Winnipeg’s most pressing land use issue

For decades I’ve been a reader of a unique American publication called the Planning Commissioners’ Journal, a voice of sanity on city planning issues. The editor of PCJ, regrettably, is working on the magazine’s final issue, and asked readers to send comments about their community, and the land use challenges it faces.

Here’s what I had to say about Winnipeg:

Rural areas may not stay that way: Think sprawl before it’s too late

I received an e-mail from a development officer in a large rural municipality in northern Alberta who hopes to persuade his council to reduce the minimum permissible size of residential lots from the current minimum of 72′ x 110″, and wanted a second opinion from me.

He’s looking ahead, as rural municipal officials and politicians everywhere should be. Here’s my response, more or less, to his query: 

Shoppers Drug Mart in Osborne Village: Be careful what you wish for

Shoppers Drug Mart in Osborne Village is expanding, crowding out its neighbours, a Vietnamese restaurant and a popular video rental store. The expansion will turn the entire ground floor of the new building into a pharmacy. Some cosmetic touches planned for the front of the building will fail to conceal the fact that three separate business at street level will be replaced by one.

In other words, diversity at street level will be replaced by uniformity. That’s what Jane Jacobs – a Torontonian who set the world of city planning on its ear – would be saying if she were still with us. In her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, she argued…

From Henry Ford to Walmart: How North America went from innovation with labour to innovation against labour

The “Occupy” protests – now winding down, but not forgotten – were effective in expressing rage against what was seen as a fundamentally corrupted social, economic and political system, and polls indicated that many agreed the demonstrators had a point. At the same time, many of us were uneasy about the absence of a bill of particulars.

Apart from the obvious – the obscene juxtaposition of extreme wealth and dismal poverty – what exactly is rotten?

Wal-Mart: Feeding off sprawl and giving it a push

An article in a developers’ house organ, Urban Land, brightly relates stories of empty retail spaces being filled by such innovative uses as medical clinics and libraries. The article says the empty spaces are a result of ”recession and prolonged economic stagnation”.

That’s not the whole story…

The price Winnipeg pays for subsidizing new roads

It’s not news to residents of central Winnipeg that our streets are in terrible shape, but it would be interesting to know just how bad the situation is overall. The Winnipeg Sun answered that question recently. The paper reported that, by the city’s own reckoning, more than 20 per cent of our streets are rated in poor condition, the lowest rating, meaning that the street must be completely rebuilt, or at least undergo major rehabilitation.

Wayne Glowacki, Winnipeg Free Press

Rural fundamentalism

North American society tends to glorify rural life, seeing it as the repository of clean living, family values and community stability. Sociologists used to refer to this as rural fundamentalism.

As a result of these ideas, it’s common, in this country and across the continent, to regard cities as, at best, necessary evils, characterized by noise, dirt, crime and moral degeneracy: pornography, illicit drugs, drunkenness, violence, degenerate art and music – with the conception of what’s degenerate changing from time to time. I’ve seen it go from Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to the Ramones to hip hop – probably with a few stops in between that I’m forgetting at the moment.

Who benefits from non-partisanship in local government?

Most news stories that mention municipal partisanship proceed from the assumption that partisanship in local government is an unalloyed evil. As I pointed out in my last blog entry, it is elites, not ordinary voters who benefit from non-partisanship. If the NDP, the Conservatives and the Liberals participate in municipal politics, we should be thanking them for it, not stigmatizing them.

Parties help us to nail down what prospective councillors actually stand for. The most important consequence of municipal non-partisanship is to make it easier for our representatives to conceal what they actually advocate.

All parties participate in local government, not just the NDP

Yesterday the Winnipeg Free Press published a well-researched piece by Bartley Kives that provided a clear demonstration of something I tell my students every year: Most Winnipeg city councillors – and, for that matter, most Canadian city councillors – claim to be free of party ties. Though they feel obligated to say this, everyone knows it’s not really true.

Walmart supercentre: Are we asking the right questions?

Walmart wants to turn its big-box store on Winnipeg’s Regent Avenue into a supercentre. Councillor Russ Wyatt says the city should require improved access for motor vehicles and bicycles, as well as trees to soften a bleak parking lot vista. The city’s chief administrative officer, Phil Sheegl, says he’s concerned about the developmental fallout from a negative decision.

In the city’s interest, Mr. Sheegl should perhaps be more concerned about the fallout from a positive decision. A series of studies covering Walmart and similar big box developments, summarized here, suggest that neither Mr. Wyatt nor Mr. Sheegl are taking a sufficiently critical look at this development proposal.

According to these studies, big box stores: