Make South Portage a people place

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This article was published 03/03/2016 (3540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the plans for True North Square, and for public officials eager to see such an ambitious mixed-use development, there is perhaps a justifiable temptation to sit back and let it do the work of improving the South Portage neighbourhood it sits in.

Bound by Main Street, Portage Avenue, Memorial Boulevard and Broadway, South Portage is a significant portion of downtown Winnipeg’s vast area. It is also home to many of downtown’s perceived shortcomings: surface parking lots, poorly scaled buildings, car-oriented street designs and a corresponding lack of pedestrian activity.

True North Square’s success as a catalyst for further development in South Portage remains to be seen, but for now, it presents an opportunity to think about what kind of neighbourhood it could become.

South Portage was originally built up at the end of the 19th century as a residential neighbourhood for Winnipeg’s emerging middle class. It wasn’t long before it began to face encroachment from non-residential uses, most significantly from Eaton’s and that company’s expanding set of facilities. Emblematic of this change was the current site of True North Square, which once housed a public school that was torn down in 1930 to make way for the first of Eaton’s many “parking grounds.”

In spite of this transition, there was relative stasis in the first half of the 20th century, and South Portage was still one of Winnipeg’s most densely populated neighbourhoods in 1945.

In the 1950s and ’60s, expectations and actions in South Portage became governed by the tabula rasa ethos of modernist urban renewal and the assumption the sunny postwar boom would carry on until all of the vestiges of the tired old neighbourhood made way for a downtown that resembled a more grounded version of The Jetsons.

In anticipation, hundreds of mature trees were removed in the 1950s, as every street in South Portage was widened and converted to one-way traffic. This clear-cutting laid bare an unappealing, gap-tooth streetscape of car-repair shops, billboards, muddy surface lots and the withering ranks of houses still standing. This desolation only caused more desolation: as residential uses declined, the housing stock became more sparse, and more land was devoted to surface parking.

Fifty years and a handful of comprehensive plans and large-scale developments later, the old houses are almost entirely gone, but much of South Portage is effectively leftover space dotted with islands of daytime activity.

True North Square filling in what has been a surface lot since the Depression is welcome, but the downtown of a good city is not simply a big jigsaw puzzle where each piece leads to a completed whole. It is not even a suburban subdivision built in rigidly ordered phases. It is something constantly in a state of change and adaptation.

Seeing development occur gives potential new builders and investors confidence in a market, but development ultimately follows demand for it. South Portage needs to be a place where people want to live, not just where people expect others to live. In other words, it needs a core population who are there because they like being there, not simply because a job, trade convention or hockey game brings them there.

One inexpensive way to improve this is to make the streets better for pedestrians. On certain blocks, oversized roadways could be narrowed to allow space for wider sidewalks, dedicated bike lanes and mature street trees. Intersections could be narrowed in order to slow vehicle traffic and reduce crossing distances.

This is the kind of thing that could help make South Portage a place that feels safe and inviting enough to lure renters from Osborne Village or condo buyers from the East Exchange. For visitors, it’s the kind of thing that can cause them to perhaps walk around in search of a place to get a drink after the game rather than hustle to their cars.

South Portage should be a busy place where the development and happiness of a strong residential population is a primary planning and policy consideration. This busyness should be visible at street level.

A welcoming pedestrian environment around True North Square will ensure South Portage is not just a collection of good but separate destinations to visit, but a busy and cohesive neighbourhood to stay in.

Robert Galston is a master’s candidate in the city planning department at the University of Manitoba.

Twitter:@robgalston