Quote:
Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes
I look at what Winnipeg got with The Forks area and what Regina has so far got out of it's railyard area directly south of the warehouse district and I weep.
My city needs to stop building suburbia in the core.
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Yes it's terrible what so many so-called city planners and councils have allowed developers to do in so many cities across North America. Some of the things already shown in this thread are trying to counter some of that historical trend, it seems.
The Forks in WPG hasn't come about by chance - from reading a history of the area, there were visionaries going back to the early 70s, such as Val Werier, who understood the importance and potential of the site and worked to shape its future.
This whole area was literally the gateway to European settlement of Western Canada, similar to St. Louis in the U.S. in a lot of ways, and of course had a First Nations history going back thousands of years before that. All of this development has tried to take into account these historical facts - credit here to planners, architects, politicians and the public - while seeing the space as an evolving urban environment.
One of the things I forgot to mention located beside the museum is the skate/snowboard park - at least until recently Canada's biggest urban skatepark and bowl, which people like Tony Hawk have called one of the best on the continent.
Some people on the WPG board zealously deride a lot of this development. They call the CMHR a 'white elephant', 'Museum of Misery' (despite its 'Tower of Hope' and over 7,900 private donors, including the Chipman family which brought the Jets back - I wonder how many federal museums in Canada have that level of private donors - although I'm never sure if they advocate getting rid of all federal museums).
Anyway, I think if a lot of these people had been in charge, there wouldn't have been much at the Forks today except some old railyards and ugly buildings, but undoubtedly a lot of potholes would have been filled in a bunch of new suburbs. So to each their own.
Between the skate park and museum near the honorary Mahatma Gandhi Way is the sculpture of Gandhi donated by the Government of India, on the path to the beautiful Esplanade Riel pedestrian bridge, reconnecting a historical alignment to St.-Boniface (Broadway-Union Station-Provencher Blvd.) and as nice a pedestrian bridge as any in Paris.
www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/sites/images/gandhi1.jpg
http://ep1.pinkbike.org/p4pb2434837/p4pb2434837.jpg
http://www.bcrobyn.com/wp-content/up...sSkatePark.jpg