IanO
Senior Member
Here's hoping that we see 3-5 more towers in this cluster, to the SW, on the hospital site and a new SOB.
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Architectural Comparisons - Edmonton and other cities
- Thread starter IanO
- Start date
occidentalcapital
Senior Member
I agree with you but take issue with the assumption that Edmonton is not a larger city. There's this residual tendency by most Edmontonians to think of Edmonton as a 'small city' somewhere in the range of 500,000-750,000 people. In reality we are already a big city, a shade over 1.5million and hurtling toward 2million within the next decades. At that population we are bigger than a number of well-known European capitals.
dunno
Active Member
Have you been to an actual big city? Edmonton is mid-sized at best. That isn't an inferiority complex, it's just reality. In the grand scheme of things, Toronto and maybe Montreal are the only cities that'd qualify as 'big' to people outside of the Prairies. That's not to suggest Edmonton is basically Lloydminster, but it's not exactly Shanghai either. Edmonton doesn't feel or act like a big city, in some cases this is a good thing, and in other ways it isn't, but overall it just is. We don't need to inflate ourselves with thinking we're something we're not.
EtoV
Active Member
Their point is literally true though. I know metro population definitions can be wildly different, but if we look at European cities with similar sized metros, we're in the same ballpark as:
Helsinki
Oslo
Dresden
The Hague
Glasgow
Marsaille
Nice
Seville
Zagreb
Zurich
I would say these all feel like "big" cities, it helps when you aren't massively sprawling. You don't need to be that big to be an interesting and culturally rich city.
Helsinki
Oslo
Dresden
The Hague
Glasgow
Marsaille
Nice
Seville
Zagreb
Zurich
I would say these all feel like "big" cities, it helps when you aren't massively sprawling. You don't need to be that big to be an interesting and culturally rich city.
Our metro pop is just 1.4 million. And the thing is, we punch way below our weight class when it comes to urbanism. Calgary has 1.5x the office workers for a typical city their size, and I'd say Edmonton has .5x. We've specialized in oil and gas refinery/servicing + low volume, high value manufacturing.
Calgary has comparative advantage for office work due to a strong clustering effect, which essentially saps any potential growth here in Edmonton.
You can see this clear as day on census mapper if you look at % working in trades/resources/manufacturing or educational attainment. We pump out graduates from the U of A, but we don't keep them in our urban core (or even our city).
northlands
Senior Member
I'm a U of A grad. I tried hard to find a job working downtown after graduation, but the options at the time were basically gov't, big 4 or CRE brokerage. I wound up working in Acheson/Winterburn area and I can probably count on two hands the people I know who actually work downtown here (and most of em are CRE).
Sucks. I live in Grandin and would give my left nut to work somewhere downtown where I could walk to work everyday.
David A
Senior Member
I realize I didn't specify size, but I was thinking of something in the Vancouver to Toronto range population wise when I used the word larger. Edmonton is larger than some cities and smaller than others.
I definitely didn't mean to diminish our city in the comparison, but to make the point we are growing and becoming larger. I think one of the things that makes it seem smaller is not a lot of density in central areas, and I think this is a good example of this changing. I'm trying to be positive about the future too and I think in that regard we probably agree.
BASE
Active Member
All a matter of scale, and of course very much subjective. On a Canadian scale we are a large city, North American scale maybe a mid size city.
We can agree that we are at a point where we deserve much more of this kind of project and much less of the Holyrood Regency abomination.
We can agree that we are at a point where we deserve much more of this kind of project and much less of the Holyrood Regency abomination.
JMatt88
New Member
This makes me wonder if all the housing builds in the core are going to flounder? What would drive people to the downtown if they don't work near there? Don't get me wrong, I fully support continue density efforts in the core, but if there aren't jobs in the core, are we going to look back on these initiatives in 5-10 yrs with a sense of failure?
IanO
Senior Member
Bingo.
Edmonton MUST make the Downtown more attractive to employers, employees and investors.
Edmonton MUST make the Downtown more attractive to employers, employees and investors.
dunno
Active Member
These are all mid-sized cities. Marseille isn't a big city the way Paris is a big city. France has 1 big city as there's a significant drop off after Paris. That's fine and normal. The UK is likewise with London. Dresden is not on the same calibre as Berlin. Having more than one big city is unusual unless you're a high population country like the US, China, India, Brazil, Japan, etc. The other countries that have more than one are polycentric, like Spain, Canada, Germany, and Australia. But their multiple big cities are smaller than the one, definitive big city. Instead of Buenos Aires or London or Paris, you get Barcelona/Madrid or Toronto/Montreal or Sydney/Melbourne. In Canada, you could have one 10 million megacity, but instead there are two big cities in the 4-6 million range. In the UK, you could have a few cities in the Toronto-Montreal range, but instead there's the London megacity and then a steep drop off to Manchester and Birmingham, which are Vancouver or San Antonio sized.
Cities like Oslo act like a "big city" in the same way that Halifax is like the "big city" for the Maritimes. In the absence of anything larger or more 'important', both Halifax and Oslo feature clustering of people and services that draw people from across the region. They'll have the head offices, big universities, cultural centres, destination retail, etc. because there isn't a New York or Toronto to fulfill that role, but nobody in their right mind will say Halifax/Oslo are big cities like Tokyo or Sao Paolo are. Just like Halifax doesn't actually feel "big" just because it has the most prestigious universities, regional headquarters, and largest airport in the area, nor does Oslo. It just means there's nowhere else for these metropolitan amenities to coalesce.
Density doesn't necessarily mean a city feels big. Is Male big? Or Gdansk? People conflate the two because the typical big city is also dense. Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Delhi, etc. Having packed streets or a lot of high-rises can give a slight bump for this reason, but it's an illusion. Calgary is a great example of this. It has a skyline that puts American cities triple its size to shame, but at the end of the day, it doesn't have the services or amenities of a city 3x its size. When you look beyond the bold skyline, Calgary still looks and feels like a city around its size, maybe slightly larger than you'd expect in the US. And density doesn't have to be the only way a city feels big. Is Dallas not a big city? What about Miami? Or Los Angeles? Regardless of the morality of a packed freeway, there is an intensity, a sense of bigness, being stuck in traffic on the 405 in West LA that, while aesthetically and functionally different from a crammed 5pm L train to Queens, they both still show a bustling transportation system that connotes a big city feel, just in a different way.
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Mattyeg
Active Member
I feel like everyone is missing the biggest point of contention to the original post. The original post stated that this building is so nice that it could be in a bigger city. Bigger city does not have to equate to having better buildings. Cities half the size of Edmonton have much more attractive streetscapes and architecture. It’s not like we don’t have nice buildings here already, it’s just that there’s so much crap put up in between the good ones. Maybe we are at a point that people are starting to take notice and starting to care? And if so hopefully the pretty becomes the norm and the uglies are the one offs
dunno
Active Member
That and while this building is not aesthetically criminal, it's not exactly an architectural masterpiece either. It's nice, don't get me wrong, and will be a great addition to the area, but standout architecture it is not. Cities like Toronto churn out 5 proposals just like this tower before anyone's even had breakfast. The fact that this building is being held as an exemplar of good architecture is really indicative of how poor Edmonton's recent architectural stock is. This is a city where Manchester Square is unironically accepted as a new local landmark, where Stantec may be tallest that doesn't stop it from being mediocre (or a safety hazard). The last time Edmonton's architectural stock seemed, overall, on par with architectural quality in peer cities was probably the early '90s, when the new City Hall, Commerce Place, and the University LRT extension were built. Since the late '90s, good buildings have been few and far between, such that even mid buildings like Maclab Garneau or Stantec are treated like they're Vancouver House and Brookfield Place.
Filip.Nowak
Active Member
I would argue that The Parks and the Winspear Centre Expansion are projects that are under construction currently which could be considered examples of solid architecture.
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David A
Senior Member
Maybe I missed something, but who compared this building to Brookfield Place? It is probably true there are a lot more proposals for nice buildings in Toronto and back to the point it is a much bigger city, with ... um ... more buildings and of course more big buildings.
However, I also think there is a good point about cities not having to be the biggest to have nice buildings. I went to Montreal a while ago and loved it there. In my opinion better than the bigger TO. Older cities have more variety and were built at a time when more attention was paid to style and character and when things had to be designed on a more human scale. So Edmonton can not be the same as Halifax or Oslo in that regard, but it would really help if we stopped tearing down the few older character buildings here that remain.
However, I also think there is a good point about cities not having to be the biggest to have nice buildings. I went to Montreal a while ago and loved it there. In my opinion better than the bigger TO. Older cities have more variety and were built at a time when more attention was paid to style and character and when things had to be designed on a more human scale. So Edmonton can not be the same as Halifax or Oslo in that regard, but it would really help if we stopped tearing down the few older character buildings here that remain.