This week, Edmonton’s city council approved a new neighbourhood on a patch of farmland well south of the Anthony Henday ring road. The decision raises important questions about who builds our city, and how, and if that can change in the future.
If this neighbourhood, called Heritage Valley, rolls out to plan it will be completed in 2030, house less than 4,000 people, “eventually” offer LRT service at its core and centre around a new hospital that will be built by the province.
Ambleside, a neighbourhood that exists outside the Anthony Henday ring road. Photo: Mack Male/Flickr
The most forward-thinking part of this project is that it has been intentionally designed with a relationship between housing, mobility, and jobs. The hospital and associated employment clustered near it will mean, ideally, that a future resident can live close to work — heck, maybe even walk there. This is the way all city neighbourhoods should be built, most especially the suburban ones, so bravo to Edmonton on that point.
But what the new community also highlights — aside from our city’s long-established aversion to tackling costly edge-of-city sprawl by doing something other than a better job at that same sprawl — are the questions I pointed out above about city building.
The answers are more complex than many realize. And as Edmonton enters into a discussion on its next city plan over the next few weeks, these questions need to be asked. The trouble is, those who can answer may not be in the room.
The neighbourhood we’ve just approved, called Heritage Valley, has been driven by the province, not our city planners or officials. Provincial investment in a hospital and the Dr. Anne Anderson high school are catalysts. The city passed an area structural plan in 2009 for Heritage Valley and we have made investments there, but without the province and the infrastructure, Heritage Valley was going to remain more an idea than a reality.
It gets more complicated still. Arguably the largest investment in city-building in Edmonton over the last quarter century is Anthony Henday ring road, which Heritage Valley is close to. Since 1990 the province has built this freeway, but the city has built freeway connections to it. Beyond the more than $4 billion and counting that has been spent on the Henday, what has resulted is an explosion in housing in the southwest of Edmonton.
Without the Henday, it wouldn’t be there.
The relationship between how a province invests in infrastructure in our cities and how those cities can develop, or control development, is therefore complex one. Put another way: it will be near impossible for Edmonton to tackle a huge reason its property taxes go up — sprawl — if the province continues to invest in the infrastructure that literally enables it.
The discussion gets even more complicated as we consider Edmonton’s upcoming city plan. If you haven’t read the proposals in this plan, here they are. Edmonton is re-envisioned as a compact city that can grow within its existing footprint to house a lot more people. This makes sense on all levels — carbon emissions, congestion, liveability, equity, and keeping property taxes in check.
Council can, and should, endorse this plan. It’s a good one.
But the trouble is that the province controls a lot of the development in Edmonton by what it does, and does not, invest in. The city can plan all it likes to remain compact, but unless the province invests in LRT, rather than expansions to freeways, those plans will not become reality.
As council discusses the city plan over the next while, the most pressing questions should not be put to planners. Instead, it should be those preparing to run for mayor of Edmonton who are put on the hot seat. How will you negotiate city-building with the province? How dedicated are you to building LRT rather than freeways? How committed are you to enacting the city’s plan, rather than the province’s?