February 2012
10 posts
“A substantial amount of downtown land is owned by individuals who are not...”
– Case in Point #34,604
January 2012
11 posts
Turns out Portage Avenue is a market, too.
My latest piece in the Sunday Free Press is a friendly reminder to Winnipeg’s amateur and professional downtown boosters (at least to the professional boosters who genuinely care if downtown succeeds or not) who think that downtown renewal is a simple, aggregate demand problem. Bring enough people downtown for a few different destinations, and they’ll create a whole demand for...
Watch“Something they call better…” - Chinatown, the movie
Good urban design -- look, but don't touch
There is a difference between false fronts on the set of a movie, and a real neighbourhood street. Any pedestrian could tell you quite easily what those differences are. Unfortunately, those differences seem lost on the Urban Planning Department, who think that a big box store dressed up like urbanism, and is both compatible and desirable for Osborne Village. Anyway, a column I wrote about this...
December 2011
3 posts
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
Let's have our (unexclusively capitalist) cake and...
I wrote a quick piece in this week’s Uniter on branding the Exchange District as a trendy district for commerce, the limits of top-down neighborhood branding, and on the phony conflict between the artistic pioneers and the more commercial interests represented by the Exchange District Business Improvement Zone (BIZ). This accompanies a news feature on Dr. Sonia Bookman’s research on...
September 2011
5 posts
Two Winnipegs
Over the weekend, the WSO maestro Alexander Mickelthwate paid some glowing compliments in the Free Press to Parlour Coffee, a new venture that was opened (after a couple of months of pointless delay) on Main Street near Bannatyne by an old friend of mine, the always enterprising aesthete, Nils Vik.
Maestro Mickelthwate’s piece was a pleasure to read: a short feature on some of his favorite...
What came NEXT: summarizing my NEXT City Talk
By Friday afternoon, the Facebook event page for the “NEXT City Talks” event (part of the Winnipeg Design Festival) had a list of 177 or so attendees. But in the end, every one of the Gas Station’s 232 seats were filled on Friday evening. Many more were turned away, and the queue to get in after capacity was reached apparently snaked its way to the corner of Osborne and River...
Speed and volume
Within the course of five minutes this morning, I was almost hit by a car twice.
The first incident occured as I crossed Kennedy Street on the north side of Graham Avenue (with the walk sign and green light). A car travelled south on Kennedy and began coasting into a turn west on Graham, but the driver saw me and slammed on his brakes before turning. He gave me an apologetic wave, and I shook my...
August 2011
1 post
Expectations
David Connors at the Free Press had an interesting feature on the current state of the Main Street, roughly between City Hall and the CPR tracks. According to Neon Factory owner Mike Wolochuk, his longtime neon sign-making business is going under because the neighborhood didn’t turn out quite the way he had hoped—becoming a drab bureaucrat ghetto rather than the fledgling arts district...
July 2011
2 posts
"The problem with the city, is the City"
Full marks for Walter at One Man Committee for bringing this good-looking apartment development to light, and noting that before it can proceed, it must get permission from the City of Winnipeg, because it is a development below their standards on several fronts. As OMC writes:
“This project requires the developer to get variances for failing to meet the minimum front yard setback...
June 2011
4 posts
Civic design standards slide into reverse
A massive parking garage is under construction on McDermot Avenue East (between Rorie and Waterfront Drive), certifying this southeast corner of the Exchange District remains a dull wasteland for many years to come.
There will be the finger-waggers who like to remind people that there needs to be some room for parking. Indeed there does, but this looks like more than just some parking.
The...
"Heart of Gold," three year later
Looking through some old articles, I came across this one from the Winnipeg Free Press, published in March 2008, where I wrote of Centre Venture luring the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority to build their ghastly head offices to the Main Street strip:
Perhaps to prove it is still able to deliver big projects like Red River College on Princess Avenue, or the condos on Waterfront Drive,...
The Spacing Road Show comes to Winnipeg
Spacing magazine has been Canada’s best source for discussion on urbanism. Mainly Torontocentric in scope, they have now embarked upon producing a national issue (out now), and an accompanying national tour by their publisher and editor. On Thursday, June 16, they will be in Winnipeg to promote the new issue (which features an article on urbanism in prairie cities, a list of Canada’s...
May 2011
4 posts
Locality knowledge
After 200 years of permanent settlement, North Point Douglas is a complicated neighborhood in the middle of a complicated city. There is a sense of mystery to the place. Much of the city’s population has only a vague sense of where Point Douglas is located. For the rest, they are divided between two camps: the first thinks of it as nothing but urban dystopia, where thousands of junkies and...
April 2011
6 posts
The Walk Home
It must be Spring. The walk home from work this afternoon brought me up the stretch of Main Street’s skid row that has been undergoing publicly-led renewal since 2008. Near Henry Avenue, directly across the street from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s headquarters, a crowd has gathered.
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After a brief but violent fist fight (between the man in white standing in the...
When normal becomes abnormal
At the corner of Austin St. and Selkirk Ave. E. in North Point Douglas, it appears that development of a vacant lot that has been eyed for non-profit housing for years, is finally moving forward. But first, let’s see if two new houses will be detrimental to the surrounding neighborhood or not.
Subdividing this 7,854 square foot lot into two means both lots will fall below the 2006 Zoning...
March 2011
21 posts
The need for aged buildings, part 24,504: cheap...
Remember when it seemed every professional downtown booster wanted to see the strip of small storefronts known as the Albert Street Business Block be torn down so that a seemingly erratic, would-be hotel developer could have 10 extra parking spaces?
That never happened. And now instead of the Exchange District having yet another place to spend $6.50 to park a car for a few hours, it has another...