Who are these people?

As you walk through Edmonton's pedway you feel it, and by 'it' I mean that downtown Edmonton intimacy, like seeing someone you know well but don't necessarily love. It's an unexcited familiarity. With few windows allowing us to catch our bearings using landmarks outside, the nondescript corners, quirky shops and strange, old signs within the halls of Edmonton's pedway have become our waypoints over the decades. They guide us through the maze. We turn left at that indoor coffee shop with a vibe that's stuck in 1991. We take a right at that hair salon where the owner stands at the front scanning the passers-by with a judgey gaze. We walk up to the street by that former bar with wood panelling that's now closed. 

In this intimacy, like a hallway display of so many failed or fading dreams from Edmonton's history, things pop out as often as they blend in. We walk past something daily and then, one day, stop to ponder it. It's a feeling that suddenly demands answers to questions. What is this? Why is it here? How long has it been here? Has whoever put this here forgotten about it? 

For the past four years that I've lived in Edmonton, I've routinely asked this list of questions of the strangest, most intimate corner of Edmonton's pedway. It's a section of the pedway halls that form the path that, once a few more connections are opened, will siphon thousands of winter-weather avoiding hockey fans from parkades being built in City Centre Mall to Rogers Place, a few blocks away.

Yes, I'm talking about that bizarre photo gallery. 

The pictures are in the Sutton Place hotel, one a wallpapered wall down a 30-foot or so long hall with yellow-tinged lighting. The hall connects to a windowed pedway linking the building to City Centre Mall. On either side of this hall is normal. Within it is not. 

The photos are presented as if they represent a family's life achievement, ornately framed, lit by soft lighting in the way they might be at a grandparent's house. But as you scan them you see that none of these people are related. There is no sign explaining what these photos are doing here. It's as if you've walked out of a hotel and, to continue into the city's downtown mall, you need to first walk through someone's house.

While in this space you almost feel you should apologize for intruding.

Like many things about the arena, I don't think the City of Edmonton has really thought this one through. Or, more bluntly, I'm not convinced the city's staff have walked the various routes people might take from parkades to our arena with a critical eye, considering it the way a walker might to make sure the experience is easy to navigate and doesn't leave you baffled. We continue building pedways in Edmonton but to figure out how to make them work is not acceptable. 

But, on some other hand, I kind of love this bizarre photo gallery and hope it stays. I'd love to know who these people are, though, and whether they're still in Edmonton, and how they feel about their photos being so prominent to thousands of people walking from an Oilers game to their car. 

Why Edmonton's inner-city suburbs need to embrace density already

Residents in Edmonton’s inner city neighbourhoods hold more power than most of us when it comes to what sort of city we can build in the future.

The reason is their acceptance—or refusal—of urban density and how that will affect our upcoming election. 

Allow me to explain.

Most of us, me included, hate simplistic discussions about over-used words like “density” but love the things it enables. We want a better transit system. We want vibrant, walkable streets with cash-registers dinging within small-scale retail bays. We want a sustainable growth model that doesn't see our tax dollars used to subsidize revenue losing suburban sprawl. We want a downtown with economic resilience and 24/7 culture. We want streets that feel safe. 

Flickr/hobvias sudoneighm

To achieve all of this we need density across our entire urban grid. And to get that, we need to at least figure out, if not solve, the anti-infill NIMBYism that’s on fire in some of our inner-city suburbs rather than argue for another second about the merits of infill.

Much of this will largely be sorted in our upcoming municipal election. Expect more than a few candidates to see a potential win by running as one-issue, anti-infill nincompoops.

Let's hope we advance the discussion beyond that before they get a chance.

Now, before we go too far here, I think it's necessary to bust some myths about population densities in Edmonton. While regular wisdom might have it that the city is densest at its middle and most sparsely populated at its edges, in Edmonton it's just not the case.

Edmonton's newest and most far-flung suburbs are car dependent and sprawling, yes, but they're also surprisingly dense. The more we've grown, it seems, the more we've realized density isn't just a buzzword but instead a survival mechanism. And so our newest suburbs, like Tamarack, or Eau Claire, or so many other names that we struggle to place on a map, see the duplexes and four-plexes and dense, multi-unit housing we keep saying we need all over Edmonton, despite offering those who live there relatively unusable transit options and few services within a walk. 

In comparison, the gorgeous neighbourhoods ringing our core, mostly built between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s, are actually our most sparsely populated—and by a long shot. Sure, as we walk or drive through these hoods, the large trees, beautiful older schools and more mature retail activity might fool us into seeing a denser place than is actually before us. But the numbers don’t lie. Areas of the suburb of Terwillegar, for example, see up to 50 residential units per hectare, while areas of Glenora, which I still consider walkable or at least bikeable to downtown, and which is blessed with bountiful transit options, already-built schools, parks and other expensive infrastructure, can see just 18 units per hectare. 

What that means is that Edmonton has an internal donut of old fashioned suburbia that isn't growing while the rest of the city is. 

The concerning part for the whole city is how this donut votes based on its feelings toward density (or its stand-in word in these neighbourhoods, “infill”). Because it’s in the inner donut where the battles over density are the loudest and meanest. 

It just makes economic and logical sense that as a neighbourhood ages out, as its original families leave and its schools struggle to maintain enough students to stay open, that we bring people back. That’s why neighbourhoods like Glenora, Rio Terrace, Capilano, Gold Bar and others see so many attempts to fill-in their gaps with newer housing, often more dense. 

And yet it’s some residents in these and many other donut communities, with the least dense built form in all of Edmonton, who say that their neighbourhood will be destroyed by skinny homes or duplexes or—shudder—a mid-rise rental building.

At stake if we can’t figure out a way to bring density into these communities is, well, a lot. It’s everything from the viability of our transit system (should our buses skip our empty inner suburbs in an attempt to get service to the far more densely populated communities on the fringes, for example?) to our efforts to reign in costly sprawl. 

Edmonton is projected to swell to 1.4-million residents by 2044. If we do it in the style we’ve been doing it so far, a lot more people are going to have to buy into a world of dense suburbs on the edge of nowhere—places with large multi-unit housing but few services to walk to and a long drive to work in the core. 

A better approach would be pressuring our inner-city suburbs to think beyond their backyards and elect councillors in October who understand density isn’t a bad thing, but something that we can all share the benefits of. 

Over to you, Edmonton. 

It's a great thing to feel wanted

I let slip yesterday that after leaving my job as managing editor of Metro Edmonton, I had contemplated all sorts of things, including a move to another city.

"You can't leave," said the older gentleman I was interviewing for a story, catching me off guard.

"We need people like you."

He then grinned.

The comment is one I've heard several times in Edmonton, and probably the best part of this place. It made me reflect on a conversation I had earlier in the day at a systems-thinking lab I attended. A government employee from Vancouver and I started chatting about how we were both transplants to the city, how we missed a lot of the places we move here from (I came from Toronto), but how, after a few years here, we didn't want to leave.

Flickr/Mack Male

The why behind this then came up.

"Vancouver never made me feel like it wanted me," she said.

"Toronto never made me feel like it wanted me, either," I replied.

Edmonton, for all its many faults — ones I'm attacked for by the ever-prevalent cult of insecure Edmonton boosters, whenever I point these faults out too passionately — wants me. 

Four years ago today, I boarded a plane in plus 10C spring weather in Toronto bound for a high-latitude city that was facing yet another March blizzard. I landed and two conflicting things: A sinking feeling that the urbanism I'd come to see as central to my happiness in Toronto wasn't going to be here, and another, far more compelling feeling: I can do something here.

Over four years, I've failed in some ways during my Edmonton experiment. My magazine writing has been somewhat mediocre compared to the field-based writing I was doing in the Northwest Territories, Africa and the Yukon. That's been a hard realization to look at. And it's being addressed.

I'm going back to writing from the field.

Outside of that, though, in four years I've become part of a community of people who try to build Edmonton into a better city. And somehow this has given me something I didn't feel I had in Toronto: meaning. Purpose, even.

I can't help return to that realization the woman from Vancouver and I had about feeling wanted. It's a very powerful thing, that. Edmonton — its ugly, concrete brutalism and its deference to car thinking, its inability to manage big projects on a level with other big cities and its annoying insecurity and too-frequent suggestions you "just leave" if you want to see things change — wants me here. It recognizes it needs people who want to do things rather than expect them to be done for them. 

It's why I've stayed for the past four years. It's the single best feature of this city. It wants to keep growing. 

© Copyright 2017 Tim Querengesser. No reproductions without license.