Largest Downtowns in Canada

[raggedy13]

I would consider downtown Winnipeg as stretching from the Red River in the east to roughly Osborne St./Memorial Blvd. in the west and from the Assiniboine River in the south to (and including) the Exchange in the north. Areas like Waterfront Drive, The Forks, the Broadway-Assiniboine residential area, and the Legislature would be sort of downtown shoulder areas. I would also add in the University of Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Art Gallery as another shoulder area.

[WhipperSnapper]

Originally Posted by isaidso

Downtown? Yes, Yonge/Bloor is very much downtown these days but that's a rather recent development. It bares mentioning that the Uptown condo building sits on the former site of the Uptown Cinema. This was uptown Toronto not that long ago.

Yonge and Bloor being downtown is hardly a recent development. "Uptown" persisted so long largely from nostalgic locals with the theatre's marquee as their visual representation. The city has grown tremendously outward from when Loew's Uptown first opened.

[wg_flamip]

I don't think it's altogether that useful to set definite boundaries for any downtown. The concept is by nature somewhat vague; we don't use it in actual speech in the same ways we would use other place names. I rarely hear the word being used as a noun in everyday conversation. It is, by far, more common to hear it used as an adjective or an adverb (one "goes downtown" or "to the downtown core," one does not "go to downtown"). I hear it most often used as an adverb meaning "towards the centre of the city." To my friends in Mississauga, my apartment (solidly West End) is "downtown" (this is exacerbated in Toronto, I think, because we have no agreed upon word or phrase for the "former City of Toronto" in common speech). When I go to my friend's place in the Village, I am "going downtown," but from there we might "head downtown" to Dundas Square or King and Bay.

To use an example from another city, when I went to Trent in Peterborough, I took many of my classes at the "downtown campus" located closer to the city centre than the main campus at the edge of town. Yet, from there one could "go downtown" to the main commercial stretch on George St. And then of course there's Manhattan where we really see this usage of the word in its purest form (one goes uptown or downtown depending on the direction they're travelling in, even if they're not necessarily going to the areas called Uptown or Downtown*).

There's definitely areas here that are concretely downtown, and areas solidly not - but there's a lot of grey space in between. Downtown grows or shrinks depending on your relative position to the city centre (itself a sort of vague concept), and it's only really useful in conversation when a broader context has already been established. Municipalities may set down boundaries for downtown areas and individuals may have their own idiosyncratic definitions, but these are essentially immaterial in actual on-the-street conversation.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Considering the distances involved that only makes sense. There's no way that anything but a very large city could support a downtown geographically that large. Downtowns definitely change over time and where a person draws such boundaries should change too. It shouldn't be based on history or naming conventions but rather on function and what role the area actually serves.

Precisely. When I moved to Toronto in 2001 I definitely didn't consider Yorkville to be downtown, nor did it feel like one. I remember standing at Yonge/Bloor with my mum on a sunny July afternoon and she quipped 'Where is everyone? It's like a ghost town!' It felt sleepy and on the periphery back then; I rarely ventured north of Dundas unless I wanted to 'get away from it all'. Toronto has grown tremendously since then and I'd very much consider Yorkville downtown today.

Downtown Toronto continues to expand with the most noticeable growth happening east and west. In the not too distant future it will stretch all the way to the Don River in the east and maybe as far west as Bathurst. Maybe by 2030? You can feel it gradually happening.

[softee]

^ I've been hanging around in downtown Toronto since the early 80s and even back then, Yonge and Bloor/Yorkville never looked like ghost town to me, it was always a busy area and I always considered it to be part of downtown -- albeit the northern edge of downtown.

[someone123]

Here's an animation of the changes in the Spring Garden Road area of Halifax. The "before" image is 2003 and "after" is 2014. This right side of this area would have been considered a marginal part of the downtown area of the city in about 1980. In 2015, it's hard to argue that it is not downtown. Soon it will be built out and the pace of development will probably slow down as the new construction moves farther south and west.



The yellow sites are upcoming developments, the Margaretta and 5885 Spring Garden. They are the last significant privately-owned surface lots in this part of town.

[GlassCity]

I don't think downtown Vancouver will ever expand in its definition. While Broadway will surely get denser and denser, it is separated by False Creek from the peninsula and as such is unlikely to ever be joined to the concept of downtown.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

I don't think downtown Vancouver will ever expand in its definition. While Broadway will surely get denser and denser, it is separated by False Creek from the peninsula and as such is unlikely to ever be joined to the concept of downtown.

Really? I think the distinction is starting to blur around Main Street (e.g. around the Central condos and the skytrain station) and soon that area will extend to around Cambie. Main and Broadway has become much busier too.

Before the Canada Line, Cambie and Broadway was more of a neighbourhood commercial area. Now it has underground rapid transit and is as busy as all but the busiest of downtown stretches. One day it could conceivably be a transfer point between multiple transit lines.

[GlassCity]

Originally Posted by someone123

Really? I think the distinction is starting to blur around Main Street (e.g. around the Central condos and the skytrain station) and soon that area will extend to around Cambie. Main and Broadway has become much busier too.

Before the Canada Line, Cambie and Broadway was more of a neighbourhood commercial area. Now it has underground rapid transit and is as busy as all but the busiest of downtown stretches. One day it could conceivably be a transfer point between multiple transit lines.

I think the business can definitely spread, and like you say it already has, but whether or not people will consider those areas "downtown" or not I'm not sure about. In other words, I don't think in 20 years people in Richmond will say "let's go downtown" and mean Broadway.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by GlassCity

I think the business can definitely spread, and like you say it already has, but whether or not people will consider those areas "downtown" or not I'm not sure about. In other words, I don't think in 20 years people in Richmond will say "let's go downtown" and mean Broadway.

I wonder if this idea of downtown as something every city has is popular in Canada because we've historically had relatively small cities with well-defined office/commerical/nightlife districts. We also had planning rules that mandated this type of urban form during the 1950-2000 period but are now slowly disappearing.

In the future if Vancouver continues to fill in with new buildings and more transit I think it will more closely resemble European cities where the interesting stuff is spread out more uniformly over an area of medium-density mixed use development.