of Brandon.

Accommodating 32,000 stalls, 41 per cent of the land area in downtown Winnipeg is dedicated to parking, half on surface lots. In general, North American cities devote from 10 to 15 per cent of their overall land area to parking, with personal vehicles typically sitting parked 95 per cent of the time.

All of this might soon change. The advent of autonomous vehicles, and a coming revolution in how we drive and park, may provide an important opportunity to take back much of this land and transform the way we have designed Canadian cities for the last century.

Walking key to complete community

Last week, the city’s familiar public notice signs began appearing along three blocks of Academy Road in River Heights. They usually signify a rezoning application for new development; in this instance, the little yellow signs were advertising something quite different.

The application being made is a change to the local neighbourhood plan — called a Planned Development Overlay — proposing to redraw the boundaries between what is called the “Academy Shops and Services Area” and the “Academy Living Area.” This move would restrict three blocks of the street, currently single-family homes, from ever being converted into mixed-use or commercial development.

The application represents another chapter in a long history of resistance to development on Academy Road. River Heights residents have demonstrated a particularly rabid aversion to change, but their opposition is not unique in the city. Whenever change is proposed in any of Winnipeg’s mature neighbourhoods, developers generally face opposition. A recent example was a four-storey mixed-use proposal for a surface parking lot on Provencher Boulevard that had residents at the public hearing lamenting the loss of parking and views, as well as fearing increased neighbourhood density.

There are streets such as Academy Road in most cities, running through neighbourhoods with the density and demographics of River Heights, lined with shops and amenities for their full length, to support the daily needs of community residents. The “high street” would be celebrated as the life of the neighbourhood, a driver of employment and a vital part of a healthy, pedestrian lifestyle, providing supporting services such as shops, restaurants and groceries that are walked to by the residents.

City should consider streetcar revival

One hundred and 17 years ago this week, the first electric streetcar in Winnipeg jingle-jangled its way down River Avenue between Main and Osborne streets. Soon, a network of routes would criss-cross the city. At its peak, almost 400 cars carried 60-million riders annually on more than 200 kilometres of track.

Winnipeg owes much of its current urban form of large streets radiating out from the core to those early streetcar routes. The attraction of public transportation was used to drive development and target growth in new suburbs, by extending streetcar lines down streets, such as Osborne Street, Corydon Avenue, Sherbrook Street, Broadway, Portage Avenue, Academy Road and St. Mary’s Road. These roads would become dense retail and service corridors, running through neighbourhoods of grid-pattern residential streets that provided easy pedestrian access to transit stops.

As car ownership boomed and diesel buses became the future, the last streetcar made its final run down Main Street in 1955, with a banner on its side proclaiming, “I’m giving way to transit progress.” The city form would change to follow this evolution, with primary growth occurring in distant, car-focused, low-density, cul-de-sac subdivisions with regional retail centres.

With most population growth happening on the suburban fringes, many North American cities are looking to establish more sustainable development patterns by attracting greater density to mature neighbourhoods and promoting inward growth in central suburbs.

National housing strategy a way to change face of neighbourhoods

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently unveiled details of the federal government’s national housing strategy, a 10-year, $40-billion initiative that will look to collaborate with provinces and municipalities in developing programs that target homelessness and improve access to affordable housing for Canadians in need.

The plan includes the creation of a $15.9-billion national housing co-investment fund, a system of grants and low-interest loans that will help construct up to 100,000 new affordable residential units across the country.

Government programs often work in silos, but if all three levels can come together to harmonize this new spending with other programs, initiatives and long-term planning goals, there is significant opportunity to leverage our investment, inspire innovative private development and affect positive change in Canadian cities.

In Winnipeg, mature neighbourhoods have seen a population decline over the last 40 years, generally due to smaller household sizes. The density in Wolseley, River Heights and St. Boniface, for example, has declined by as much as 30 per cent since the 1970s. This reduction in density leaves fewer taxpayers paying for a greater share of services and infrastructure, while making local commerce, schools, libraries and community centres less viable.

Climate revenues could transform transportation

Premier Brian Pallister recently unveiled the made-in-Manitoba “Climate and Green Plan,” a strategy to reduce the province’s greenhouse gas emissions and battle climate change.

The central component of the proposed policy is a $25-per-tonne tax on carbon emissions, typically generated from burning fossil fuels.

The plan has been presented as a work in progress, with details to be finalized in the coming months. How the government spends the projected $260 million raised each year by the carbon tax will be a critical piece to realizing the plan’s projected emissions reductions.

With almost two-thirds of Manitobans living in Winnipeg’s metropolitan area, targeted, forward-looking investment in the city’s urban infrastructure represents a significant opportunity to make bold moves that leverage those dollars to reduce our carbon footprint, grow the economy and build a more competitive and progressive city.

Time to love Portage and Main

Picture the best urban neighbourhood you have ever visited, the most dynamic city centre you’ve been to. Are you surrounded by people on bustling sidewalks, open to busy shops and restaurants? Where is it — maybe Vancouver, Montreal, New York or Paris?

Why do we go on vacation to fall in love with cities with this vibrancy and urban quality, then come home and not demand the same for our own city? Why do we believe a great urban experience can only happen somewhere else?

Winnipeg’s endless Portage and Main debate is a glaring example of this attitude. The value of bringing people back to our central intersection is seemingly only measured by its effect on vehicular traffic. The speed at which we can evacuate downtown in a car is often seen as the only legitimate priority in the debate. Qualitative, and even economic, arguments are brushed aside as meaningless.

Traffic congestion is an important part of the discussion that will need to be resolved. Other intersections, such as Broadway and Main or Portage and Memorial, have a similar range of traffic volumes, and operate without extreme congestion or pedestrian danger. It is important that we not let traffic become the only issue we focus on when making important city-building decisions like this. Elevating the role of pedestrians downtown can be a step towards making Winnipeg one of those vibrant and prosperous cities we fall in love with.

City can learn from Amazon search

Amazon, the Seattle-based online shopping pioneer, recently sent shock waves across the continent when it initiated a search for a location to build a massive second headquarters somewhere in North America. In an unusual move, the company released an open call, seven-page request for proposals (RFP) inviting jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S. to submit plans to lure the technology giant to their city. The winner is promised a capital investment of US$5 billion and employment for up to 50,000 skilled workers.

Predictably, civic leaders from coast to coast, including those in Winnipeg, have announced their intention to enter the lucrative Amazon sweepstakes. Most realists would accept that cities such as Winnipeg have very little chance of winning, but the exercise of responding can be a valuable opportunity to understand what makes a city competitive in the battle for outside investment and new corporate offices. Amazon’s wish list is a clear window into what progressive companies are looking for when evaluating a move to a new location.

The RFP reads like an urbanist’s dream, specifically outlining a preference for sites offering dense, pedestrian-friendly, connected neighbourhoods that foster a sense of place and cultivate the local culture. The document celebrates Amazon’s urban campus in Seattle as a “city maker,” supporting “restaurants, services and coffee shops... with its sustainable buildings and open spaces.” It goes on to indicate the new location could be similar.

Amazon’s evaluation criteria suggest that cities able to offer urban lifestyle options will be the winners in attracting companies in the knowledge-based economy. Car-dominant cities without a diversity in its quality of life choices will be less competitive in the city-versus-city battle for outside investment.

Imagination could give Arlington Bridge new life

The three graceful arches of the old Arlington Bridge have cast their curving shadows on Winnipeg’s central rail yards for 105 years. It’s become a quintessentially Winnipeg experience to ascend the bridge’s steep ramp and cross its narrow deck as the rhythm of steel girders ticks by. The sweeping panorama — a rarity in a flat city — lays out below, with rows of trains vanishing into the horizon, the downtown skyline rising over an elm tree canopy beyond.

Few bridges provide an experience as unique as Arlington, and even fewer provide a better story. The prevailing legend explains that the ramps are so steep because the bridge, built in England, was actually designed to span the Nile River. When a contract fell through, the structure was offered to Winnipeg on the cheap and shoehorned into the site. Built specifically to run streetcars to the North End, the steep ramps prevented a single trolley from ever crossing.

With all its quirks, calls for the bridge’s replacement go back more than 70 years. This month, the City of Winnipeg will begin public consultation for the design of a new $300-million bridge, with more lanes, better emergency vehicle and transit access and less-steep ramps for pedestrians and cyclists. Public art will attempt to make the modern roadway more visually appealing.

The starting point for public consultation assumes the old bridge will be demolished, specifically identifying that it cannot be repurposed to another use. The steep ramps and aging structure are provided as anecdotal reasons for this decision, but no formal study identifying the criteria used in this assessment has been made public.

Project shows diagonal parking works

There’s something counterintuitive about adding cars to a street to make it a better place for pedestrians, but that’s what happened in downtown Winnipeg when an old idea recently became new.

Three weeks ago, the city implemented an eight-month pilot project on Bannatyne Avenue in the Exchange District. Using paint and temporary planters, existing parallel parking was re-oriented into diagonal parking stalls, like something you might see in a small town or on an old photograph. The goal of the project is to increase the amount of on-street parking, something businesses and area residents have been asking for. While 10 new spaces have been created, the new configuration has had a much broader effect. It has changed the way people drive and has transformed the character of the street.

Modern diagonal parking is part of a phenomenon that began in Germany in the 1970s, called “vekehrsberuhigung” — a great word if you are ever playing German Scrabble, but more easily remembered as “traffic calming.” The strategy introduces design elements to a street that intuitively slow traffic and make drivers more aware. The intent is not to cause congestion, but to create urban streets that are safe and comfortable for all users — drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Traffic calming attempts to match the physical environment with desired traffic speed, instead of relying on signage and police enforcement.

Some important traffic calming measures include eliminating one-way streets, making tighter radius corners, raised plateau crosswalks and, most importantly, narrowing roads and a driver’s field of vision. This last point is part of the success of diagonal parking as a traffic calming tool. When a driver’s field of vision expands, speeds intuitively increase. We instinctively drive faster on Pembina Highway than on Albert Street, regardless of posted limits.

Strong fire-safety measures critical

In June, the world watched in disbelief as soaring flames and columns of thick smoke ravaged Grenfell Tower in London. Dramatic images and heartbreaking reports of desperate residents trapped inside streamed across social media. So far, at least 80 people are believed to have lost their lives in the tragedy.

The source of the fire appears to have been a refrigerator inside one of the units on the fourth floor. From there, the flames spread rapidly, and within half an hour, the fire was out of control.

A year earlier, the 43-year-old, 24-storey apartment underwent a $15-million renovation. This upgrade included a new heating system, windows and exterior siding. The siding product used was an aluminum panel with a flammable polyethylene backing, layered on top of polyisocyanurate insulation, which burns easily, giving off toxic cyanide fumes.

Fire-safety experts are pointing to this highly flammable exterior siding as a likely cause of the rapid spread of the fire from floor to floor, as well as being the source of deadly gases in the air. At least three survivors were treated for cyanide poisoning.

Heritage builds opportunity downtown

Winnipeg’s Main Street has long been a symbol of the city itself. Starting out as a muddy cart path between two fur trading posts, it would grow to become the economic engine of Western Canada, lined with magnificent buildings along Banker’s Row. With two grand railway stations welcoming thousands of settlers every day, Main Street was the centre of Winnipeg’s early prosperity. 

As the decades passed, Main Street would also come to symbolize Winnipeg’s decline. Construction of the Trizec Building in 1978 saw demolition of an entire streetscape of almost 40 buildings, resulting in the loss of a neighbourhood and countless small businesses. The pedestrian barricades at Portage and Main have divided the street in half for 38 years and counting. These moves have resulted in the once-vibrant thoroughfare now being lined with surface parking, including a gravel lot at the city’s most important intersection. Land values and development pressure are so low that a one-storey restaurant can offer an entire city block of free parking in the heart of downtown. 

Fortunes may be changing for Winnipeg’s oldest street. The city’s new tallest building will soon rise at Graham Avenue, removing the walls at Portage Avenue will stitch the street back together, and The Forks’ Railside development will bring several hundred new residents to the area. Lost in these major changes, however, are two little old buildings that have stood witness to the street’s ups and downs and are today finding new life, promising to be important contributors to its renewal. 

The three-storey Fortune Block, built in 1882 by real estate speculator Mark Fortune, who would later die aboard the Titanic, comes from a time when Main Street looked like a scene out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. Despite being one of the oldest buildings in downtown, it and the adjoining MacDonald Block were threatened with demolition in 2015. The buildings' owner lobbied for exclusion from the city’s heritage protection list, arguing that they were unsafe, structurally unsound and beyond the point of saving. 

Boosting Winterpeg’s ‘destination’ status

For many years, Winnipeg has had an image problem. The popular depiction has been one of a city frozen in a never-ending winter with a downtown filled with nothing but dusty old buildings. Most tourists only recognize Winnipeg from the route map on the screen in the airplane seat in front of them as they pass by at 30,000 feet.

Something appears to be happening lately that is altering this perception. Winnipeg has begun to make regular appearances in international travel blogs and periodicals, including Vogue, Elle and Reader’s Digest, all celebrating the unique Winnipeg experience. Somehow, the city’s rough-around-the-edges character has become cool. To outsiders, our frozen city in the middle of nowhere seems oddly exotic, exemplified by its place alongside Seychelles, Bhutan and the Hawaiian volcanoes in a National Geographic list of the Best Trips of 2016.

The irony of this transition is that the very things that have for so long served as fodder for "Winterpeg" ridicule, are now being celebrated as unique attractions. Eating dinner on the frozen river, skating among artistic warming huts or wandering through a largely intact century-old warehouse district are hailed as must-see, uniquely Winnipeg experiences.

The world is becoming smaller, travel is becoming easier and globalization is making cities more homogenous. As a result, tourists have begun to look more often for unique stories and authentic, local experiences in non-traditional destinations.

Globalization means opportunity

Imagine if every restaurant in the city was part of an international chain. Even if they were all the finest franchises in the world, they could never replace the experience of a neighbourhood eatery with a menu composed through an understanding of regional foods and nuances of local taste.

This past week, I was invited to the University of Manitoba to talk about the future of Winnipeg architecture with graduating students. I used this line as a metaphor to describe the transformational effects globalization is having on their future profession and the cities they will live in.

Rapid urbanization, unprecedented mobility, digital communication and the standardization of building materials and construction techniques are transforming the practice of architecture, and in turn the image of cities across a culturally homogenizing world. Designers and design ideas travel easily across borders today, meaning local design tradition is giving way to globalization.

Like a restaurant franchise, international architects have become brands that can be purchased as a commodity. In cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, developers clamour to attract the latest global “starchitect,” lending instant credibility to their project. As architects move from one city to another, buildings are increasingly becoming representations of the designers and less of the place and the people they are built for.

Time for feds to help preserve heritage buildings

For several decades after the Second World War, many Canadians considered the old buildings in their cities to be symbols of decline, representing a lack of progress. Many cities, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, developed grand plans to replace historic downtown neighbourhoods with freeways, parking lots and mega-projects. In one generation, more than one-fifth of Canada’s historic buildings were demolished.

Values have changed and today the areas in Canadian cities that survived the Modernist planning movement are celebrated as places of opportunity and growth. The busiest strip on a Saturday night in downtown Calgary is Stephen Avenue, a street lined with century-old facades. The lanes of Old Montreal, Vancouver’s Gastown and Ottawa’s Byward Market bustle with residents and tourists year-round. In almost every Canadian city, the trendiest, most interesting urban neighbourhoods are the ones filled with old buildings.

Winnipeg is no different. The 1960s had optimistic plans for riverside freeways, broad avenues and ordered, modern apartment blocks, wiping away the past. Only the city’s slow growth saved its old buildings; the blocks of City Hall, Manitoba Museum and Centennial Concert Hall represent the limited manifestation of a plan that was to eliminate the Warehouse District.

Today, the Exchange District National Historic Site, a collection of 117 turn-of-the-20th-century structures, is a catalyst for renewal in Winnipeg’s downtown. Twenty years ago, the area had a population of about 250. Since then, more than 1,500 residential units have been constructed, including 31 heritage building projects, accounting for more than 900 units — the equivalent of six 20-storey apartment buildings. The area is home to dozens of shops, businesses and restaurants and is downtown’s cultural and social hub. The district has even been celebrated recently as a must-see tourist destination in several periodicals, including National Geographic, Vogue, Elle and Reader’s Digest.

Downtown must embrace winter, not hide from it

After enduring a week of arctic wind chill in the month of March, it might be a bad time to discuss Winnipeg’s downtown walkway system, but as one of the five coldest major winter cities in the world, how we design for climate is an important consideration.

For many years, the North American response to winter has been to hide from it. In the 1960s, as downtowns started losing a battle to suburban shopping malls and office parks, civic leaders felt the only way to compete was to mimic this climate-controlled trend and consolidate interior spaces in the city centre.

Montreal was the leader in this movement, beginning construction of the Underground City in 1962, growing to become a staggering 32 kilometres of subterranean tunnels and shopping centres beneath the city. Since that time, 17 indoor pedestrian systems have been developed in cities across North America. Minneapolis boasts the longest continuous network of elevated walkways at 15 kilometres, and Calgary has the largest total length at 18 kilometres.

The idea for Winnipeg’s indoor walkway system began with the 1969 Downtown Development Plan, which envisioned a futuristic city of towers and plazas, interconnected by a vast network of elevated and underground walkways to protect people from winter and allow vehicular traffic to flow more efficiently. To discourage sidewalk use in the summer, the plan proposed “the second-storey habit,” a strategy to pull all retail, commercial and social activities away from the ground level and into the corridors, so people could avoid cars and weather year-round.

Examining five pillars of a big-picture plan

The recent release of Canada’s 2016 census was like catnip for us statistics nerds. Across the country, we slouched at our computers into the early hours, poring over everything from aggregate dissemination areas to census agglomerations.

The census revealed that Winnipeg is growing faster than it has since the 1960s. After entering this century at No. 9, it is poised to soon retake the position of seventh-largest city in the country. Some visible trends were confirmed: mature neighbourhood populations have generally stayed level, the downtown population is growing and the city’s southern suburbs are booming.

Municipalities surrounding Winnipeg have continued to grow faster than the city itself, with Ritchot, Macdonald and Headingley experiencing a growth rate more than double that of the city and province.

The growth of these municipalities has been concentrated overwhelmingly in existing population centres. Many satellite towns are now ringed with suburb-style, low-density subdivisions and are beginning to experience the economic challenges with growth and municipal services with which Winnipeg is currently wrestling.

Give Union Bank Tower the crown

Union Bank Tower has quietly watched over Winnipeg from the bend in Main Street for 113 years. Symbolic of a more optimistic time, its full significance has been lost in our civic memory. If this elegant building stood in one of Canada’s more confident cities, it might adorn postcards and tourist brochures. In Winnipeg, a small bronze plaque on its facade timidly boasts, “The city’s first skyscraper.” A deeper investigation, however, reveals it likely deserves to be celebrated with the much loftier title of “Canada’s first skyscraper.”

The term “skyscraper” was coined in the late 1800s as buildings in Chicago and New York used new technologies to race toward the sky. The first innovation that facilitated the highrise era was the invention of the electric elevator by the Otis Company in 1857. This made the idea of taller buildings more practical, but it was the steel-frame structural system that made them possible. Thin exterior walls could be hung from the frame, known as a curtain-wall system, replacing heavy, load-bearing walls supported from the ground. This allowed buildings to be lighter and more flexible, unlocking the barriers to height.

The world’s first skyscraper is generally recognized as Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, built in 1885. It was the first structure to have all four ingredients of a modern skyscraper: a high-speed elevator, steel skeleton frame, curtain-wall exterior and a height that was well above typical (then considered to be 10 storeys or taller).

It would be reasonable to assume the same four conditions must be present to define what was Canada’s first skyscraper. As expected, Montreal and Toronto most commonly claim to have buildings that own this title.

Downtown growth didn’t happen overnight

If construction cranes in the skyline create optimism in a city, then Winnipeggers might feel particularly confident in 2017.

Downtown is projected to see as many as five highrise towers under construction this year, potentially including a new tallest skyscraper, a first since 201 Portage (formerly the TD tower) passed the Richardson Building almost three decades ago. Along with these towers, population growth in downtown will be supported by three mid-rise apartments and four residential heritage building conversions also slated for construction this year.

An important component of these proposed developments is that they are spread across different areas of downtown and often located near other recently completed housing projects, helping reinforce pockets of residential growth in key areas. Developing unique population nodes that can grow together over time is an important strategy to bring renewal to an over-scaled downtown.

Graham Avenue is poised to bustle with construction as the 24-storey residential and 17-storey office towers at True North Square rise together, structurally topping out by this fall. The $400-million project, heralded as the largest development in downtown Winnipeg’s history, will combine with the recently completed Centrepoint towers on Portage Avenue to form the heart of the sports, hospitality and entertainment district.

Developing a road map for growth

A little 12-unit condominium project proposed by Ventura Developments for Winnipeg’s Crescentwood neighbourhood has caused quite a stir. The project’s rejection at a community committee meeting has once again sparked public debate about the challenges of trying to build in Winnipeg’s older neighbourhoods.

Infill development of this type is generally seen as a tool to reinvigorate established communities, create affordable housing options and provide cost-efficient use of existing infrastructure.

Over the last several decades, Winnipeg’s mature neighbourhoods have seen a significant population decline due to an aging demographic, higher real estate values that prevent younger residents from moving in and a nationwide trend to smaller household sizes.

River Heights, Wolseley and St. Boniface have all seen a population loss of more than 20 per cent since the 1970s. Crescentwood, the neighbourhood of the Ventura project, today has nearly one-third fewer residents.

Road safety by design

If flying were as dangerous as crossing the street, steamships and passenger trains would still be a thing.

On average, about 600 people die in plane crashes across the entire world each year, while in Canada alone, one pedestrian per day is killed in a vehicle collision. In Manitoba, a pedestrian is hit and injured by a car five times per week, resulting in death once per month.

We have engineered our Canadian cities for speed. Our streets have got bigger; lanes have got wider and traffic flow has been given priority over the safety of other transportation modes, such as walking and cycling. Speed reduces reaction times, increases stopping distances and has a significant effect on accident severity. A pedestrian struck by a car travelling 50 kilometres per hour has an 80 per cent chance of being killed, compared with only five per cent at 30 km/h.

Reducing vehicle speeds is key to road safety, but it’s not as easy as putting up signs and red-light cameras.

Designing the perfect winter city

Winter is Winnipeg’s thing. It’s what we’re known for. It unifies us like a legion heading into battle. As we prepare to collectively stare down another winter, however, the city of Edmonton is quietly threatening to invade our turf. They not only showed up last week to beat us at our favourite winter sport, they are now trying to beat us at winter itself.

In a few weeks, Edmonton’s urban planning committee and city council will be presented with an official winter design policy, a planning document that outlines an innovative set of winter-specific urban design guidelines, with the goal of transforming the Alberta capital into an international model for winter city design. Once adopted, its recommendations will influence zoning bylaws, design standards and approval processes by viewing them through the unique lens of winter living. With these new guidelines, Edmonton is hoping to turn a traditional winter hibernation into an outdoor urban celebration.

Winnipeg has led the way with several grassroots festivals, activities and community initiatives that have begun to change our attitudes about winter living, but embedding winter-specific design principles into official civic policy is a visionary idea that could have a transformational effect on the character of Edmonton’s architectural and urban form.

The guidelines will implement several design strategies to help make outdoor spaces comfortable and inviting in all seasons, by focusing on the creation of comfortable urban microclimates. Wind and sunlight are the two key elements that impact thermal comfort in urban areas. Environment Canada has indicated by controlling these factors through design, we can make outdoor public spaces feel warmer by as much as 10 C on cold days.

Pilot projects going permanent

Resistance to change is a natural human condition. We feel security in what is familiar and see risk in what is unknown.

As cities grow and progress, this inertia can be a difficult obstacle for planners, developers and political leaders trying to implement new ideas. When change threatens to alter familiar, established patterns in a community, opposition galvanizes, and decision-makers face the uphill challenge of articulating the goals and benefits of new proposals in an effort to alleviate neighbourhood concerns.

Cities across North America are looking for new ways to engage in this dialogue and inspire a greater feeling of public inclusion in the decision-making process. In some cases, cities are implementing short-term pilot projects as a method of testing ideas and building community support.

Pilot projects allow residents to observe the real-world effects of an idea, fundamentally changing the nature of public outreach. Traditional open house-type consultation offers case studies from other cities, academic theory and glossy renderings that often do little to change attitudes and preconceptions. By implementing smaller-scale pilot projects, the starting point for public engagement is shifted from a hypothetical description to a discussion about an observed experience.

City's thirst for growth fees ignores their power as a planning tool

For the last 50 years, Winnipeg’s built-up geographic area has been increasing at a rate of more than twice the city’s population growth. There are 20 per cent fewer people living in River Heights today than in 1970. In Wolseley, the population is down 36 per cent, St. Boniface 23 per cent and even busy Osborne Village has seen a population decline of 11 per cent during that time.

The city’s population density is lower today than it has ever been — and it continues to drop. We want to live large. The average new Canadian home size, growing to almost 2,000 square feet today from 1,050 square feet in 1975, is a clear indication we like space.

Why does it matter? Shouldn’t we be free to live wherever we want?

The difficult reality is that low population density has had a significant effect on the economic viability of our city. Sprawling growth is at the root of almost everything we complain about: taxes, city services, potholes and traffic. Only mosquitoes and winter seem exempt from its effects.

Uniting nations: A look at the design submissions to replace the iconic Peace Tower

In the southwest corner of Manitoba, nestled within the rolling hills of the Turtle Mountains is a grand, formal garden dedicated to global peace. Its manicured geometric layout, aligned with the international border, is an image one might expect to find cascading from a medieval European castle. The backdrop for this garden, however, is hills, forests and lakes that sprawl north into Canada and an endless horizon of glistening wheat fields stretching into the United States.

Dedicated in 1932, the International Peace Garden is a formal Renaissance-style plan with a symmetrical composition of pathways, terraces and planter beds, centred on a primary axis running for 1.5 kilometres along the international boundary. In 1982, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the park, Number Ten Architectural Group of Winnipeg was hired to design a Peace Tower that would complete the formal axis at the western end of the garden.

The scheme proposed a monument of four columns, each 37 metres tall, representing people from the four corners of the Earth. Seen on an axis, the four towers appear as two, with the border running between them, a representation of two distinct nations built on shared ideals. The towers have become the iconic symbol and focal point of the formal garden.

Regrettably, over the last number of years, the concrete towers have developed an issue with moisture infiltration that has begun to degrade their internal structure. The concrete has started to crack, and the structural base is crumbling. After exhausting all solutions to save them, the difficult decision was made to demolish the iconic landmark, set to happen this winter.

Lane it on the line

The back lane was a perfect spot to play street hockey when we were kids. The narrow alley was enclosed and protected, houses were close-set, allowing our parents to maintain a watchful eye. The occasional slow-moving vehicle could be accommodated simply with an enthusiastic howl of ‘car!’

The intimacy and human scale that makes residential alleys so great for street hockey are characteristics shared with the narrow urban lanes found throughout many downtown areas. These attractive qualities are leading cities around the world to explore the potential of re-engaging these forgotten urban connectors.

Streets with a similar personal scale inspire the vibrant sidewalk culture that makes European city centres an attractive vacation destination for so many, but in our downtown we demand wide, straight roadways designed primarily to funnel cars as quickly as possible into the suburbs. Any efforts to narrow these thoroughfares and improve the pedestrian experience are often met with strong opposition.

The city’s back lanes, however, might provide an opportunity to efficiently create this welcoming pedestrian environment within existing infrastructure. These narrow, enclosed spaces, generally used for loading and garbage collection, are being reimagined in many cities as an alternate pedestrian network superimposed on the larger street grid, introducing lively, people-first, public space.

City issues neglected in election

Nearly 55 per cent of Manitoba’s population lives inside Winnipeg’s Perimeter Highway, representing more than 60 per cent of the province’s employment and two-thirds of its GDP. Despite this concentration of people and commerce, urban issues have seemingly not been a central focus of the provincial election campaign. Manitoba’s provincial budget is 12 times greater than Winnipeg’s municipal budget, meaning the province’s values and civic priorities have a substantial influence on the type of city we build.

A recent Winnipeg Free Press poll found the top priority for Winnipeg voters is roads and potholes. It was identified as being the most important issue more than twice as often as health care or taxes. While this result may be disheartening for those hoping for a more inspiring election dialogue, it is hardly surprising.

We have built a city that has made the car a central focus our lifestyle. For most Winnipeggers, almost every activity done outside of the home requires a drive in an automobile. It logically follows that potholes would become the key voter concern.

The way in which the provincial government chooses to respond to this issue will affect the shape and civic competitiveness of Winnipeg. Will the choice be simply to fill the potholes and hope they don’t come back, or will the province engage in more holistic solutions that address the root causes of our infrastructure deficit?

Two-ways to revitalize downtown

Building a prosperous downtown is a two-way street — literally.

Later this year, downtown Winnipeg will celebrate its 60th anniversary of becoming a one-way city. Our transition away from urban two-way streets began some 30 years earlier, however, as car ownership grew, and for the first time traffic flows started to become a public concern. This means, of course, we in Winnipeg are also approaching our 90th anniversary of complaining about traffic.

To improve vehicular circulation in the growing city centre, new bylaws were introduced in 1931 that included the elimination of diagonal parking, the allowance of right turns on red lights and the creation of a handful of one-way streets.

In 1955 it was decided even more changes were needed. The boulevard trees that once lined downtown streets were cut down, and roads were widened, streetcars were removed to provide more room for vehicles, and by fall 1956 the majority of remaining streets in the downtown were converted to one-way traffic.

Sprawl fees ease growing pains

‘Growth must pay for growth.’

This was the mantra repeated by Mayor Brian Bowman after revealing in his 2016 state of the city address negotiations are underway to create a new growth fee to help pay for the infrastructure costs associated with suburban development.

Faced with a $7-billion infrastructure deficit and a 2016 municipal budget filled with increased taxes and fees attempting to make up for a $74-million shortfall, our civic leaders appear to be coming to the realization the low-density suburbs we have built for decades in Canada are not financially sustainable in the long term.

Searching for a solution, cities across the country are turning to a ‘sprawl tax’ to help fill suburban-development funding gaps. Calgary recently implemented a charge on new subdivisions that’s expected to increase the cost of a new home by up to $6,000.

Pedestrian traffic at Portage & Main would invigorate all of Winnipeg

Nothing stirs the passions of Winnipeggers more than talking about traffic. Those emotions boiled over recently when the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ hosted, Imagine Portage and Main, a symposium to stimulate conversation about the future of our city’s once iconic intersection.

The event’s guest speaker was Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, a business improvement district that successfully navigated a public consultation process to transform the New York intersection from a seedy, car-dominated crossing into a safe, pedestrian destination and vibrant public space.

Judging by the response on social media, Internet forums, radio callin shows and newspaper comment sections, the challenge of convincing Winnipeggers to consider a similar evolution for their famous intersection will be even more daunting than persuading eight million New Yorkers.

To move the debate forward, the following paragraphs will identify the key concerns that arose through the symposium in opposition to reopening Portage and Main and provide a brief response from the proponents’ side.

Building a better neighbourhood

It's not often our little city makes headlines in major international newspapers. When it does, it's rarely the precursor to a positive story.

A recent banner in Britain's prominent daily the Guardian, made it clear its Winnipeg tale would be no different.

Titled Crime in the community: when 'designer' social housing goes wrong, the column presents a less-than-glowing review of Centre Village, a Manitoba Housing complex on Balmoral Street in the Central Park neighbourhood, designed by local firm 5468796 Architecture.

With 441 reader comments and extensive social-media attention, the story received significant levels of negative commentary.

Winnipeg’s skyline looking up

North American cities are often judged by their skylines. The postcard image of towers set along the horizon seem to stand like a bar-chart representation of a city's power and affluence.

By this metric, 2015 was a pretty good year for Winnipeg, with five new downtown highrise towers under construction. The last time the city saw that many cranes in the skyline, the Winnipeg Jets' top line wasn't Ladd, Little and Wheeler, it was Hull, Nilsson and Hedberg, struggling to make the playoffs in 1974.

In many cities, highrise construction is largely driven by high-end condominium development, but Winnipeg's new towers respond to a range of functions and demographics.

The twin peaks of the CentrePoint development on Portage Avenue feature office space, two ground-floor restaurants, loft-style condominium units and a trendy boutique hotel. Residential density south of Broadway will be bolstered by the luxury condominiums of D Condo and the rental apartments and townhouses of Heritage Landing, both going up on Assiniboine Avenue. The University of Winnipeg's residence rising behind the art gallery will include a unique blend of affordable student housing and market rentals.

Building a better city

Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris... it reads like a great bucket list of travel destinations, but these cities are more significantly connected as hosts of high-profile global climate change conferences.

From 1992 in Brazil to last week in France, the nations of the world have repeatedly come together in exotic locales to negotiate agreements for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The general pattern of results has been: set emissions targets, ignore them, set easier emissions targets, ignore them, and repeat.

With an increased recognition that the environmental clock is ticking, there is hope the Paris climate conference is the one that ends the cycle of inaction.

As one of the top-10 GHG emitters in the world, Canada came to France pledging a 30 per cent reduction of 2005 levels by 2030. Partnering in the effort to finally achieve significant reductions, individual provinces have come forward with their own targets -- including Manitoba, where emissions are planned to be cut by one-third over the same period.

The past must be part of the future

Thirty years ago, Winnipeg's Exchange District was a hollow collection of pollution-stained industrial warehouses surrounded by treeless streets and empty sidewalks. At night, a checkerboard of dimly lit windows behind the facades of darkened buildings would reveal a subculture of artists and musicians using the low-rent spaces as studios and squatter residences. From the street, the heavy brick walls would only partially muffle the nocturnal sound of rehearsing local rock bands, as old single-pane windows pulsed to the beat of the music inside.

Albert Street was heart of the city's seedy 'red light district', anchored by the Royal Albert and St. Charles Hotels. Their dingy bars, smelling like a potent cocktail of sweat, smoke and marijuana, were the centre of a vibrant local punk rock scene. The district itself was the heart of a thriving artistic community.

Today, the Exchange is peppered with luxury condominiums, trendy boutiques and restaurants. Old Market Square has become a focus for summer festivals, and the tree-lined sidewalks are often busy with pedestrians.

The area continues to be the hub of Winnipeg's creative community, but today the rock bands have been replaced by students, dancers, architects, designers, filmmakers and digital entrepreneurs. Several of the area's buildings have been redeveloped, but others remain underused and in danger of falling beyond repair. Many of the low-rent artists' spaces that were the seeds of the area's renaissance have disappeared, as expensive upgrades required to meet current building codes preclude anything but high-return redevelopment.

Winnipeg's urban forest could be one of the city's most valuable assets

As Winnipeg's trees drop their leaves and brace themselves for another winter, the full effects of the city's tireless battle against Dutch elm disease has revealed itself once again. Trees resigned to their ultimate fate wear an orange dot of paint like a scarlet letter, and significant gaps can now be seen in the once-continuous tree canopy that rises above many of the city's neighbourhoods.

In 1900, Winnipeg's civic leaders decided that to elevate the image of their gritty, featureless prairie town, residential streets should be built with boulevards and lined with grand trees. The American elm was the species of choice because it was beautiful, resilient and readily available to be transplanted from the city's riverbanks.

That forward-thinking decision has defined the image of Winnipeg for more than a century. The quality of light filtered through a cathedral arch of 25-metre-high elm trees is a uniquely Winnipeg experience. These trees today form the backbone of an impressive urban forest, one of the city's truly special attributes.

Looking beyond esthetics, cities across North America have begun to study the value of their urban forests as a tool to inform the political policy and public investment that guides the civic economy and environment.

Consider parties’ stand on municipal issues when you vote

To most of the world, the image of Canada is best represented by a snow globe containing a miniature Mountie sitting on his horse, overlooking an emerald lake framed by majestic mountain peaks.

The reality of course, is Canada is one of the most urban (or more precisely suburban) nations on Earth. The 35 largest cities in our country are home to two-thirds of its population, create 70 per cent of all employment and represent three-quarters of the national GDP. Cities are the cultural and economic engine that drives Canada forward, and most importantly to the politicians trying to win the federal election, they are home to most of Canada’s voters.

This election has seen an uncharacteristic focus on the policies that affect our nation’s cities. In past campaigns, discussion has typically stayed away from issues seen as being within the municipal jurisdiction, but over the past month, each federal party has made significant policy announcements hoping to appeal to the urban voter.

Canada is the only member of the G8 and one of the few western nations that does not have a federal department of cities to co-ordinate national strategies and programs with municipalities. In the 1970s, prime minister Pierre Trudeau created a department of urban affairs, but it lasted less than a decade after losing a turf war with the provinces. Despite this fragmented relationship, the federal government continues to play a vital role in city-building simply because it controls most of our tax dollars. This makes it important for city-dwellers to consider each party’s urban priorities before casting their vote next week.

Rail relocation should be on radar

The Arlington Bridge originally being built to span the Nile River is one of many stories that live on in Winnipeg folklore. Its legend sits alongside Winnie the Pooh, the real James Bond, Bob Hope's first golf game and a legislative building filled with mystical secrets of the Freemasons.

Sadly however, it appears the story of the Arlington Bridge will soon be lost to us.

The city recently announced that after more than a century of spanning Winnipeg's central rail yard, the familiar silver structure with its steep ramps and skyline views is scheduled to be taken down and sold for scrap.

This weekend, a public open house was held to present the options for its replacement.

From parking lot to urban paradise

It is rare for a city to be given an opportunity to build a brand new neighbourhood in the heart of its downtown. When it happens, it is usually the result of an industry that was once the economic engine relocating out of the modern core.

In Toronto, the railway lands along Lake Ontario have seen a multibillion-dollar transformation into a forest of highrises, altering the city's postcard skyline image into something resembling lower Manhattan. False Creek was once the industrial heart of Vancouver, but today it is home to 60,000 people living in a signature West Coast condo tower neighbourhood.

When the rail yards at the intersection of the Red and Assiniboine rivers were closed 30 years ago, Winnipeg was given that same opportunity -- but our city went in a different direction.

Instead of a skyscraper community, we transformed our land into an important public place that is today a jewel in the city's crown and one of Western Canada's top tourist destinations.

Prairie icons in danger of extinction

Summer is a season of road trips. For many Manitobans, the idea of driving across the prairie evokes a nostalgic image of a pastoral landscape. A black ribbon of asphalt is seen vanishing toward a razor-sharp divide between golden wheat fields and a brilliant blue sky. The horizon line is broken only by the angular silhouette of a soaring grain elevator, its familiar form appearing in endless repetition as the miles pass behind.

Today, those iconic wooden towers are becoming an increasingly rare feature in this idyllic image. At their peak, almost 6,000 elevators dotted the Canadian Prairies, sitting every 12 to 16 kilometres along the rail lines. Over the past few decades, as family farms and transportation networks have modernized and consolidated, the role of the local town elevator has been lost. Fewer than 10 per cent of those 6,000 are still standing, with only half of those remaining in operation.

Despite this loss, the grain elevator remains a lasting part of Canada's national identity. Its story is found in the DNA of rural life. Elevators have featured prominently in Canadian art and literature, on currency, postage stamps and even on government advertising used to lure European settlers west a century ago.

The first wooden grain elevator in Canada was built in 1879 in Niverville. It was a small, round building powered by two horses. Until this time, grain was stored in flat warehouses (one such example still exists in Brookdale) and brought to market in bags that were loaded by hand. The arrival of the railway presented an opportunity to ship Prairie grain to the world, but this would require a larger and more advanced system of transfer. In response, the modern grain elevator was born.

Empowerment on wheels: It’s time to support lifestyle choices of all

In an odd twist of Winnipeg politics, Couns. Jeff Browaty, Russ Wyatt, Ross Eadie, Shawn Dobson and Jason Schreyer are playing a role usually reserved for special-interest lobby groups by airing radio ads to rally public opinion against the pedestrian-and-cycling strategy, which council will vote on Wednesday. The radio ads claim, "Mayor and council are rushing through a long-term plan to spend $300 million on commuter cycling infrastructure."

As with all political sound bites, the targeted message often requires context to be fully understood.

In 2011, council approved the transportation master plan. This document outlines a series of principles intended to guide the development of Winnipeg's transportation infrastructure in the next 20 years. The plan identifies spending of more than $5 billion on a number of projects that include new streets, ring roads, bridges, underpasses and rapid-transit lines.

A companion study called for in the plan was initiated under former mayor Sam Katz in 2013 to provide greater detail to the pedestrian and cycling components, resulting in the comprehensive 350-page document heading to council this week.

Even if requirements have been met by developers, local opposition can scuttle plans

'I support development, just not THIS development'

'People are going to park on my street!'

'My property values are going to plummet!'

'The traffic isn't safe for my children!'

Plan would redefine downtown

Most mid-sized North American cities have struggled to maintain a healthy downtown retail market. Winnipeg is no different. Shops that once lined Portage Avenue have been replaced by government offices and for lease signs. Longtime anchors such as Eaton's and Holt Renfrew are now only a memory and The Bay is withering away like a fruit clinging to a branch in late autumn.

The city's sprawling suburbs are served by big-box stores floating in oceans of asphalt parking.

The shape of the city has changed and so have our shopping habits. In the late 1980s, Portage Place mall was constructed as a last-ditch effort to out suburb the suburbs, but it has struggled almost since the day it opened.

Even with downtown's large surface parking lots and 35,000 stalls, it is unlikely there will ever be enough parking to compete with the convenience of suburban shopping. Portage Place has demonstrated that even connected to a large, heated parkade, downtown retail struggles as a commuter destination. The perception remains, however, that urban restaurants, services and retailers must cater to drive-up customers to be successful.

Bigger roads mean more traffic

‘THAT money could be better spent fixing our city’s crumbling roads.”

This familiar sentiment is often heard following any new spending announcement that comes out of Winnipeg city hall.

From downtown development grants and rapid transit to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Esplanade Riel, the value of many projects is publicly weighed against the number of potholes the investment could have otherwise filled.

Ironically, the only spending generally not criticized for diverting money from road maintenance budgets are those announcing the construction of new roads that will eventually add to the volume of infrastructure needing to be maintained.

Wood expands possibilities

Prosperous residents make prosperous cities. With housing costs typically constituting the largest portion of personal expenditures, housing affordability has become a principal determinant of the standard of living in urban areas. Access to adequate housing plays an important role in building strong communities and is a vital social indicator of health, equality and inclusion.

Consistently rising real estate values during the last decade have made access to affordable housing a difficult challenge for cities across Canada. In Winnipeg, since 2005 the average cost of a home has increased by 100 per cent and rental rates have grown by 70 per cent, while the average annual income has increased by only 34 per cent.

One strategy provincial governments are looking at to help bridge this financial gap is reducing construction costs for multi-family housing by revising provincial building codes to allow an expanded use of less expensive wood-frame construction. Currently in Manitoba, buildings made of wood are restricted to a height of four storeys. In 2009, a strong lumber industry pushed the British Columbia government to increase the allowable limit to six storeys, resulting in more than 250 of these structures now being built or nearing completion. Since that time, Ontario and Quebec have followed suit, and last week, the Alberta legislature passed a private member's bill to do the same.

Cities in these provinces see this move as an opportunity to improve access to quality housing options for citizens while at the same time increasing neighbourhood densities to create a more sustainable overall urban form.

Beyond big-box: Transition away from mega-stores bodes well for urban landscape

When Disneyland opened its doors in 1955, visitors experienced for the first time a stroll down Main Street U.S.A., Walt Disney's nostalgic interpretation of the central pedestrian shopping strip most North American cities and towns had grown up around.

Winnipeg's example of this high street was Portage Avenue, stretching through downtown from its famous intersection at Main Street. Anchored by Eaton's, the 10th-largest department store in the world, the avenue's shops, theatres and restaurants made it the social, retail and cultural heart of the city for more than a century.

As postwar North American cities began to expand outward with sprawling, low-density suburbs, retail development responded to this new, auto-centric lifestyle by moving away from main street into enclosed suburban shopping malls, set within large, asphalt parking lots. In 1959, Polo Park opened in Winnipeg, and the first shot was fired in the long war against downtown shopping.

The mall would reign as the king of retail for a generation, but the seeds of what would come next were planted in 1962 when the first large, suburban discount Walmart, Target and K-Mart stores opened in the United States. Decades later, retail culture would shift away from the enclosed mall and move toward big-box stores and retail power centres, a trend that is reshaping the modern North American city.

Racial peace through architecture

The Maclean's article -- three words that when spoken anywhere in Winnipeg over the past few weeks would invariably spark a passionate and polarizing conversation. It is not often that a national periodical publishes such a charged condemnation of an entire city, but shining a spotlight on Winnipeg's racial divide has created an opportunity to further an already pervasive dialogue about our city's most complex challenge.

More indigenous people live in Winnipeg than in any other Canadian metropolitan area, representing the city's youngest and fastest-growing community. As a proportion, Métis and First Nations people have gone from constituting 2.9 per cent of the city's overall population in 1981 to more than 13 per cent today.

As such, the prosperity of the indigenous community has become indivisible from that of Winnipeg's success as a whole.

Much of the discussion following the Maclean's article has addressed the need to weave together Winnipeg's torn communal fabric. In order to realize long-term prosperity within the indigenous community, enabling greater social and cultural inclusion is imperative. The opportunity exists for Winnipeg to become a leader in this pursuit by exploring new ways of injecting our city's architecture and urban design with indigenous values that allow aboriginal people to see themselves in the spaces and places we inhabit.

From why Winterpeg to why not?

It is mid-January, and through hard crusts of frozen breath on their tightly wrapped scarves, Winnipeggers across the city can be heard muttering to themselves "Why do I live here?"

Winnipeg doesn't have many things that can truly be described as world-class, but winter is certainly one of them. For a major city (with a population over 500,000) our January average temperatures are the fourth-coldest on Earth, rivalling cities in Siberia, Mongolia and northern China.

In response, over the last 40 years, we have worked to build a city that turns its back on winter. We defend ourselves from it like it's an enemy invader. Our climate-controlled networks sever us from the outside. Portage Avenue was for a century a bustling 12-month, outdoor shopping strip, the retail heart of the city. Then we decided to move to indoor malls, and today we zig-zag in our cars across massive parking lots from one big-box store to the next. We pushed people at our landmark intersection underground, and our sidewalks were emptied by skywalks. The default reaction to everything from segregated bike lanes to active pedestrian sidewalks and great public spaces seems to always be "It's too cold to do that in Winnipeg."

We have all heard someone from outside the province call our city Winterpeg and laugh a derogatory giggle. Imagine if we could transform that word into a badge of honour. It is difficult for a city to reach its full potential as a smart, vibrant, livable place with a resigned attitude we must endure the winter months. If Winnipeg is to be globally competitive, attracting investment, tourism and immigration, we can't simply accept a lower quality of life for half the year. Winter is part of who we are, it defines us. It can be an asset, if we make it one.

Energy efficiency not cheap

Every young intern architect in the country has been through the experience of having their eyes glaze over when first trying to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle known as the National Building Code of Canada. For those in Manitoba, that challenge just became much more difficult.

This month, the province became one of the first in Canada to adopt the National Energy Code for Buildings. The target of these new regulations is to increase the average energy efficiency of new construction by 25 per cent and to reduce levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 450,000 tonnes, equivalent to removing 90,000 vehicles from Manitoba's roads during the next 20 years.

Until now, environmental sustainability has largely been a voluntary initiative, championed by idealistic designers and building owners. Adopting the energy code is a first step to establishing the principles of green building design as mandatory construction requirements. The new code sets a baseline for building energy performance and outlines three methods designers can use to comply.

The first route is called the Prescriptive Path, which provides a checklist of stringent demands that must be met. These include such things as increased insulation values and restrictions on window areas to a maximum of 29 per cent of overall exterior walls. The second method, called the Tradeoff Path, allows designers to substitute higher-performing features to reduce the energy-efficiency requirements of others. As an example, to allow a wall to be more than 29 per cent glass, the increase in area can be traded for a more efficient heating system, as long as the baseline energy levels are still met. The third method of compliance is the most flexible, but also the most complex. Called the Performance Path, designs must demonstrate overall energy efficiency by using detailed computer-model simulations that track hourly performance.

Campuses return to core

Weighed down by book-filled backpacks, groups of young people brave the autumn cold as they race between monumental stone buildings set geometrically around a sprawling open lawn. This pastoral scene is the traditional image of a university campus, but today, post-secondary institutions across Canada are creating a new backdrop for student life by returning to the bustling streets and soaring office towers in the cores of cities.

In an age of globalization and mobility, universities increasingly have to compete nationally and internationally for students. Young people today are more often looking for cosmopolitan lifestyle choices and are beginning to focus on educational programming that will make them career- or enterprise-ready upon graduation.

In response to these evolving priorities, universities and colleges are looking to differentiate themselves from their competition by exploring avenues to commercialize education and pollinate research disciplines. Following business, art and technology back to the urban core can enhance collaborative partnerships and identify synergies within local clusters of creativity and innovation.

Connecting students to regional industry promotes the establishment of personal professional networks, which also supports greater retention after graduation.

A new urban agenda

Two weeks ago, Winnipeggers made an emphatic statement that it is time to move in a new direction. On Election Day, voters rewarded mayoral candidates who were not afraid to dream. They overwhelmingly supported those with urban-focused priorities, moving past the traditional debates of potholes, photo radar and synchronizing traffic lights, to engage with ideas that described a broader vision for the city.

The biggest surprise of the day was the performance of Brian Bowman and Robert-Falcon Ouellette. Both men came into the campaign with low name recognition and little public support. In the end, each captured the attention of voters by presenting big-picture visions for the city. They had many differing ideas, but the underlying commonality in their platforms was a commitment to an openly urbanist agenda.

As mayor, Brian Bowman joins Edmonton's Don Iveson and Calgary's Naheed Nenshi as young, telegenic leaders of Western Canadian cities in need of reinventing their urban-growth policy. Like his western counterparts, Bowman is now the mayor of a city facing the consequences of decades of sprawling, low-density growth, including crumbling infrastructure, reduced civic services, budget deficits and higher taxes.

Several of his campaign announcements were initiatives to build a more sustainable city form, many focusing on the promotion of a walkable and liveable downtown core.

How to fall in love with our city

Winnipeg's population is increasing only because of immigration. Its downtown is expanding largely because of public subsidies. Crime rates in the city remain high and social inequity is growing. Roads are crumbling, civic services are declining and taxes are rising in an attempt to keep up with the low-density, sprawling city we have decided to build. The people chosen in Winnipeg's upcoming municipal election will have a number of significant challenges ahead.

The difficult solution to many of the city's issues is to increase opportunity and prosperity for its citizens, improving their quality of life, growing the economy and civic revenue.

In business, the greatest success is rarely the result of following trends. Wealth comes from being ahead of the curve, predicting and investing in what's coming next. A city is no different. Prosperity, particularly in this age of unparalleled mobility, can only be achieved by building a city that inspires and attracts the next generation.

CMHR’s future is up to us all

It has been 4,549 days since the Winnipeg Free Press first announced media mogul Israel Asper had been secretly championing an idea to construct a national museum at The Forks, in the centre of the city. Children born on that day are now in Grade 8. This weekend, finally, the world will be given the opportunity to step through the museum's doors and into Mr. Asper's imagination.

When the concept of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was unveiled, it seemed to be an impossible dream. The average house price in Winnipeg was $98,000. The city had 80,000 fewer residents. There was no new airport, Manitoba Hydro tower or Investors Group Field. Our hockey team was a minor-league franchise playing in a 50-year-old arena. We were not used to big things yet.

The museum has travelled a long and difficult path to get to the eve of its opening. For almost six years, we have watched it grow from a gravel parking lot into a towering mountain of glass and stone. Its protracted construction time and ballooning budget have drained much of its public goodwill and given everyone in the city opportunity to formulate an opinion. Its glass tower has seemingly become a metaphorical lightning rod of negative energy.

Debate over the value of public investment in our cultural amenities is a vital discussion to maintaining a healthy community, whether it's subsidizing professional hockey, building a new football stadium or investing in museums. Through this debate, the CMHR has been supported by elected representatives from all stripes, from the federal Liberals and Conservatives to the provincial NDP. The museum's realization is a result of similar levels of government support that all national museums in Ottawa have received, but what sets the CMHR apart is the more than 8,000 private donors who have given a staggering $147 million of their own money in support of the idea.

Many of city’s well-known buildings designed by New York architects

REFERRING to Winnipeg as the ‘Chicago of the North’ is like comparing the city to a famous child actor who, after his television show was cancelled, spent the rest of his life reminiscing about his time in the spotlight.

Focusing on this Chicago comparison not only discredits the diversity of what Winnipeg is today, it dilutes what the city was during the booming, turn-of-the-century rail-town days that inspired its nickname.

Several entrepreneurs of that time looked for inspiration beyond America’s Second City. Like buying a Cézanne or Van Gogh to legitimize their art collection, many of the power brokers in Winnipeg turned to the big-name architects of New York City for the design of their buildings. This oftenoverlooked connection produced some of the most familiar and iconic structures in the city and has left a significant legacy on the physical character of Winnipeg to this day.

The most prominent architectural firm in the United States at the end of the 1800s was New York-based McKim Mead and White. It was an influential contributor at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, at which an ideal prototype city was built with broad avenues lined by fantastical buildings replicating the styles of ancient Greece and Rome. The success of the exposition popularized the colonnades and archways of classical architecture for a brief time across America.

Grand vision for Union Station

In 1908, the headlines of the Manitoba Free Press boldly proclaimed Winnipeg's new train depot, to be constructed at the foot of Broadway, would be "the most modern railway terminal in the world."

It described the building as magnificent in proportions and luxurious in its appointments, the finest in the Dominion. American architects Warren and Wetmore, who were simultaneously designing Grand Central Station in New York, would go on to create a building that stood as the gateway to the Canadian West, a symbol of prosperity and optimism in the young city.

More than a century later, Union Station, now owned by Via Rail Canada, welcomes fewer than 25,000 passengers each year. Gone is the bustle of the surrounding neighbourhood, its stately beaux arts limestone facade is today surrounded by parking lots along a decaying stretch of a once-proud Main Street.

Recently, the promise of change has begun to appear in the area surrounding the old depot. The imminent opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has triggered The Forks to move forward with development planning of the land on the other side of the rail line.

More than the museum

Nearly 20 years ago, the swirling titanium panels of a new Guggenheim Museum transformed a blue-collar city named Bilbao, Spain into a flourishing centre of culture and design. This inspired cities across the globe to build ever-more sensational public buildings, hoping to recreate the elusive "Bilbao Effect."

As Winnipeg prepares to open its own iconic museum, the lesson that can be learned from the experience of these cities is translating a building like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights into a broader development catalyst, requires a focused effort to build complementary projects that expand the museum's influence beyond its walls.

The opportunity for this development in Winnipeg begins with the massive parking lots that sit directly across from the museum at The Forks. Last week, a conceptual master plan for the five-hectare site along the raised rail line was made public, quickly receiving approval by the standing policy committee on downtown development.

Leading up to the submission of the report, The Forks Renewal Corporation undertook a public consultation process through workshops, interviews and online engagement, to distill a guiding vision for the design. The overall findings outlined a general desire to enhance the current experience at The Forks and improve its economic viability by strengthening connections to downtown, creating public green space, active commercial storefronts and cultural amenities.

Let’s make River City a reality

Winnipeg is sometimes referred to as River City. Despite owing its very existence to the conflux of two waterways and having four distinct rivers flowing through its boundaries, the reality is Winnipeg is anything but a true river city.

For more than a century, we have turned our back on the rivers. Travel down the Red or Assiniboine by boat and it is striking how rarely they are engaged by development. From the water it appears almost as though the city doesn't exist. Only downtown office towers that peak over the grand elm trees hint at its urban location. In Winnipeg, rivers are often crossed but they are rarely approached.

The lazy Prairie rivers that meander through the city appear benign at first glance, but their hidden power is revealed with water levels that rise as much as seven metres. These dramatic fluctuations have made it difficult to consistently develop the waterfront, resulting in a city that faces away from its rivers.

Over the last 15 years water levels in the city have become increasingly inconsistent. The Assiniboine Riverwalk, built at a level that historically would rarely be submerged after the spring flood, is today more than two metres under water, a common summer condition. Recreational boating on the rivers has declined sharply, public docks and yacht clubs have vanished, water taxis that once carried 50,000 people per summer are not operating and the iconic paddlewheel cruises that ran for 45 years are now gone, unable to survive the unpredictability of a fluctuating river.

Winnipeg: City of architectural delights

In the few decades leading up to the year 1914, Winnipeg transformed itself from an isolated trading post to a brash, cosmopolitan metropolis.

When a new train station needed to be built, the architects of New York's Grand Central were hired. When the Union Bank needed a new building at the bend in Main Street, they constructed Canada's first skyscraper, the tallest in the Dominion. Some of the finest architects in the country designed elegant banking halls, majestic terra cotta towers and grand theatre houses such as the Met, Capitol, Walker and Pantages.

Although the start of the First World War would signal the beginning of the end for this golden era of design, two events of the time would set the foundation of the city's architecture in the future. The University of Manitoba had just opened the first school of architecture west of Toronto, and the profession became organized under the regulatory umbrella of the Manitoba Association of Architects.

One hundred years removed from those formative events, the creative confidence of that pioneer era has begun to return to Winnipeg. Something special is once again happening with the city's architecture, and the world is beginning to take notice. Most people in our city don't know it, but in the international architecture community, Winnipeg has become cool.

How to fill potholes

The people of Winnipeg have become a tired and irritable bunch. They have endured the worst winter since the invention of the automobile and now are living through what might be the worst spring for potholes since they started making roads for those vehicles.

It's understandable then, that as city council was presented with the details of a $590-million plan to complete the city's first leg of rapid transit, the public, politicians and media all wondered aloud if the money would be better spent filling that proliferation of potholes.

As we yet again get dragged into the quagmire of a 60-year-old rapid-transit debate, every Canadian city Winnipeg competes with for investment, immigration and tourism has been lining up to announce their long-term commitment to rapid-transit development. Vancouver is currently constructing a $1.4-billion expansion to its Skytrain system, Calgary and Edmonton have announced billion-dollar additions to their existing networks, Ottawa will be investing $3 billion over the next 10 years and Hamilton and Kitchener are both building new light-rail systems.

Most of these cities face the same infrastructure challenges as Winnipeg, but their leadership believes the solution is not a choice between conflicting priorities of transit spending and road repair. Rapid transit is seen as a complementary strategy that addresses the root causes of infrastructure deficits, helping to make road-maintenance budgets more sustainable, in part by reducing private vehicle use and in turn road wear and capacity demands.

WAG’s neighbour from the North

The powerful forms of Inuit art, a dancing soapstone bear, a majestic ivory narwhal or an etching of a snowy owl, shape the symbolic imagery of Canada's northern indigenous people. The distinctive works that have come to represent this ancient culture are, surprisingly, a modern form of artistic expression.

The idea of establishing a self-sufficient handicrafts industry across the Arctic was promoted in the early 1950s by the federal government as a means of providing economic opportunity in northern communities.

As the program grew, a rich artistic movement began to flourish, driven by a provocative esthetic imbued with 1,000 years of custom and ritual. Lives spent observing the form and movement of Arctic animals and understanding the intimate nuances of an overpowering landscape provided a depth and gravity to the artistic expression. Rich storytelling traditions combined with a craftsmanship refined through generations of constructing delicate kayak frames and carving intricate objects such as snow knives and harpoons, translated into skill and imagination that made artistic carving a natural extension of Inuit culture and tradition.

Former Winnipeg Art Gallery director Ferdinand Eckhardt was an early proponent of the movement, making the WAG one of the nation's first galleries to display the new art form in 1953. In 1964, he organized Canada's first significant exhibition of Inuit sculpture, the beginning of a relationship that would establish the gallery as a global leader in the study and presentation of Inuit artwork. With over 13,000 pieces, the WAG is today home to the largest and most important public collection of Inuit art in the world.

Leadership makes wheels turn

Winnipeg played host last week to the second International Winter Cycling Congress. Nearly 200 delegates from across North America gathered to discuss the challenges of urban winter cycling and celebrate the benefits it can have for northern cities.

The health and quality-of-life-benefits cycling as urban transportation can bring to the citizens of a city are obvious. Numerous studies show commuters who cycle are generally healthier; they feel less stress, sleep better and have more energy. Physically active employees often show improved productivity, reduced absenteeism and turnover.

Beyond improving the well-being of its citizens, many cities that struggle to keep up with infrastructure deficits are beginning to understand the positive role investment in active transportation can have in building a sustainable city.

As we construct sprawling suburbs, greater commuting distances increase vehicle time on the road, which, in turn, increases congestion levels. The response is often to build new roads or expand existing ones to accommodate higher traffic volumes at peak times.

Embracing density

It has been a difficult time for Winnipeg's infrastructure. Our water periodically looks, but certainly doesn't taste, like a fine Canadian whisky. A combination of the polar vortex and daily water-main breaks has entombed cars from Charleswood to Transcona in knee-deep ice. Recent snow-clearing efforts left most of us wanting to trade in our car for a late-model Mars Rover, and of course in the not-too-distant future, the annual pothole invasion will begin.

The rising cost of maintaining this infrastructure and other civic services have left the City of Winnipeg scrambling to balance its budget, resulting in a third straight property-tax hike for 2014. This increase will be accompanied by a rise in sewer and water rates and likely, education taxes. A few months ago, a KPMG report recommended a 'winter surcharge' be added to property taxes in years when snow-removal costs exceed the city budget.

These reactionary solutions to infrastructure deficits leave governments trying to catch up by spending greater amounts of money fixing problems, without addressing their root cause. Over the last 50 years, Canadians have built sprawling, car-oriented cities that have resulted in a sharp reduction in population density. This has left civic governments responsible for a larger stock of infrastructure with fewer taxpayers to pay for its construction and long-term maintenance.

Since 1970, Winnipeg has grown in population by 33 per cent, yet its area has increased by almost 80 per cent. The populations of mature neighbourhoods such as Wolseley, River Heights and Riverview have also declined by 20 to 30 per cent in that time. Even Osborne Village, the city's most urban neighbourhood, is 10 per cent less populated than it was four decades ago. This decrease in density means each taxpayer has become responsible for a greater share of infrastructure and city services, stretching tax dollars beyond their limits.

Prime plan for a pumphouse

Imagine a Winnipeg that could build the Union Bank Tower, Canada's first skyscraper, the nation's tallest building, crowned with the British Commonwealth's highest flagpole. Imagine a Winnipeg that could have more construction in a single year than Toronto and Montreal combined. The Winnipeg of 1904 optimistically pushed skyward with every new building, marking its place on the world stage with its towers, just as developing cities such as Dubai and Shanghai do today.

At the heart of Winnipeg's rampant vertical growth was the security of the most sophisticated high-pressure fire-protection system in the world. At full production, 35,000 litres of Red River water could be pushed through a 13-kilometre network of pipes, powered by six massive engines housed in the James Avenue Pumping Station.

Since being decommissioned in 1986, the hulking machinery in the pumping station has been silent, its windows boarded up, its roof and walls decaying. Over the past quarter-century, proposals to transform the building into a brew pub, a restaurant, condominiums, a gallery, a museum and office space have all come and gone. Each time, the cost of converting a century-old industrial building into suitable public space has made the business case for redevelopment unworkable.

Realizing time had become an enemy for this charming old neighbour, a local group of engineers, architects, builders, developers and heritage advocates came together in late 2012 with the goal of finding a final solution that would preserve the pumping station from demolition, celebrate its unique industrial character and transform it into the social heart of its burgeoning urban neighbourhood.

Window to the past, and future

Winnipeg in the 1890s was a bustling city of 30,000 people. Horse-drawn carriages dodged new electric trolley cars as pedestrians click-clacked along oak-plank boardwalks lining the sides of wide, mud-packed streets.

In residential areas, the tradition of planting boulevard trees was initiated to beautify the featureless prairie city. Many of the 12,000 elm trees planted in that first decade were located in the Hudson's Bay Company Reserve, a parcel of land surrounding Upper Fort Garry, retained by HBC as payment for surrendering Rupert's Land in 1870.

Schools and churches were built across the reserve to lure residential development and Broadway, the area's main thoroughfare, was lined with nearly 900 elm trees. These efforts proved successful in transforming the barren land into the city's first distinguishable neighbourhood, home to Winnipeg's wealthiest and most prominent citizens.

One such citizen was Sir Hugh John Macdonald, who would build his Victorian mansion in 1895 on Carlton Street, lined with 324 of those new elm trees. The son of Canada's first prime minister, Macdonald came to Winnipeg to open a law practice with Stewart Tupper, the son of Canada's sixth prime minister.

Think like big-city neighbours

Over the past few weeks, Winnipeg newspapers have been filled with scandalous stories of government mismanagement and partisanship that has paralyzed city hall in a quagmire of resignation, accusation and recrimination.

As the citizens of Winnipeg focused on the dysfunction of their city's municipal leadership, voters in Alberta's two largest cities went to the polls to elect what has been dubbed Canada's dynamic duo of civic politics. In Edmonton, former city councillor Don Iveson, 34, received nearly two-thirds of the vote to become Canada's youngest big-city mayor. Calgary's wildly popular incumbent mayor, Naheed Nenshi, 41, swept back into power with support from almost three-quarters of voters.

A Google search of each young leader reveals a long list of adjectives of which any politician would be envious. Headlines are peppered with words like progressive, forward-thinking, dynamic and bold. These types of descriptions are not generally attached to civic leaders who pledge to build their cities using the sprawling, suburban model of the last 50 years. Progressive mayors are typically urban-focused with a long-term vision for a fiscally, socially and environmentally sustainable city.

Both Alberta mayors captured the imagination of their young electorate by running on strong urbanist platforms that emphasized the importance of building cities that are networks of sustainable, walkable, livable and lovable complete communities. Nenshi in Calgary dubbed his urban philosophy 'the three Ds of great cities'--density, diversity and a sense of discovery.

Downtown development will exemplify quality design

‘IT is fatal to specialize... the more diverse we are in what we do, the better.’ — Jane Jacobs

In 1961 Jane Jacobs wrote her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It would redefine our understanding of what makes urban areas vibrant, prosperous and safe. Jacobs likened the city to a living organism, where physical elements such as buildings, parks and sidewalks worked in harmony with social and economic conditions to create a spontaneous blend of what she called "organized complexity." She emphasized the importance of buildings that interact with their surroundings and engage pedestrians along the sidewalk, insisting even large buildings be attractive, welcoming and offer a visually rich experience at the human scale.

Jacobs questioned the effectiveness of single-use neighbourhoods such as entertainment or office districts, instead advocating for a diversity of building types and uses. She argued that a variation of buildings, large and small, new and old, commercial and residential attracts a range of people with different lifestyles and daily routines that populate the city at different times, increasing commercial activity and improving urban safety.

In the past, these diverse neighbourhoods evolved organically over time. The challenge for modern urban renewal is to create space that inspires an instant emotional connection with the community. New buildings that are multi-use and designed to reflect local tradition and character, while connecting to their surroundings on a human level, have the greatest opportunity to become successful contributors to a vibrant neighbourhood.

Let Portage and Main breathe

At 10 o'clock this morning, there will be precisely 2,000 days left until the intersection of Portage and Main, Winnipeg's famous windy corner, can legally be opened once again to pedestrians. Whether it will open or not remains to be seen.

The story is well-known by now. With the construction of the Trizec building in the late 1970s, an underground connection was made to each of the intersection's four corners. In an effort to force people into the shops that lined the concourse, a 40-year agreement was signed with the six adjacent property owners that read, "The city agrees that it will not consent to any construction of a pedestrian crossing over or under any street" (at Portage and Main). Concrete barricades adorned with colourful flowers were installed and the intersection was sealed off to a generation of people.

Last month, the Canadian Institute of Planners nominated Winnipeg's windswept corner one of the "Great Places in Canada." The improbable announcement touched off a public discussion about the future of the intersection, with bloggers, television, radio and newspaper outlets all debating the subject.

Those who favoured the barricades argued pedestrians would be unsafe crossing with the high number of cars that pass through the intersection, yet traffic volumes are similar at Broadway and Main or Portage and Memorial, and pedestrians cross those intersections without incident every day.

Let’s have designs on our city

Winnipeggers have traditionally had an off and on relationship with the architecture of their city. At the beginning of the last century we built with the optimism of a young metropolis destined to become the Paris of the Prairies. We raised the tallest building in the country and the finest marble and terra-cotta banking halls on the continent stood as a symbol of our promise. Winnipeg was animated with finely manicured parks, bustling sidewalks and busy urban plazas. Its citizens held a deeply rooted connection to their built environment. They had big-city solutions for big-city dreams.

In the decades ending that century, we became indifferent to the built quality of our city. Buildings were no longer constructed with the same permanence. The suburbs exploded, our parks fell into disrepair, the city centre was deserted and urban planning became an exercise in traffic management. We even gave our most famous intersection a makeover with all the charm of a freeway exit ramp.

Today, things appear to be changing. With several world-renowned architects putting their signature on our city and local firms winning prestigious awards for their creative work, Winnipeggers seem to be taking notice and are slowly engaging in a dialogue about the issues of design in our built environment. Recent public outcry over a proposed hotel and waterpark across from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights served as an example of this newfound engagement.

To further stimulate this conversation, a number of grassroots organizations have emerged, working together to incubate a culture of design in Winnipeg and heighten appreciation for the city's urban landscape within the broader community.

Long-term planning crucial

Winnipeg's population is nearing 800,000 and is growing by more than 10,000 per year. Property values are rising, construction is happening and the economy is prospering. We have an IKEA, a professional hockey team and a half-dozen new towers rising in our skyline.

Winnipeg is without question a progressing city -- but is it a progressive one?

After decades of stagnation, Winnipeg is beginning to face the challenges that come with more rapid urban growth. The suburbs are sprawling in every direction, traffic levels are increasing and established neighbourhoods are being redeveloped. The city is evolving and we are at the point of having to ask ourselves: What kind of community do we want Winnipeg to become?

Old Winnipeg was a special place, filled with dense, tree-lined, walkable neighbourhoods of grid-pattern streets, community clubs and corner stores. Will new Winnipeg have the same character and soul, or will we look back on this growth period as a lost opportunity to progressively shape our future city? Will we have the same pride and foresight as those who planted our characteristic tree canopy a century ago, or will we leave a legacy of ubiquitous suburbs, unmanageable civic finances and crumbling infrastructure?

Downtown’s parking facilities tell story of city’s development

The Archives of Manitoba are filled with photos of buildings, but there are none of parking lots. Urbanites hate them. Mayors and premiers campaign against them. Parking lots are a maligned group.

It is easy to love a building, to find beauty and meaning in stone columns and arched windows, but nobody ever considers the story of a parking lot or wonders what ghosts might linger on their asphalt surfaces.carl

Winnipeg's parking lots define the downtown as much as the towers rising at its core. The neighbourhood between Portage Avenue and Broadway is a particularly fractured urban landscape. Ever wonder why?

The story of how that area became home to so much surface parking is a journey that began 143 years ago when the Hudson's Bay Co. surrendered Rupert's Land to Canada. In the transfer, the company maintained ownership of Upper Fort Garry and 500 acres of adjacent land. This reserve was unsettled prairie in an area defined today by the two rivers, Portage and Main to the north and Memorial Boulevard to the west.

A vibrant vision for Chinatown

On a late November evening in 1877, the distinctive clip-clop, clip-clop of horses' hooves would pierce through Winnipeg's cold autumn air. The setting sun outlined the silhouette of an overloaded stagecoach staggering along the sharp prairie horizon. Curious onlookers were drawn by the moan of rigid wheels struggling to navigate the city's dusty Main Street. Unfamiliar sounds of foreign voices came from within the American caravan transporting the first three Chinese settlers to the isolated town of 6,500 people.

Charley Yam, the leader of the three, would soon open the city's first Chinese laundry on Post Office Street (now Lombard Avenue). Three months later, demanding better living conditions, his employees would stage an armed revolt. The 'Chinese War' would captivate readers of the Manitoba Free Press, which announced the end of the week-long standoff with the simple message, "Two Chinese laundries are now in operation in this city." Six more would open over the next eight years.

In 1905, the Quong Chong Tai Company opened a grocery at 249 King St., forming the genesis of Winnipeg's Chinatown. In the next year, another grocery and four laundries would open and by 1909 the neighbourhood would take on a distinctive exotic flavour.

Facing significant linguistic and cultural barriers, economic hardship and racial discrimination, early Chinese settlers would band together by isolating themselves on inexpensive land at the fringes of city centres across the country. In search of security, social networks and community support, this voluntary residential segregation would result in the birth of Chinatowns in many Canadian cities.

Landscape of professionalism

There is nothing more frustrating than flying into a new city while sitting in the middle seat of an airplane. You stretch to see over the person beside you who's pressed up against the small round window. You strain to catch a glimpse of the city passing below you, trying to formulate that first impression of the place you are about to experience.

We often seem to rate the urban quality of North American cities in this way, as if we are 1,000 feet in the air. The size of its freeways or the height of its skyline resonate as symbols of civic affluence and vibrancy.

The true health of a city, however, must be judged from its sidewalks. Its urban quality can't be measured from the height of its towers. It can only be found in the spaces between those buildings. The human experience is not defined by how buildings engage the sky, but how they engage the ground, how they define public space, how they facilitate a social connection between the people in and around them.

The quality of these spaces is what makes a city livable and prosperous. Active parks, sidewalks, plazas and courtyards work together as an integrated network of open space that can attract people to live, work and invest in a city. When done well, they can be a catalyst for growth and development. When done poorly, they can enable crime and promote urban decay.

Kapyong Barracks site can become an inspired, modern neighbourhood

Winnipeg doesn't have Vancouver's majestic seawall or Calgary's mountain backdrop. It doesn't have a Maritime harbour or a hulking, big-city skyline.

Winnipeg is flat and remote and often way too cold.

In a city like ours, not blessed with any natural advantages, it is vital to nurture the qualities that make Winnipeg unique and work to enhance development that has already been done successfully. Too often, we fail to recognize and build from our strengths while allowing our successes to be eroded through short-sighted development.

An important example is the Exchange District, a neighbourhood that defines Winnipeg's urban character and is one of the most important turn-of-the-century commercial areas in North America. It has been passed down to us through an anomaly of good fortune, but instead of cherishing and protecting this valuable urban asset, the area routinely finds a place on Heritage Canada's Top 10 Endangered Places List. It continues to lose buildings such as the Shanghai Restaurant, the Grain Exchange Annex and many others to make way for parking or empty lots. This is slowly eroding the area's cohesive character, reducing its allure as a catalyst for growth.

It’s our Winnipeg, for art’s sake

Ask any Winnipegger what their favourite piece of public art is and the response will likely be a confused look and the question, "Winnipeg has public art?"

Ours is an artistic community. With only two per cent of Canada's population, we have 12 per cent of its musicians. We have the country's oldest civic art gallery, French-language theatre, English regional theatre and dance company. We are home to a renowned symphony and numerous artistic festivals. Despite this creative heritage, we have fallen behind other major Canadian cities in our funding for and implementation of great public art.

North American cities today are turning to public art as a means of defining and enhancing urban identity and character. The visual appeal of a community can play a significant role in cultivating civic pride and emotional attachment from the people who live in them. It is human character to seek out physical beauty in the things that surround us and in the places we live. Public art that is authentic, stimulating and visually appealing can contribute to this sense of public well-being. Although not plentiful, Winnipeg does have some inspiring examples of urban art that illustrate the benefits of this type of economic investment in our communities.

Effective public art can help to articulate a shared sense of place and belonging within a city or neighbourhood. It can celebrate cultural diversity and unite social groups, expressing the history, traditions and identities unique to that community.

What’s rotten in Denmark?

Winnipeg is a garbage city.

We send more of it to the landfill than any other municipality in Canada, generating 750,000 tonnes of waste each year. This is equal to the weight of nearly 200,000 full grown African elephants, representing more than 1,000 kilograms from each citizen. Even with a blue box in every home, we divert only 17 per cent of our waste from the landfill, the lowest recycling rate in the country and one-third of what cities like Vancouver and Toronto accomplish. That's a lot of elephants.

The most recent topic for discussion in Winnipeg's coffee shops and hockey rinks has been the city's less-than-seamless transition to an automated garbage and recycling collection system.

As we wait for the wrinkles to be ironed out, it's important to remember the new garbage bins are a fundamental first step in a comprehensive new master plan that will help improve our city's dismal waste-management statistics. The goal is to double recycling rates to 35 per cent in five years and to achieve 50 per cent by the year 2020.

Putting a little green up above

Do you ever wake up in the morning, turn on the weather channel and notice the temperatures shown at The Forks are often several degrees warmer than those at the airport?

You wouldn't think an area's climate would change over six kilometres, but it turns out that annually, the average overnight low at The Forks is -0.7 C while at the airport it is almost three degrees colder at -3.4 C. On sunny summer days, the temperature variation between the downtown and the outskirts of the city can reach six or seven degrees Celsius.

The answer to this puzzle is something called the 'urban heat island effect.' As the name suggests, cities are literally islands of heat. A Google Earth view of downtown shows a landscape of black roofs, asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks. These impervious materials absorb and store the sun's energy, releasing it back into the air as heat. Natural landscapes of soil and vegetation trap moisture and use the sun's energy for evaporation, releasing water vapour that cools the air.

For much of the year, heat islands can negatively impact human comfort in the city. This can affect urban vibrancy, commercial activity, public health and air quality while increasing direct energy costs for building owners.

Copenhagen shows bicycles can improve cities and their citizens

2Home to inspiring modern architecture, set within a dense and vibrant urban context, the most significant impression any visitor has of the Scandinavian capital is an overwhelming presence of bicycles.

In Copenhagen, 37 per cent of the population ride their bikes to work every day. With a vast, integrated system of separated lanes and dedicated lights, rush-hour traffic can often be heavier for cyclists than motorists. The system is so safe only 15 per cent of Danes choose to wear a helmet.

During a recent architectural pilgrimage to the Nordic city, I was lucky enough to visit prominent Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl. Having written several influential books on the design of livable cities, he has been instrumental in establishing Copenhagen's bike culture. In our discussion, Gehl lamented the lack of cycling infrastructure in most Canadian cities and cited the significant social and economic benefits it can have. He referred to a study commissioned by the mayor of Copenhagen indicating that when taking all factors into account, every kilometre ridden on a bike saves Danish society 25 cents and every kilometre travelled by car costs them 16 cents.

In Winnipeg, the first steps toward implementation of an active transportation network have largely been focused on encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, but expanding on Gehl's business case for an urban cycling infrastructure might be a valuable strategy to galvanize government and public support for its continued development.

Rail yard redevelopment would bring density, investment and revenue

First we need to fix the roads, replace the sewers, fill the potholes. Our property taxes are too high already. We can't afford it. It would cost too much. There are bigger priorities for Winnipeg.

Sentiments like these have generally followed recent public discussion over the potential relocation and redevelopment of the Canadian Pacific Railway yards northwest of the downtown. Instigated by a request to government (by the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg) for a feasibility study, the public debate has met with significant skepticism over the value of what seems to be an unachievable goal, considering the apparent costs and current economic pressures on local government.

It appears to be linear thinking to conclude we cannot afford such a grand dream. If we don't have the money, how can we spend it?

However, stepping back and re-evaluating the root cause of our public fiscal deficit, we might be led to the question: How can we afford not to consider this idea?

Rush to raze leaves lingering holes

Dec. 15, 2010: Winnipeg city council approves demolition of the Shanghai Restaurant building at 228 King St. with the following condition for redevelopment: "preparation of a firm redevelopment proposal and a formal application for a building permit."

July 18, 2012: Approval for demolition is granted with the following change to the original conditions: "receipt of an urban design submission that meets the intent of council not to allow a surface parking area."

With this revision, the requirements for demolition of a building that has stood at the heart of Winnipeg's Chinatown for longer than Chinatown has existed went from proving the building would be replaced immediately to the installation of a few thousand dollars' worth of sod and a promise to water and mow. The 130-year-old building will soon make way for a city block-sized grass field being hailed as a "much-needed" passive park for Chinatown's few hundred residents.

This raises the question: Is it the physical presence of cars that makes parking lots detrimental to the quality of a city's urban environment, or are there greater issues that laying sod does not alleviate?

Pumping-station conundrum

In the spring of 1997, as a prairie ocean slowly formed around our city, we anxiously followed along as the provincial flood forecaster reported the rising water levels each day, describing it as 21, 22 or 23 feet above James. The term became a local catchphrase, but few people knew that "James" referred to the James Avenue Pumping Station, an unassuming little building along the Red River in the Exchange District.

As the waters receded, the spotlight dimmed and the building's last moments of fame faded away. A century earlier, however, the pumping station was one of the most important buildings in our growing young city.

In 1904, a great fire on Main Street threatened to destroy several blocks of downtown. To battle the blaze, the city was forced to release Assiniboine River water into the main lines. This contaminated the drinking supply and resulted in an outbreak of nearly 1,300 cases of typhoid throughout the city. In response, construction would soon begin on one of the most sophisticated high-pressure firefighting systems in the world. The only such facility in Canada and one of two in North America, it was such a wonder of engineering that in 1909, the British Science Association made the arduous journey across the globe to hold its annual general meeting in Winnipeg and tour the impressive new James Avenue Pumping Station, the centrepiece of the system.

Closed in 1986, the pumping station's elegant, rhythmic facade and double gable roofline serve as a reminder that the utilitarian building once stood as a pavilion in Victoria Park, Winnipeg's first municipal green space and ground zero for the 1919 General Strike.

Rapid transit slowly arrives

We waited 15 years for an NHL hockey team. Now we have one. We waited 36 years for an IKEA. Next Christmas we will have one. We waited 53 years for a modern rapid transit system. In two weeks we will have one. Well, sort of.

After more than a dozen studies, countless advisory committees and an endless number of task forces, Winnipeg's first, three-kilometre-long rapid transit line will soon be running. This modest first step comes more than five decades after the now infamous 'Wilson Plan' first recommended the creation of a rapid transit system for Winnipeg.

Since that time, we have overwhelmingly built our city with a focus on car-oriented development. Decades of low-density subdivisions leapfrogging each other towards the periphery have resulted in Winnipeg's urban area growing disproportionately to its population. Between 1974 and 2006, the city's population grew by only 15 per cent, while its area increased by more than 50 per cent.

Winnipeggers engage in few topics of discussion with greater passion than they do the cost of gasoline, the pace of traffic and the physical condition of our streets, yet we continue to support the urban sprawl that compounds these issues. As our city expands outward, we drive farther, buy more gas, build more roads, navigate more traffic and emit more pollution. With a lower-density tax base, government budgets struggle to maintain basic services and infrastructure for an increasingly unsustainable city.

New buildings contain promise

Moonlight sparkled on the water as a sleek new cargo ship backed away from her Vancouver dock and quietly slipped into the dark November night. Without ceremony, the Clifford J. Rodgers set sail for the Yukon carrying a shipment of beer, stored for the first time in a series of specially fabricated stacking metal containers. On that autumn night in 1955, she became the first cargo ship in the world to use this revolutionary technology that would transform the global economy in the 20th century.

Today, 90 per cent of the world's cargo is transported in standardized shipping containers, with more than 20 million containers making 200 million trips each year.

International trade deficits mean that less than three-quarters of the shipping containers coming to North America head back in the opposite direction. This has led to a surplus of tens of thousands of containers sitting unused in ports across the continent.

The growing importance of environmental sustainability in building design has led architects to explore these mountains of unused steel boxes as a material resource. With prefabricated and modular construction reducing labour, fabrication time and material waste, reclaiming discarded shipping containers can be an effective and affordable component of a sustainable design strategy.

Inspiration comes with a cost

Winnipeg had a great year in 2011. The lengthy string of positive urban development headlines was recently interrupted, however, by the announcement that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is facing a significant funding shortfall. This has provided fuel to the critics of what will forever be a controversial building, but for many in the construction industry it is not a surprising development.

Construction cost inflation is a challenge most projects in Manitoba have confronted in recent years. The double-edged sword of high growth is as construction activity increases and contractors become busier, competitive bidding and cost stability decrease. Over the past years, Manitobas construction cost escalation has been as much as three times the inflation rate.

Compounding this volatility are global increases in building material costs due to construction volume in emerging countries. Since the CMHR began fundraising in 2003, the price of steel has quadrupled, with 45 per cent of global consumption occurring in China, which also consumes 50 per cent of the worlds cement.

With escalation of up to half a percentage per month, large-budget projects with extended timelines can be significantly affected by fluctuating costs. The new airport terminal, football stadium and Manitoba Hydros office tower all met with similar economic challenges.

‘Ghost signs’ evoke city’s past

Sign, sign. Everywhere a sign. Blockin' out the scenery. Breakin' my mind. Do this. Don't do that. Can't you read the sign?

These famous song lyrics colourfully illustrate how ubiquitous signs have become in our urban environment. Street signs, billboards, traffic signs and video screens are all inescapable components of every cityscape.

Long before giant LCD screens blinked above our streets, the most common and effective commercial signs were painted wall advertisements. Applied directly to a building's exterior brick, these large billboards were once a prominent feature in the commercial districts of Canadian cities.

Today these signs are among the most revered and endangered components of historic neighbourhoods across North America. Painted by hand and left to the elements, these early murals have become known as "ghost signs," both for their visual character resulting from faded paint leaving ghosted images on the sides of buildings and because they often represent companies or products that vanished long ago.

Thriving time for city architecture

A Google search of the term 'Winnipeg architecture' yields a colourful grid of thumbnail images that graphically illustrates the city's unique physical character. Instantly distinguishable from similar searches of Edmonton, Calgary or Vancouver, the results portray the familiar kaleidoscope of arched windows, Tyndall-stone columns and reflective glass walls that have come to define Winnipeg's modern built form.

Winnipeg's distinct architectural character is largely the result of unique growth patterns in the last century that saw rapid expansion during the two decades before the First World War and after the Second World War, each followed by long periods of economic stagnation. The city's current urban form has been largely defined by the architectural legacy left by these two distinct boom periods.

At the turn of the last century, Winnipeg became a breeding ground for new architectural ideas and technologies, rivalling work being done in larger centres across North America. The city became such an architectural hotbed it attracted some of the continent's most influential architects. McKim Mead and White, Darling and Pearson and Warren & Wetmore were three internationally renowned firms working in Winnipeg who were also designing some of the most significant buildings in Toronto, New York and Chicago at the time.

Beginning in the 1950s, Winnipeg would again become a centre for innovative design. Many local architects returned from schools like MIT, IIT and Harvard to practise in the Modernist style that was sweeping the world. The University of Manitoba, led by MIT graduate John Russell would become a leading academic institution, promoting this new movement in architecture. Many of Winnipeg's Modernist buildings would win national and international acclaim as the city became recognized for its provocative contemporary design.

Modern flair lifts historic park

A century ago it was the place for fashionable Winnipeggers to see and be seen. Surrounded by the stately homes of the city's well-to-do, Central Park with its Victorian flower gardens, tennis courts and bandshell stage was the centrepiece of one of Winnipeg's finest residential neighbourhoods.

In 1914, the park would gain a distinctive landmark that stands today as the last remnant of its Victorian beginnings. Local businessman Thomas Waddell was informed three years after his wife's death of an unusual clause in her will stipulating that if he were to remarry, he would be legally required to spend $10,000 building a memorial fountain in Central Park or he would forfeit his claim to her $56,000 estate.

Thomas was already engaged to be remarried by this time, but was nearly bankrupt after a series of poor real estate investments. It would take him four years to raise the money and build what has been known to generations of Winnipeggers as the Waddell Fountain.

Stories such as this exemplify the role Central Park has played in Winnipeg's rich historic narrative. By the 1960s, however, the park's prominent place in the hearts of Winnipeggers had changed. The distinguished old mansions that lined the park were demolished to make way for highrise seniors and public housing in an effort to "modernize" the neighbourhood. This ill-conceived urban renewal strategy wiped away the existing social fabric of the community and accelerated its decay. Central Park would become a desolate and forlorn place with significant issues of crime and poverty. The Waddell Fountain, once a symbol of the neighbourhood's affluence, would sit dry and in pieces, an embodiment of the area's decline.