Quote:
Originally Posted by BAKGUY
If you want to get technical, Winnipeg is One Weird city Period.
Our Chinatown is a mess crunched in narrow strip malls, then spread all over the place barely facing Pembina.. Just a mess, Disjointed, non cohesive..hideous. No character but Winnipeggers don't mind that.
Corydon is no longer Little italy.. More Fusion..Sushi town..
Heck, we are proud not having a bustling Downtown and our new Downtown is Polo park region...embarrassing to investors, visitors.
These are some of the very reasons Winnipeggers love to hate their city.
Little pride for the reasons above and just a quick park & dash to wherever we go, uncaring of the esthetics
We need to strive for better.
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I agree with most of your comment, except that I’d argue our new downtown will be the strip of Pembina from Bishop to Bison once Southwood lands redevelopment gets going next year. Although transforming a stroad is a decades long process atleast there’s a direction towards making the area more pedestrian friendly with the new Transitway infrastructure.
Also, who exactly is proud of not having a bustling downtown? I think in general Winnipeggers would rather have a vibrant downtown, it’s just that it appears the city is struggling with huge amounts of apathy right now.
In terms of aesthetics sure the strip malls on our stroads are bland and boring, but imo a large part of that had to do with conforming to setback requirements and parking minimum requirements. If Gillingham is serious about removing parking minimums on Portage & Pembina while allowing C2 & C3 zoning to have residential it opens up a lot of opportunities for more “aesthetic” development that faces the street with CRUs. The Arc and it’s phase 2 building under construction should be more of what we expect from new builds.