Winnipeg’s ghastly downtown: Time to think the unthinkable

May 3, 2010

[Updated May 30 — Further information from the American Planning Association on the effects of skywalks on downtown areas.]

I happened to be at a downtown cafe the other day when I overheard the barista having a chat with a visitor from Saskatchewan. The visitor’s stay in Winnipeg sounded as though it would be a memorable one, but not in a good way.

In her frank opinion, in spite of her home town (Regina? Saskatoon?) being a “murder capital” by her own admission, Winnipeg’s downtown was just plain awful — and she wasn’t impressed with the sight of “some guy passed out right in the middle of the street”, even if Downtown Watch was tending to him.

Welcome to Winnipeg, ma’am.

As Winnipeggers, many of us are well aware that downtown isn’t necessarily representative of the entire city. Life can be pretty nice in Charleswood, South Tuxedo, Lindenwoods, Whyte Ridge, River Heights, posher parts of Crescentwood, River Park South, areas of St. Vital west of Dunkirk and St. Mary’s, or the Canterbury Park area of Transcona.

Visitors seldom spend much time in those parts of the city, however. Their lasting impression of Winnipeg — all of it — is often based on what they see downtown.

Winnipeg certainly isn’t the only city to have problems with panhandlers and petty criminals in its downtown area. I was nearly knocked down in Dublin by a shoplifter fleeing a grocery store with a security guard in hot pursuit; and watched in amusement in Sydney’s seedy Kings Cross area as a vagrant wandered into an internet cafe, banged his fists on a keyboard, and stomped back out without the attendant on duty so much as raising an eyebrow.

Even though tourists are advised to avoid walking through parts of Dublin’s city centre or down the less-patrolled side streets of Kings Cross at night, it would be considered a miracle if downtown Winnipeg were as bustling with activity as those two places are.

Why are people drawn to central areas of Dublin and Sydney in spite of their seedy reputations, but not to downtown Winnipeg? A 2004 study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association might just shed some light on that.

As part of their research, four researchers — three from the University of Waterloo in Ontario and one from Wayne State University in Michigan — sought out the opinions of more than 300 academics, urban planners and professionals with an interest in urban development. These respondents were asked how important they considered each of 19 factors in making a successful downtown in a medium-sized city of 100,000 to 500,000 residents.

Six factors stood out as being crucial to a successful downtown, having been considered “very important” by more than 50 percent of respondents:

– An active retail scene

– Pedestrian environment

– Cultural activities

– Street-oriented retail

– People on sidewalks (i.e., walking around and doing things — not passed out!)

– Employment

What’s remarkable about this list is that Winnipeg has stomped all over four of those items with both feet clad in steel-toed work boots since the ’80s.

By constructing a skywalk system so that it’s possible to walk all the way from the Grain Exchange Building to The Bay without going outdoors — and by continuing to expand that system to the present day — we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that the rest of downtown Winnipeg is a pedestrian-unfriendly environment with as few people as possible on the streets and, thus, too little foot traffic to support street-level retail. (Indoor business isn’t what it used to be at Portage Place or The Bay, either, which weakens our standing on point #1 above.)

We have, however, put great effort into five of the six things that respondents considered least useful — each considered “very important” by fewer than 25 percent of respondents — to creating an attractive downtown:

– Public sector presence

– Historical character

– Presence of educational establishments

– Abundant parking

– Presence of social services; and at the bottom of the list,

– Presence of a retail mall

It’s time to think the unthinkable, bear the unbearable and say the unsayable about downtown: If we are to be serious about pulling downtown Winnipeg out of its depressed state, we need to seriously look at the possibility of closing the skywalks,* converting the second floor of Portage Place to non-retail use and turning the first floor into an outside-oriented instead of inside-oriented mall (or even taking the wrecker’s ball to that architectural monstrosity as it approaches its 25th anniversary in 2012); and accelerating the conversion of what remains of Cityplace’s retail space to other uses.

All to get Winnipeggers out shopping in the streets, which is the key to urban revitalization.

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* – The American Planning Association had this to say about skywalks in their book, Planning and Urban Design Standards: “A number of cities have developed second-level walkways, often claiming that climate generates the need for this solution. Unfortunately, virtually no North American downtown has enough intensity to support retail on both the street level and the skywalk level… In some selective instances, pedestrian overpasses are workable, such as between a department store and a parking structure, or between two parts of a civic building. Such elements do not generally contribute positively to economic health and vitality of a downtown, however, and should be discouraged.” (p. 417)

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Note: If you haven’t seen them already, Slurpees and Murder‘s James Hope Howard has written a couple of posts on this subject, both well worth reading. The first is his evening walking tour of downtown, followed by his retrospective on the 1987 opening of Portage Place as “the saviour of downtown Winnipeg” and the much different reality 23 years later.