THE RISE AND SPRAWL

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 Ave. (Many friends of mine would eventually head over to nearby bars to determine the future of the city on their own.)

If pecha kucha is “the hipster slideshow” that Bartley Kives calls it, then I am the most uncool nerd on the planet. Thinking I figured out the best way to effectively deliver the most information possible within the 20-slides-at-20-seconds-each format, I quickly discovered reading and timing ones’ draft at home is quite a different thing from actually delivering a speech on stage. Thankfully for both the audience and myself, I had the sense to abandon my notes and just talk off the cuff about the slides mid-way through.

Anyway, what I had ambitiously and naively hoped to say was that Winnipeg will need its downtown to be more humane and walkable, and more economically dynamic in the future (and that these two are closely linked). This comes through recognizing that true urban life is organic, and is dependent on the quality of the physical scale. To improve the city, we are going to have to change the way we build buildings, plan and regulate neighborhoods, and engineer our streets.

A new building in Beunos Aires

“It’s not how dense you make it,” one designer has said, “but about how you make it dense.” All of the development in the world—even residential development—is not necessarily going to create busy sidewalks. Population density is necessary, but far from sufficient on its own. This only comes through buildings that have appropriate scale, good interface with the sidewalk (active entranceways), and opportunities for mixed-uses and adaptability.

Problems of scale: a ‘landscraper’ on Kennedy Street (at St. Mary Ave). The sprawling parking garage is no better than the sprawling surface parking lot across the street. With no texture, the building in the background would work at the size of a toaster oven, but fails as a 10+ storey building. 

There should be a greater emphasis on form-based zoning codes, rather than on the conventional use-based codes, and Winnipeg should prioritize development that enhances connectivity and continuity. This is why keeping old buildings is important: not because we need traditional-looking built environments, but because we need traditional-functioning built environments. Old buildings do this, not because they have ornate cornices or immaculately preserved tin ceilings, but because they are scaled appropriately. 

Old buildings—particularly old commercial and warehouses—are also worth keeping because they can adapt to any number of new uses over time. Building built as an agricultural implement warehouses in 1900 were transformed into garment sweatshops in 1950, and are loft condos, design offices, or artist studios in 2011. What will parking garages we build today be reused as in the future?

Old urban spaces can adapt to new uses (well, this one can’t because it was demolished last year and is now the site of a vacant lot).

Regarding the way downtown is planned, the immediate and contrived has been prefered over the gradual and organic. Dropping a giant yule-tide on smouldering embers does not create a fire. Gradual and organic growth can be disappointing, and makes life miserable for politicians eager to cut ribbons, but at least it is honest. This is why the Exchange District is more or less suceeding as a neighborhood today: because there has never been any ambitious masterplan (since 1970, at least), and it was allowed to transition gradually.

Under Winnipeg’s Zoning Bylaw (2006), building Winnipeg’s best-loved old neighborhoods would be illegal today. The lots and streets are to too narrow, the floor-area-ratios too high, the uses too fine-grained, and (of course) there is not nearly enough parking. Winnipeg is going to have to reform it’s zoning bylaw, or create a separate bylaw for its old, central neighborhoods similar to the Downtown Zoning Bylaw (2004).

Like buildings, streets must be mixed-use: a streetcar stop on Main Streeet

Wnnipeg will also need to change the way it plans its streets. Current traffic engineering favors vehicular speed and volume over all other considerations, including safety. A good street, like a good neighborhood acts as many things for many people. It becomes great not because it is able to do one thing perfectly, but because it is able to do many things simultainiously. There is lots more room for on-street parking (in the curb-lane), loading (in the second-from-curb lane) on downtown streets, particularly on the wide Portage Ave. and Main St.

By applying these new approaches to building and planning in Winnipeg, this can be a city that is more humane and walkable. There must be an apprciation of the human scale, and the organic social and economic networks that emerge in urban environments. It may be a waste of time to envision Winnipeg as a new Copenhagen or Manhattan, or even Winnipeg of the 1920s, but this little city can still do better at being a more easier place to live and build urban.

A dynamic and livable city can work, even in Winter: Albert Street. Photo by Leif Norman

That, basically, is what I attempted to present in my hipster slideshow at the Gas Station Theatre last Friday. One day, I’ll be cooler.