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| Edmonton Churchill Square Panorama. Click to enlarge. |
Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo. These are big Asian cities with massive infrastructure projects, and they have that high tech, living in the future vibe. When describing a future city without dilapidated public transport, amazing architecture, and rich cultural experiences with tradition, modernity, shopping, history, these are all places that have that. Only Shanghai and Tokyo would have a long history pinned down, but theses cities have been massively redeveloped too.
To write about future cities, their successes, and problems, you need to look at these mega cities. These cities have their own problems with traffic congestion, overcrowding, poverty, but they also have amazingly glamorous faces that just overwhelm you with massive scale, fun, and interest. I live in Alberta and travel regularly between Edmonton and Calgary.
Both are mid-sized cities in North America, or teeny tiny cities in
China where a middle sized city in the tens of millions. This means
there are many growth potentials and being small makes you nimble to be
able to leap frog the big boys. In our cities, you have space to grow,
even if you don't think so. Both cities have invested in light rail
transit (trains are the way to go), upgraded freeways, business
development, and the arts.
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| Tokyo City Hall is huge, but the city is 50 times the size of Edmonton. |
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| The entire building from further out. That big plaza in the first photo is up there are treetop height. |
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| Edmonton City Hall. Not as big but very nice and more people friendly with the big pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter. |
I created a fun blog post about Edmonton at my Tokyo site here. We do have a great place under the sun.
I watched the film Lost in Translation again after watching it years ago. After having visited Tokyo I don't know how you couldn't have fun even on your own - you have to be seriously depressed to not have fun like it showed in that movie. When you travel to these big cities you realize just how much happens in them, and examining their successes in infrastructure development and cultural experiences can only benefit Edmonton and Calgary.
I'm going to focus on a few things for Edmonton.
- Invest more in the arts scene from art education during K-12, live music, public art, theatre, and art galleries. This may mean more grants and making cheap real-estate available for art galleries and art studios. Those horribly underutilized downtown LRT stations with the big empty spaces could become artisanal malls that open year round after facilities improvement and definitely better security. By artisanal, I mean anything to do with a craft from hand sewn goods, to organic farmed produce, custom bicycles, and any art from painting to computer games. You cannot direct growth like this as it is typically organic, but once you have critical mass, it is self-sustaining. The JR East company in Tokyo has developed many spaces under their rail lines into different types of themed malls, and some train stations have markets just for "local" food and products. The closest equivalents to these are City Centre Mall / Churchill Station and Southgate Mall / Southgate Station.
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| Outside Shibuya Station at night. It is busy. |
- High speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton. Bring the cities closer together at a loss, but we blow tons of money anyways - so why not lay infrastructure that will be useful in the future. For me, the rail trip would be nice, but for families, it needs to be as cheap as driving on an annual basis (yearly passes anyone?). Attending museums, concerts, and doing business should be pleasant to get to in either city. Highway 2 kind of sucks to drive on now. A bullet train, with a table and leg room, and some good food and drink is the way to go. You can even turn seats around so you can have 4 seats facing each other and a table in between.
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Bullet Trains
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- Better development of commercial real estate and mass transit together. In Tokyo and Hong Kong, the rail companies are private or are like crown corporations. BUT they operate efficiently, make profits, and don't ask the public for capital funds to develop. They are bigger than Edmonton Transit as they make money on operating malls and commercial buildings around the train stations. They exploit the fact that every train station is a hub and can generate revenue. Empty train stations are sad - instead of having a bustling busy area that exists around most train stations in Tokyo or Hong Kong. And yes, the train systems use smart cards which are also used at vending machines and many stores, especially the ones in malls run by the rail companies.
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| Shiodome City Center Building Ground Level With Big Atrium |
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| Looking up from Ground Level at Shiodome City Center |
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| Shiodome walkway (+30 level) underneath a monorail line. The street is below this. |
- Big mega developments are fun, but expanding and densifying places like Old Strathcona are good. We have to get people out and build up existing hubs. The arena project will work if it can actually hub people when there isn't a game or concert (fingers crossed). West Edmonton Mall is a nice mega project, but we also need other areas to build up and retain their original charm at the same time.
- The fancy metal sculpture that looks like a pile of mirrored balls by the Whitemud should have been in Churchill Square like the Sky Gate in Chicago. And yes, let's have a big statue of Wolverine there too, but we need a feature piece of art for our central town square.
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Giant Head at the Bow Tower / Calgary
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- Roofing over Churchill Square would be cool to create a all seasons space. More mega building projects that attract people and not the monster traffic interchanges we seem to build so they can be seen from orbit.
- Where is our sky deck or eagle's eye observation gallery to see the city?
- What is our city's identity, theme, or slogan. If we don't have a good one, we're better off with none and not spending a cent. No PR agencies please (so far the ones for Alberta / Edmonton projects haven't been all that great). It might be better to wait to see if some of these developments take off build one on our successes.
- Reign in the expansion of suburbs unless the real estate developers build denser developments with high rises and connections for rail transit. Our city can't afford low density suburban development as the cost of infrastructure, police, firefighting, buses, road maintenance, etc., costs too much. If burbs keep going in, they'll be second class neighbourhoods unless they foot majority of the bill for these things. Much like smaller towns and older neighbourhoods, they should also have central areas with services and amenities for walkable communities.
Some of these things sound kind of science fiction-like, but that is what I write for fun. I also write about Tokyo over at my
Tokyo Excess blog too! I like Edmonton and I'm not saying it should be Tokyo, but we need to take tips from successful cities and innovate to catch up. I just hope some of these things happen to make the city a more vibrant place.
Finally, just some thoughts about what the future economy would be like. We're currently highly dependent on oil and gas for our prosperity. What happens when alternate energy, especially solar + battery storage takes off? Price of oil will plummet again, but oil is still used for chemicals and plastics. Basically, we need to do more final processing in the province of oil into products and not export crude to gain the most value of the the resource.
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