Central planning
Urban-minded young Winnipeggers want the city to focus on building in, not out
Sat Jan 5 2008
Sitelines / By Ian Tizzard
ADD one more item to your list of things to do in the new year: Challenge the way you think about Winnipeg.
To that end, go online and visit a pair of Facebook groups started last year, both resolved to develop new ideas about how Winnipeg should grow, and both intent on making the old new again.
"An Urban Winnipeg" and "Save the Heritage Buildings of Winnipeg from Demolition by Neglect" embrace an ideal of "urbanity" that considers the benefits of filling the spaces in our city, and of building in, rather than out. People behind these groups say that under such pressures as high fuel prices and global warming, we have no choice but to use the space we already occupy. They say this sparse city needs to be dense.
A trio of friends graduating from the University of Winnipeg started "An Urban Winnipeg" last spring to share ideas and involve people in determining how Winnipeg grows.
Michael Pyl, one of the group's administrators, grew up in Linden Woods and studied at the University of Winnipeg before heading to Toronto last year to start post-graduate work in urban planning. He says living in fast-paced Toronto for a few months has already given him a new perspective on Winnipeg.
"In Toronto, when a lot comes up, developers jump on it," he says, "(but) downtown Winnipeg is littered with parking lots."
On top of our slow growth pattern, which favours parking lots over buildings, Pyl says we're spoiled by abundant space that lets us gradually expand while ignoring the centre.
"Driving from the airport, coming in from Toronto, I really noticed it," says Pyl. "Winnipeg looks like a city stretched a little too thin. I don't think Winnipeggers are very urban-minded."
"I think if Winnipeggers don't care, it's because they don't know," says Michael Petkau, a group administrator for "Save the Heritage Buildings of Winnipeg from Demolition by Neglect." That group started in August, spurred on by Daren Jorgenson, the developer who took over the keys to the Royal Albert Arms Hotel earlier this week.
Petkau lives on Maryland Avenue. Except for work, he spends most of his time in an area that roughly approximates the city's original boundaries -- north to Higgins and south to Corydon, though he sometimes goes east into St. Boniface and as far west as Kenaston Avenue.
"With increasing oil and construction prices, suburbanism is becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Ninety per cent of what I do in my life is downtown," says Petkau.
"I've never had to own a car, I know the local business owners, I know the local characters," he says, praising a sense of neighbourhood that he says he never found growing up in a south end suburb.
"I don't know of cities of comparable size that have really adopted urbanist principles," says Pyl's friend Nick Weigeldt, the Facebook group administrator who is also studying urban planning at the University of Toronto. Weigeldt says he's not sure if he'll return after school to a city he says has lots of potential. "Maybe if I see some real movement on rapid transit and the political will to fill spaces with buildings instead of surface parking lots," he says.
Weigeldt says he hopes the post-baby boom generation, a well-travelled, idealistic demographic, will create home-grown adaptations based on what they like about other cities' urban districts. He says it takes time for decision-making power to change hands, but figures that within 10 years, Winnipeggers will see the direction of growth change from out to in.
Pyl, on the other hand, says he's sure to return with his master's degree. "Winnipeg gave me the inspiration to get in to city planning," he says. "I have some naive notion that I can transform it."
ian.tizzard@freepress.mb.ca
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