The most ambitious megaproject Edmonton has ever seen is rising in the sky in our downtown, but it’s still no sure thing that Daryl Katz’s Ice District is going to be a crowd pleaser.
To get a sense of where the Ice District is heading, I went on a tour of the area with Marcelo Figueira, an urban planner and designer with ParioPlan and a member of the Edmonton Design Committee, which reviews major building projects for the city. Of course, no Edmonton project is more major than the Ice District.
Now going up around the $483-million Rogers Place arena are the 66-storey Stantec Tower and the 54-floor JW Marriott Hotel-Legends Private Residences. The foundation is in place for a third tower, which will be mainly residential, and is set to open in 2020.
This week, the Katz Group also announced its second phase of development. It is to be built on the gravel parking lots north of the arena, and calls for as many as 10 new mixed-use towers to house as many as 10,000 people.
It’s a dizzying amount of building, especially for someone like me who has worked downtown since 1985 and has seen only the slowest and most incremental growth and change in that period, at least until the arena got built.
For his part, Figueira said the Ice District represents a new vision for the downtown, one made up of differing conceptions of city life. “The Ice District is kind of a hybrid,” he said.
Edmonton’s downtown has been guided by two previous visions, Figueira said, the old vision of downtown from the 1950s and earlier, which focused on small buildings open to the street with people moving around outside on sidewalks, and the vision that took over in the 1970s of everyone working in glass skyscrapers or malls and moving around on pedways.
In the 2000s, people realized that the 1970s vision was flawed, Figueira said. “We’re trying to move ahead of that mistake, but we’re not ready to go back to the 1950s. We’re trying to find something different.”
The huge buildings of the Ice District get all the hype and ink, but it’s the spaces between the structures that will help make or break the area as a people place.
You can already see the smaller laneways that will link the existing downtown to the Ice District. If those lanes are welcoming, with restaurants and cafes, people will want to hang out in them, as opposed to rushing through them.
“It’s coming together,” Figueira said of the laneways. “Those are the spaces where people are mostly going to hang out.”
A major challenge in the Ice District will come with all the shops, restaurants and amenities on the second floor and above in the various buildings. Those businesses might serve to suck life off the street.
“People might say, ‘I don’t need the ground floor any more. Let’s just go up,’ ” Figueira says.
One aspect of the plan that excites Figueira is the plaza.
The space is now a huge pit full of cranes, workers and the foundation of buildings, but one day it will be an open area for the public to congregate and celebrate, and for the Oilers Entertainment Group to stage outdoor events. Restaurants and outdoor cafes will ring it.
“All that I see about this plaza, it’s fantastic,” Figueira said.
The plaza should often seem full of people, as it’s not too large, Figueira said. “The plaza is not going to be too big, which is good. It becomes more human scale. It is about perception. A lot of places that we think there’s a lot of people, they are small spaces.”
Of course, the Ice District has been hailed as transformative by its boosters for years. It’s going to be hard to live up to that hype. A walk around the building site, though, should be humbling to any critic who doubted the arena would spur development.
There’s an army of workers and machines erecting massive structures that make old downtown Edmonton seem like some dull and foreign place. The arena itself is already a gem, a glittering, curvy sculpture that gives plenty of sights to admire as you move around it.
The real good news, though, is that along with all the enormity of the project, it’s also got a chance to succeed as a people place. Early indicators, such as the beginnings of cosy laneways are there, and enough to give hope.