COP Lands to be developed into shopping mall (Trinity@Winsport)

[Spring2008]

^Would it be unusual for MEC to open a second location? AFAIK they just announced another new location in Vancouver's Olympic Village.

Project video looks pretty promising. This should be the standard for suburban centres going forward. No reason this can't be more consistently implemented.

http://www.trinity-group.com/wp-content/...ary_final_movie_updated_new_smaller2.mp4

[CalgaryAlex]

That Trinity Hills project is atrocious. SO much surface parking and not enough residential to make the development worth it. That treed boulevard is a trick - this is just another wasteful power center.

[Fuzz]

But look at all those green roofs! Their GREEN!

[milomilo]

I don't really understand the thinking of having two completely disconnected 'town centres'? Of course you are going to have to drive to this, but if you have places to go in each of the two clusters then you are going to have to drive between them as well.

[Porfiry]

Originally Posted by Spring2008

^Would it be unusual for MEC to open a second location? AFAIK they just announced another new location in Vancouver's Olympic Village.

The Olympic Village store is a true move. The flagship is moving from Broadway to a new 45k sqft space.

As for second locations, it's not unusual. I mentioned the North Vancouver store, it's only 20 minutes from the Vancouver flagship. I'm pretty convinced this will be a second store, if only because of this snippet from an article back in July:

Southam said it is considering other new Canadian locations but is not in a position to confirm them now. “In the West, our opportunities now are in Calgary and Edmonton, where we have just one store in each city,” he said.

[Innersoul1]

Originally Posted by Spring2008

^Would it be unusual for MEC to open a second location? AFAIK they just announced another new location in Vancouver's Olympic Village.

Project video looks pretty promising. This should be the standard for suburban centres going forward. No reason this can't be more consistently implemented.

http://www.trinity-group.com/wp-content/...ary_final_movie_updated_new_smaller2.mp4

I am with you. I don't think that it is so outlandish to think that they would have a second location. Especially in a city like this with proximity to the mountains. I would imagine that many people avoid MEC because of its location and the parking. Not to say that the new location won't suffer from the same problems.

Originally Posted by CalgaryAlex

That Trinity Hills project is atrocious. SO much surface parking and not enough residential to make the development worth it. That treed boulevard is a trick - this is just another wasteful power center.

Who would want to live on that residential street anyway? People will just use the road as a shortcut from one end of the mall to the other. Where will the children play indeed?

[dazzlingdave88]

Is this a multi-phase development? Judging from the road layout on the overhead view it looks like the main boulevard comes to an intersection on the right hand side of the picture that is cut off in the drawings, but looks to be designed to continue at some point in the future.

[Fuzz]

I drove by on Friday, it looked like that road you speak of is already under construction.

[Wentworth]

The Mountain Equipment Co-Op is listed as "currently under negotiation." I wouldn't be surprised if Trinity is aggressively pursuing MEC as a tenant in order to give the project some "street cred" and not a case of MEC really being that interested in moving.

[Govertical]

I really had hoped this would NOT be another power centre, I cannot wait to see the garbage in the trees!

[MasterG]

Nice looking highway-oriented power centre. Better than all that have come before it except for the fundamental problem of it being a highway-oriented power centre that makes it completely irredeemable.

The land could be something. there could be better vision of it connecting to somewhere else with local traffic and transit. There could be a mixed use-town development to at least give the image of sustainability.

Nope. Only access is 80km/h freeways with enormous right-of-ways and zero capability for future redevelopment or integration into wider Calgary except wholesale tear down and start over again in 30 years.

[sim]

Originally Posted by DizzyEdge

One thing I can't determine from the renderings is although that tree'd boulevard looks good, and I'm happy the buildings come up to the sidewalks, is there going to be retail frontages there, or just blank stucco/glass sides of buildings.

EDIT: I guess from the overhead it looks like the north side will be CRUs, not so sure about the south side.

A better question might be, does it even matter? How many people are going to be accessing the CRUs from the front when there are massive parking lots behind them? It's a pretty safe bet that almost none of the people that drive here will. So who then?

Perhaps the people that will walk and bike here. All those people that enjoy navigating high speed travel lanes, jumping over jersey barriers, indirect and unintuitive sidewalks and pathways, retention ponds and reflecting on the civil engineering marvel that is the interchange. There might even be an additional five people from the "Village District" that hate free parking and enjoy needlessly unconnected street/pathway networks, that make the jaunt.

This is "density" done wrong, and product without process that uses what might be some decent urban design to urban-wash an otherwise very poor development. In my opinion, this kind of stuff is worse than some of our existing power centres. It will just provide more fodder for those that believe no one cycles (or walks) and that putting money into cycling (assuming the render is even an accurate reflection of what will be finally built - doubtful in any case) or the street public realm is largely a waste of money - because these developments will prove them right. If we're gonna develop a pile of poo, we might as well call it that and not try to kid ourselves.

But then the area does have a whole lot of roundabouts. Roundabouts are European, so obviously this will be great!

[sim]

Originally Posted by MasterG

Nice looking highway-oriented power centre. Better than all that have come before it except for the fundamental problem of it being a highway-oriented power centre that makes it completely irredeemable.

The land could be something. there could be better vision of it connecting to somewhere else with local traffic and transit. There could be a mixed use-town development to at least give the image of sustainability.

Nope. Only access is 80km/h freeways with enormous right-of-ways and zero capability for future redevelopment or integration into wider Calgary except wholesale tear down and start over again in 30 years.

Precisely.

[MasterG]

Originally Posted by sim

But then the area does have a whole lot of roundabouts. Roundabouts are European, so obviously this will be great!

What is so offensive about 4-way stops? Almost all inner city Toronto and Montreal have them on every side street with scare exception. Literally thousands of them everywhere. Seems like they work for pedestrian safety and are hardly an infrastructure cost burden.

[The Chemist]

Originally Posted by Design-mind

Toronto only has one store so my guess is they will move out of the Downtown to this location.

If they do this means we will probably see something new developed on the MEC site in the no so distant future.

There's absolutely no way that MEC abandons a downtown location for COP. A second store, OK, but I just can't see them leaving downtown.

[Fuzz]

Well there are only 2 roundabouts, maybe a 4 way at the big one could have caused traffic to back up to much. Looking at it though, did they grab a British roundabout? The flow arrows are small, but look to be all going the wrong direction....

[CalgaryAlex]

Bang on post, sim.

They could have done a nice grid pattern with a main street, offices behind and residential mixed throughout. Probably would have gotten more bang for the buck over time, but it's SO much easier to dedicate huge tracts of land for parking and a suburban grocery store, and plunk Superstore in there. The main street is a distraction which no one will use, because the residents of this area will not enjoy walking through acres of parking lots to get to their destination. They will end up driving. Anyone else arriving here will park, get the shopping done, and move on. No one will come to stroll along a street filled with banks and window displays for the stores behind them.

The location itself is kind of crazy as it is difficult to connect with any other part of the city. However, the solution isn't to give up and design a thinly-veiled power center... the solution is to attempt to create a self-contained community that is walkable within its borders and comfortable to live in.

Ugh, so frustrating to see people put this crap forward in 2015. Decades of research into the best ways to make a city/neighbourhoods work, tons of studies done which show these very designs are garbage... and they are still being put together by dead-weight developers and approved by the city.

[artvandelay]

You guys are hilarious. It's a site in a suburban location that is isolated by expressways and hills, with challenging access and topography. Of course there is going to be surface parking.

[artvandelay]

Also, it seems that some are missing the residential above the CRU units along that main street. This is the most significant mixed use project we've seen in suburban Calgary.

[CalgaryAlex]

Originally Posted by artvandelay

You guys are hilarious. It's a site in a suburban location that is isolated by expressways and hills, with challenging access and topography. Of course there is going to be surface parking.

Why should surface parking be a "given"? Why is the surface parking taking up huge swathes of land dead smack in the center of the plan? Surface parking could have been along the highway on the outside of the plan. Instead it separates areas of the plan entirely.