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Downtown

ChazYEG said:
I agree that Kensington is still ahead, but I guess just marginally. This area of the city is already, in my opinion, pound per pound the best urban experience in Edmonton, if you consider the living/working/shopping/entertainment combination, especially when you consider that, as suburban as it looks, Brewery District is perfectly walkable for residents from anywhere between 120 st to 126 st and 107 ave to 100 ave, and it has some great retail options.



I do believe that, whenever we talk about good urban experiences and models for Edmonton, we should look at Whyte and try to understand what makes it so successful. I also agree that Whyte does compare favourably to 17th ave, and I am hopeful that 109 and 99 St will significantly improve in the next couple of years. 112 st/87 ave (between 112 and 109) can also complement the whole area's urban experience, and densification is well underway in this little section.
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Kensington had a lot more momentum 20 years ago. There's still been recent development, but it used to be far 'trendier' and this is also reflected in some very late '90s/early 2000s vernacular. The area is still attractive and decently busy, but I think Calgary's new Kensington is Inglewood.

My issue with West Oliver is that the residential areas are great and attractive with decent-to-excellent urbanism, but the commerce-heavy main streets suck. 102 Ave, with its village-y atmosphere is far more attractive than 104 Ave, Jasper, and honestly, even 124th IMO. Obviously all 3 offer far more, but it's packaged in lacklustre settings. Roads are too wide and the continued emphasis on strip malls is silly, meaning that they aren't where they should be in terms of walkability. The walkability critique applies less to 124th Street itself and more to Jasper, High Street, and 104 Ave. 124th Street just has mediocre architecture until you get more into the Westmount area and feels boring IMO. But maybe I've spent too much time there! I do think the LRT will help.

For Whyte Ave's friends, the best thing the city could do is a massive redesign of the streetscape. Less lanes, more boulevards, wider sidewalks. 99th and 109th especially are just terrible to walk along because they don't feel safe. Whyte Ave itself doesn't have this problem and that's why it's far, far more attractive and it shows in how busy the sidewalks are. The strip malls on 99th and 109th are also a problem, but I think first step is simply making the main street walkable. It's the approach for West Jasper Ave, but at least 109th Street already has cachet.
 
ChazYEG said:
One thing that I would like to add, in the comparison with Calgary, in particular, is the fact that Old Strathcona and Garneau are separated from Downtown by the river, and that our river is a much more difficult crossing than the Bow River. This makes any integration significantly more difficult.

I wonder what could be of downtown, and our urban experience, if that was not the case.
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I'm not intimately familiar with all of the areas in all of the cities mentioned, but you can compare various different places and surprise - they are different!

However the Kensington/Old Strathcona comparison I find especially tiresome. They really are different. In my opinion, Whyte Ave itself is far superior, perhaps the nearby residential area is more dense in Calgary in part because of less separation from downtown.

Lest we forget, Old Strathcona is almost 20 blocks from Jasper Ave. It is quite a ways from downtown and this area arose as a separate city, not as a place for well off people commuting to downtown Edmonton to live. So many people who live in the ubiquitous walk up apartments here are students and seniors who are there because it is close to the University and is walkable to a nice variety of nearby retail stores. It is a nice, fairly desireable area, but not a snobby, very upscale one.

In general our city was mostly built when architecture was made to be more functional than impressive. If you want more beautiful old buildings like many of these places, you will need to go to Hamilton, Ottawa, Winnipeg or wherever and drag them here because guess what, they generally don't make them anymore.
 
David A said:
I'm not intimately familiar with all of the areas in all of the cities mentioned, but you can compare various different places and surprise - they are different!

However the Kensington/Old Strathcona comparison I find especially tiresome. They really are different. In my opinion, Whyte Ave itself is far superior, perhaps the nearby residential area is more dense in Calgary in part because of less separation from downtown.

Lest we forget, Old Strathcona is almost 20 blocks from Jasper Ave. It is quite a ways from downtown and this area arose as a separate city, not as a place for well off people commuting to downtown Edmonton to live. So many people who live in the ubiquitous walk up apartments here are students and seniors who are there because it is close to the University and is walkable to a nice variety of nearby retail stores. It is a nice, fairly desireable area, but not a snobby, very upscale one.

In general our city was mostly built when architecture was made to be more functional than impressive. If you want more beautiful old buildings like many of these places, you will need to go to Hamilton, Ottawa, Winnipeg or wherever and drag them here because guess what, they generally don't make them anymore.
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I haven't seen anyone actually compare Kensington to Old Strathcona because, as you say, they are quite different.

While I've focused on the inherent beauty of pre-war architecture and design, which no doubt makes Edmonton not compare well, it's less to do with the stylings of that time and more for the kind of urban fabric it produced - which was pre-automobile and thus more walkable, human-scaled, and so forth. Winnipeg and Hamilton don't have anything as vibrant as Whyte Ave is, but their incredible bones of walkable urbanism that isn't designed so heavily around cars helps balance things out and, because both cities still have attractive (even if less buzzing) areas, IMO makes them better in terms of urbanism.

Of course we can wave this all away with "well we just don't build them like that anymore" which is perhaps true but also not entirely. I've also frequently brought up Calgary and Vancouver, both of which have shown that you can build attractive human-centred urban environments in the 21st century, even if they lack the ostentatious designs of the Edwardians. So Edmonton can build better, but chooses not to. A lot of why Inglewood is so busy now is because of infill and new development, complementing its admittedly strong historic bones. This is even moreso the case for Bridgeland, which has filled in tremendously in the last 15yrs. Calgary gets an urban Canadian Tire and Best Buy, we get Brewery District. I also mentioned that Winnipeg has many new projects that are of higher architectural calibre than Edmonton on the whole, so it isn't that they're fully resting on their laurels out there, even if that's mostly what they're doing.
 
Yes, we can do better, but just vaguely randomly comparing places without putting into context the importance of history and geography in what exists will end up being an exercise in frustration.

You just can't copy something that exists elsewhere if it exists significantly because of the place's history and/or geography. So, yes Edmonton could become Vancouver if we surrounded it by mountains, and an ocean, modified the climate and doubled the population.

There is a lot of negativity here, which we are all parties to, but I feel the discussion has to be more constructive than we should be like this place or that one, otherwise it risks becoming just endless whining and achieves nothing.
 
David A said:
Yes, we can do better, but just vaguely randomly comparing places without putting into context the importance of history and geography in what exists will end up being an exercise in frustration.

You just can't copy something that exists elsewhere if it exists significantly because of the place's history and/or geography. So, yes Edmonton could become Vancouver if we surrounded it by mountains, and an ocean, modified the climate and doubled the population.

There is a lot of negativity here, which we are all parties to, but I feel the discussion has to be more constructive than we should be like this place or that one, otherwise it risks becoming just endless whining and achieves nothing.
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At what point do you just say that there shouldn't be comparison or inspiration from anywhere? Do we need to rehash the different geography and history any time we do so? I've (along with others) already repeatedly referenced the fact that many of the other cities do get a leg up due to being older and because most here seem pretty familiar with Vancouver, I don't think its special characteristics need to be reiterated all the time. For Hamilton, it's been repeated that Toronto's strong pull on it recently has had an effect, too. My comparisons to other cities are anything but vague. I've highlighted many very specific examples, to the extent that you yourself have said you're not intimately familiar with all that's being referenced. How can a comparison be vague if there's enough detail that someone without the same awareness of other places is unsure about them?

I'd speculate that a lot of the reasons for why Winnipeg's contemporary architecture is better than Edmonton's is because they have a proper architecture school and we don't. That local talent isn't forced to move for schooling. But I've already indulged in a lot of detail, do I need to produce full length essays going over every reason for every thing? Besides, it's been known on forums like this that Edmonton lacking an architecture school is to its own detriment.

I'm not arguing that Edmonton be Vancouver or Winnipeg or Hamilton. All I was saying by comparing to those places is that Edmonton has one of the weakest urban fabrics of major Canadian cities. Old Strathcona and, increasingly, West Oliver, are beacons on an otherwise stroad-y post-war suburban city. But nobody here is suggesting we need to copy-paste Hamilton's Victorian houses here. The comparisons are more to highlight the gulf. And this is tempered by comparisons to Calgary, whose context is broadly applicable to Calgary. If Calgary can copy Vancouverism, so can Edmonton. Yes, there's differences due to climate, geography, and local context generally, but there's no reason Brewery District can't turn into something akin to Olympic Village. Not a facsimile, but taking the broader strokes as influence. I want Edmonton to be the best it can be, and part of figuring out what that may look like is drawing on and comparing itself to other places to see what they're doing and why and if that can be adapted to Edmonton's context.
 
dunno said:
At what point do you just say that there shouldn't be comparison or inspiration from anywhere? Do we need to rehash the different geography and history any time we do so? I've (along with others) already repeatedly referenced the fact that many of the other cities do get a leg up due to being older and because most here seem pretty familiar with Vancouver, I don't think its special characteristics need to be reiterated all the time. For Hamilton, it's been repeated that Toronto's strong pull on it recently has had an effect, too. My comparisons to other cities are anything but vague. I've highlighted many very specific examples, to the extent that you yourself have said you're not intimately familiar with all that's being referenced. How can a comparison be vague if there's enough detail that someone without the same awareness of other places is unsure about them?

I'd speculate that a lot of the reasons for why Winnipeg's contemporary architecture is better than Edmonton's is because they have a proper architecture school and we don't. That local talent isn't forced to move for schooling. But I've already indulged in a lot of detail, do I need to produce full length essays going over every reason for every thing? Besides, it's been known on forums like this that Edmonton lacking an architecture school is to its own detriment.

I'm not arguing that Edmonton be Vancouver or Winnipeg or Hamilton. All I was saying by comparing to those places is that Edmonton has one of the weakest urban fabrics of major Canadian cities. Old Strathcona and, increasingly, West Oliver, are beacons on an otherwise stroad-y post-war suburban city. But nobody here is suggesting we need to copy-paste Hamilton's Victorian houses here. The comparisons are more to highlight the gulf. And this is tempered by comparisons to Calgary, whose context is broadly applicable to Calgary. If Calgary can copy Vancouverism, so can Edmonton. Yes, there's differences due to climate, geography, and local context generally, but there's no reason Brewery District can't turn into something akin to Olympic Village. Not a facsimile, but taking the broader strokes as influence. I want Edmonton to be the best it can be, and part of figuring out what that may look like is drawing on and comparing itself to other places to see what they're doing and why and if that can be adapted to Edmonton's context.
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You can't just cut and paste entire neighborhoods from one place into another as a solution. It does not work that way and it is not Simcity.

Some things may work, some may not and but yes you actually do have to consider history and geography in figuring out what works. The one concrete idea I have got out of all this back and forth, is maybe we should have a school of architecture here, which I have heard alluded to or suggested by others in the past.
 
David A said:
You can't just cut and paste entire neighborhoods from one place into another as a solution. It does not work that way and it is not Simcity.

Some things may work, some may not and but yes you actually do have to consider history and geography in figuring out what works. The one concrete idea I have got out of all this back and forth, is maybe we should have amad school of architecture here, which I have heard alluded to or suggested by others in the past.
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Again, who is saying to cut and paste entire neighbourhoods? Please read what I'm saying. I think you're seeing problems that aren't based on what people are actually saying in this thread. I am cognizant of history and geography, but I'm not going to rehash it every single time I want to bring up a comparison, sorry. Regardless, as I said, I've already made references to history and geography as reasons for differences between cities I've compared with Edmonton.
 
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1667247361612189696
 
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Reference ID:Job No 474391310-002
Description:To construct exterior alterations (adding mechanical grill openings to the Front Facade), reference DP #462580978-002 ( change the use from General Retail Store to Specialty Food Service with 8 seats and 26 m2 Public Space and to construct interior and exterior alterations (removal of exterior duct).
Location:10130 - 104 STREET NW
Plan 0828363 Unit 209
10130 - 104 STREET NW
Condo Common Area (Plan 1024646,1025682,0828363,1320413)
 
IanO said:
Icon I

Reference ID:Job No 474391310-002
Description:To construct exterior alterations (adding mechanical grill openings to the Front Facade), reference DP #462580978-002 ( change the use from General Retail Store to Specialty Food Service with 8 seats and 26 m2 Public Space and to construct interior and exterior alterations (removal of exterior duct).
Location:10130 - 104 STREET NW
Plan 0828363 Unit 209
10130 - 104 STREET NW
Condo Common Area (Plan 1024646,1025682,0828363,1320413)
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This is for Canadian Pies and Donair.
 
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