Focusing EXPO 2017 & Growing Edmonton Smarter
We’ve seen our economic growth in the West spawn climate change, resource depletion, social unrest, terrorism and global poverty via our consumption over the last century. It’s now clear that if cizilization as we know it is to survive the next hundred years, we need major course correction by 2020, as the East is following our fossil fuel footsteps, and we’ve managed to avoid substantive change thus far. With over half the world’s population now booming in urban areas, the solutions to our global problems will be found and forged locally through smarter land-use and mass transit. The free market cannot address our problems alone, as the answers lay beyond the bottom lines of businesses who profit from the plights they’ve provided us. Broader, bolder leadership from governments is needed worldwide to reduce footprints and conserve energy, which is to say, doing more with less. It’s in this context that Edmonton’s proposed EXPO 2017 theme, Harmony of Energy and Our Future Planet, while well intentioned, seems vague and slightly off the mark.
By sharpening the focus on sharing solutions, we could issue a 5 year challenge in 2012 to nearly five hundred cities with populations more than a million, inviting them to bring delegations of engineers, bureaucrats and politicians to showcase their greenest projects and proposals. Edmonton would then become an energetic nexus of cutting edge urban planning in the summer of 2017, when we would again be a logical host for the ICLEI World Congress, as well as other events like the World Social Forum. It’s against this backdrop that broader discussions of renewable energy, scientific research, technological innovation, as well as progressive provincial and national policy-making should take place.
Interestingly, tourists won’t fly in from abroad to attend, as figures of potential visitors for events like it are calculated based on a 10-hour drive radius around the host city. People from Vancouver, Winnipeg and Spokane aren’t included in the attendance estimate of 1.9 million unique visitors. Less than half from out of province – which is to say, Saskatchewan.
By sharpening the theme, we could increase the relevance of EXPO 2017 and get a practical edge against other bids. As entourages of architects, planners and decision makers from across the continent exchange examples, best practices and lessons learned, we can inspire the world to change. A more specific theme might influence this, such as Local Solutions for the Global Village, or even The Sustainable Urban Environment, to name two.
Dividing Edmonton in Two?
Although Edmonton is a leading recycler, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Despite being the first to build LRT in North America over thirty years ago, we’ve become Canada’s most car dependent city and one of the most thinly populated in the world. Our majestic river valley can be forgiven for leaving large tracts of undeveloped land through our core, but shameful is our nascent reflex to build golf courses, big box stores, and cul-de-sacs into the limitless prairie. We know better, but for those who don’t mind the status quo, there are always disproportionate and annually growing taxes, since the wider we grow without increasing density, the more expensive it gets to provide services. An equitable deal with our neighbours in the Capital Region will alleviate some of the burden, but St. Albert, Sherwood Park and Leduc are sprawling as well.
Plus, it turns out that our prime rural land is useful for things like nature, and food.
Got Ring Road?
Last year Councillors showed real moxie in voting to build up, by phasing the City Centre Airport out, starting later this year. Unfortunately, with the forthcoming Municipal Development Plan (MDP) it’s looking like sprawl-as-usual within the city limits as 75% of the growth is slated to go ahead in new suburban developments. Whether or not our EXPO 2017 bid is successful, and whatever the theme, we need to change the way we grow in order to be taken seriously on the world stage. We need to start by putting a freeze on all pending developments outside the Anthony Henday ring-road, and guide developers by reviewing those already approved.
The reality is that we need to grow. With a shortage of affordable housing already, and a worsening homeless problem, putting a freeze on new sub-urban single family homes will not help the situation. If a moratorium on sprawl is the Yin, then having firms bid on building mixed-income transit-oriented-developments (TODs) within the ring road is the Yang. One cannot effectively exist without the other.
There are at least forty potential TOD sites of various sizes throughout Edmonton, land that sits empty or underutilized. Re-developing fairways into walkable urban villages along half of our central golf courses would require some imagination, while compromising for space with rail companies, shopping malls, and car dealerships would be needed elsewhere. Ignoring the small pockets of downtown parking lots, some of the largest potential sites are already in the works at The Quarters, Municipal Lands, and West Rossdale. Identifying and prioritizing all potential sites needs to be set in motion with tight design and efficiency standards, and in order to get it right, we need to look to places like Portland and Vancouver that are already doing it well. The only way we can achieve our City Vision for 2040 is if we take ownership of our land by applying smarter standards for density, design and livability on it.
Smart Growth (TOD) Zones
By 2017, the Capital Region is expected to swell to almost 1.3 million – reaching 1.7 million by 2040. We trend towards 2.75 million in 70 years, but unlike Vancouver, we don’t have the sea and mountains blocking horizontal growth. The only barriers preventing us from growing up into a world class city are imaginary boundaries like county lines, and the small town mentality which thinks we can’t attain greatness – or worse yet, that we don’t deserve it, (which is dangerously self-manifesting). While it will take more than 7 years, I think we should go for it and I can’t think of a better first milestone than EXPO 2017.
(cross-posted at theedmontonian.com)
###
I look forward to your thoughts and comments below. Stay tuned for Part 2: Enhancing the Civic & Cultural Context of EXPO 2017 next week!
An Associate Producer at an award-winning independent film and television production company. He also hosts and produces a podcast covering music, current events and politics in his home town of Edmonton, Alberta. A transit planning nerd at heart, he is intimately involved in various socio-economic issues and writes his fair share of letters to the editor. 
Great critique Jordan. I agree with your reflections on theme and what will draw people here.
When you say “A more specific theme might influence this, such as Local Solutions for the Global Village, or even The Sustainable Urban Environment, to name two,” I think you can go even further!
Perhaps a more concentrated theme can look at “Developing density, net-zero energy use, carbon-free cities” or the less sexy “Innovative municipal funding models for sustaining standard of living.”
I am glad you’ve opened up this idea for discussion!
On February 22, the process of adopting the proposed MDP will begin with a Public Hearing under the Pyramids. Please see the legal notice in today’s Edmonton Journal, page A13. I don’t actually think that in-person presentations can be effective at this end-stage forum. Instead, written briefs must be sent immediately to City Council, if the 25/75 ratio of infill- to sprawl-growth is to be made more ambitious, in favour of filling in our midtown gaps. I’ve prepared a graphic, “The Wasteland”, which highlights the many hectares of vacant and grossly underutilized land within Edmonton’s Inner Ring Road. If I can find an online document storage server – DocStoc seems to have gone under – I’ll upload this 30 KB .pdf file. Once it’s live and available, I’ll be promoting the hell out of it. Our Councillors must be made aware that they don’t have to be rezoning any more top-of-bank heritage sites (the Stantec/Allard outrage in Oliver) to promote high-density development near downtown.
The image files, WASTELAND.jpg and WASTELAND DOWNTOWN.jpg, are now available at http://www.4shared.com/dir/31335658/2945e44f/sharing.html.
Everyone, please feel free to share these documents, wherever you find yourself in a discussion about suburban sprawl versus downtown infill.
Thanks for sharing those images Rob! I’ll be using them in a blog post this weekend! Looking forward to many great discussions with you here. EAVB_ZAYXSDRLBT
This week I got another notice about another 31 storey building planned for 97 ave. Another building of one to two bedroomed apartments for single professionals, double income no kids and retirees. I have nothing against any of these groups as part of a diverse population but one group is missing. As I watch news of more inner city school closures I wonder how many more of these apartment buildings can we fill and why are we not building apartments for families to live in the inner city? I realize developers will not think they can be sold but maybe we need to educate people about different choices. In Manhattan, Europe ,Vancouver families live in apartments, but not apparently in Edmonton where suburbia is the norm. We tend to think only of low income families living in the inner city, but expanding the concept could benefit everyone. We can build (or we should be building) attractive affordable housing (great example at http://www.aiatopten.org/hpb/overview.cfm?ProjectID=1140), and apartment housing that would attract those families with some higher incomes. We have a great school downtown (Victoria) that goes from K-12, plus many fine schools on the fringes of downtown that are withering. Is this viable? How do we get started?
Thanks for your comment Lynn! It is sad that most new developments tend to favour the affluent, young professionals. How about a zoning bylaw that requires a % of ground-floor units in new condo towers to be brownstone or townhouse-style walkups with a little yard space? Surely architects could come up with some creative and aesthetically pleasing ways to stick a number of those family style units along the base of most new towers in the core?
I’ve made this point before elsewhere but we don’t have a problem with schools withering. We’ve got a demographic distribution problem in Edmonton. The schools are the proverbial canary in the coal mine – indicators not solutions to the problem.
We don’t boundaries around our city? Perhaps a look at a map of the Greater Edmonton region is necessary.
To the north, we got CFB Edmonton, the NW, St. Albert, to the west Enoch Reserve and Spruce Grove, to the south, Leduc, Nisku and Beaumont, and to the east, Sherwood Park and Strathcona County.
Fortunately, there is plenty of room downtown to grow up instead of out (like the 105 Street corridor and the Quarters). There are also plenty of small houses in the downtown core itself that should be rezoned to multi-family housing ASAP and re-developed.
Our growth outwards is quickly coming to an end, unless the City can convince the province to let us annex one or more of those areas, something the province has refused several times since the 70s.