The Kelowna Art Gallery above and the Kelowna Public Library anchor the Okanagan city’s downtown Cultural District Photo: Colin Jewall

BY Richard White

For most Western Canadian cities, the last half of the 20^th century was a time of decline at the core — everybody was literally fleeing to the suburbs. Even Vancouver, for all its urban vitality, saw the deterioration of its Granville Mall, Gastown, Chinatown and East Hastings districts. But the first decade of the 21^st century has been much kinder to our city centres — they’re quickly morphing from places to work into urban playgrounds. While much has been written about the booms in downtown Vancouver and Calgary, there have also been significant changes in the city centres of Kelowna, Edmonton and Winnipeg, and there are a few reasons for the shift.

The Kelowna Public Library above, along with the art gallery anchor the Okanagan city’s downtown Cultural District Photo: Brian Sprout, Tourism Kelowna

In 2002, economist Dr. Richard Florida released his book The Rise of the Creative Class, which attracted widespread attention among the people charged with making our cities work. In it, he declared that cities should focus more on becoming magnets for what he termed the “creative class,” rather than focusing on tax relief, business incentives or building manufacturing sectors.

Florida’s research demonstrated that in the 1990s, the cities with the highest growth were those most attractive to young people in creative professions — artists, web designers, fashion designers, architects. Cities such as San Francisco, San Diego, Austin and Portland topped his list. He then developed a series of parameters to measure a city’s attractiveness to this burgeoning sector. Since then, high-ranking cities have been using the information to market themselves as great places to live, work and play, while low-ranking cities have been putting together “cultural development” plans to address their deficiencies.

While some saw this as a new revelation, many others have disputed Florida’s findings. In fact, the importance of artists and bohemians in fostering urban vitality has been happening in places like New York, London and Paris for decades. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her seminal 1961 examination of the modern city, Jane Jacobs identified the benefit of attracting creative people and small independent shop-owners to city centres to maintain urban vitality.

Cultural and political leaders across Western Canada have taken up Florida’s challenge to foster creative places within their cities, with mixed results. Rather than developing Jacobs’ “bohemian village” model, many of them are focused on that idea’s flip side — the “urban playground.” Bohemian villages are about affordable living and working places for the creative class, while urban playgrounds are about condos, spas and designer shops for rich retired urban professionals. The challenge is to create places where both the bohemians and the bourgeois can live, work and play. In Paris, they call these “bobo” districts.

A rendering of the new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton

Cultural and entertainment districts are being created, expanded or updated in almost every city centre in Western Canada. New arenas (now called entertainment complexes), libraries, warehouse lofts, downtown condos, public art programs, waterfront parks, public art galleries, theatres and museums are popping up everywhere. Old downtown department stores are being converted into condos in Victoria and Saskatoon, and colleges in Vancouver and Edmonton. But with the rush to development, the young creative class is being priced out of city centre markets, so the question becomes, where will the most effective “bobo” villages pop up?

Kelowna

Over the past decade, Kelowna has been evolving quickly. Within a block or two of its waterfront on Okanagan Lake, a new library, arena, performing arts centre, Waterfront Park and an ambitious public art program have emerged. Several major, high-end condos and hotel/residences have also been constructed along the waterfront’s edge. These mega projects take up entire blocks for single uses and don’t promote the pedestrian activity that a cluster of small shops do but there is sidewalk vitality along Kelowna’s two main streets — Bernard and Lawrence Avenues.

Kelowna’s Cultural District from Lake Okanagan, during summer festival time

Architecturally, many of the new upscale condos in Kelowna look like they’re being built for Vancouver, and Kelowna is missing the opportunity to create something unique to their lakeside location, something more site-specific and scaled to pedestrians.

Since the early 1990s, Kelowna’s arts community has been working with politicians and developers to create the Kelowna Cultural District. In 2000, they adopted the Cultural District Implementation Plan strategy, which has resulted in an emerging “bobo” district at the north end of downtown around Cannery Lane and Ellis Street — once the centre of the Okanagan fruit packing industry. This is where a concentration of public and commercial art galleries have opened their doors — Art Ark, Turtle Island, Gallery 421 and Hambleton. It’s also become home to an eclectic array of shops like Chai Baba Teahouse, Monte’s Golf Shop, Guitar Works and an Opus Art Supply store — a definite sign that artists are working in the area.

In the neighbourhood just off Ellis St. along Coronation Avenue, Cawston Avenue and St. Paul Street, blocks of pre-war housing are used by creative types as working and living spaces, and on Clement Avenue, an old city Works yard is now home to a number of artists’ studios.

It will be interesting to see how Kelowna’s city centre evolves over the next decade, whether they can successfully integrate a livable cultural centre with the drive for expansion in second-residence and resort development.

There is no substitute for lively streets…we have too much homogeneity, planned streets…we have too much area afflicted with the great blight of dullness.”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

Edmonton

The biggest negative catalytic event to hit Edmonton’s downtown core was the closure of two major department stores — Woodward’s in 1993 and Eaton’s in 1998. The dilution of retail space in part led to the relocation of The Bay from its historic Jasper Avenue building to the Edmonton Centre a few blocks away and the subsequent decline of Jasper Avenue.

Whyte Avenue in Edmonton’s Old Strathcona district

On the positive side, the opening of the Grant McEwan College campus downtown in 1993, combined with the removal of the railway lines in 1997, planted the seeds for the revitalization of Edmonton’s core. Locating a major post-secondary campus in a city centre will often have a great effect on the cultural viability and vibrancy of a city. Montreal, with its five campuses, is perhaps Canada’s most lively city centre, with literally thousands of students coming and going day and night.

The University of Alberta is now refurbishing the old Jasper Avenue Bay store, re-branding it Enterprise Square. With a mandate to preserve the historical integrity of the original building, the new 430,000-square-foot facility will house a number of the University’s programs — including the Faculty of Arts’ Design Gallery, and the CHUM television and radio stations. The building is now providing a temporary home for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s collection and exhibitions while the Gallery completes a major renovation.

For more than 30 years, Edmonton has had a cultural and civic district around Sir Winston Churchill Square on the north side of the river valley. The area is home to City Hall, the courthouse complex, Central Library, two performing arts complexes, the civic art gallery and the Edmonton Centre shopping mall. The redeveloped Art Gallery of Alberta will reopen here. Designed by Randall Stout, a Los Angeles-based architect, its futuristic shell will put it in competition with the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg for the claim of most iconic contemporary building in Western Canada.

But this core area has not been a catalyst for the development of studio and living spaces for artists, and hasn’t yet fostered a hip strip of cafes, bookstores, commercial galleries, or small performance venues nearby. In fact, Edmonton’s bohemian village is not in its city centre at all, but south of the river valley, a good drive or transit ride from downtown, on Whyte Avenue in the Old Strathcona neighbourhood. In the 1990s, Whyte became Edmonton’s cultural core with the growth of the city’s wildly successful Fringe Festival, now the second largest in the world. The festival takes place every August in churches, pubs, nightclubs and pocket parks on and off Whyte Avenue.

Whyte Avenue has no major architectural icons, no major museums or theatres and no major retailers. What it does have is 300 merchants, 90 per cent owner-operated. It fits Jacobs’ model of a great pedestrian-oriented street, with a collection of small independent shops and restaurants. The Avenue’s greatest advantage is its proximity to 35,000 University of Alberta students, many of whom live in the area. It remains to be seen what the expansion of the University across the river will do for the downtown core.

Winnipeg

In the late 1970s, the Winnipeg neighbourhood of Osborne Village was being transformed into an interesting “urban” village where both the bohemians and the bourgeois were hanging out. Today it’s less vibrant, overtaken by the burgeoning districts of The Forks and the Exchange District.

Winnipeg’s Exchange District

The Forks is a collection of mega projects — boutique hotels to baseball parks, and soon home to the skyline-dominating Canadian Museum for Human Rights, designed by New Mexico architect Antoine Predock. The Forks is about tourists and day trips, not a place for the “creative culture” to hang out.

The Exchange District just a few blocks north is the new urban gathering place for Winnipeg’s creative class. A National Historic Site, it’s a collection of turn-of-the-century buildings which are being transformed into trendy lofts, galleries and restaurants. With more than 650 businesses, many of them small start-ups, and 250 not-for-profit offices, it’s an affordable incubator for small entrepreneurs. Hipsters can congregate at an amazing array of independent hardware, antique, furniture, retro and second hand shops mixed with high-end galleries and restaurants. It’s within walking distance of the MTS Centre arena and CanWest baseball stadium, theatres, museums and Red River College.

The Exchange District has the diversity and density necessary for a true “bobo” village, evident in the fact that it is home to one of Canada’s oldest and most respected artist-run centres — Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, and one of Canada’s most respected commercial galleries — Mayberry Fine Art, representing established Canadian artists like Wanda Koop, Joe Fafard and Robert Genn.

Though the District was derelict for many years, its old warehouses have been converted to offices, public spaces have opened up and five new condominium projects have broken ground along the river’s edge. But already the District has some out-migration by artists to the North Main and North Point Douglas areas as rents increase. This parallels exactly what happened in places like Paris, London and New York — the artists move in, fix up the area, make it trendy, the rents increase and they have to move on. But perhaps more than any major city in Western Canada, Winnipeg has the affordability to allow artists to live and work in the centre.

Is the focus on attracting the creative class just the flavour of the month, like downtown pedestrian malls, convention centres and indoor malls were supposed be the catalyst for urban renewal in the 1970s and 1980s? Mega projects have a big and immediate impact, but are they able to sustain vitality? And what happens when they aren’t new anymore?

To echo Jane Jacobs’ observations on urban vitality — mega projects like convention centres, performing arts centers and other large buildings sterilize entire blocks and inhibit street vitality. Unfortunately, bohemian villages are often victims of their own success, because with success comes higher rents that only national and international retailers and rich urban professionals can afford to pay. This results in a decline in the number of local shops, which were critical to what made these communities attractive in the first place.

Ideally, developers, planners and politicians create inner-city communities where both the young and restless and the rich and famous can afford to hang out together. In Paris, “bobo” districts are not planned. They are not created from a checklist. They grow from the needs of artists and other creative people to find affordable places to work, live and play. The challenge for all Western Canadian cities will be to make their city centres more attractive places for the bohemians and bourgeois — without sterilizing and gentrifying them.

Richard White is a Calgary-based writer who has written on art, architecture and urban culture for more than 20 years. He is the former executive director of the Muttart Public Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of Calgary) and the Calgary Downtown Association. He is currently an associate at Riddell Kurczaba Architecture.