Article by: Laura Severs
'The track Edmonton is on is a leadership role in several respects,' says Gregg Lintern, former chief planner for the City of Toronto.
Edmonton is thinking outside the box, willing to take risks.
That’s the impression one of Canada’s top city planners took away on a recent visit to this city as he toured residential, commercial and recreational developments in the vicinity of the downtown core.
There is a willingness to experiment and innovate, said Gregg Lintern, formerly, and now retired, chief planner for the City of Toronto. “(There’s) a bigger appetite for some of level of risk than I might normally see from what is inherently a very market driven conservative (development) industry.”
What is that risk and what did Lintern like in Edmonton? We explore that in this second of a two-part series looking at how this city is handling residential growth in an urban setting. In Part 1, which ran in last week’s Homes section, Postmedia looked at how a city plan to create a major new leisure space (O-day’min Park) just north of Jasper Avenue, between 106th and 107th streets, spurred the development of multiple residential apartment buildings. This, in turn, has created the beginnings of a new residential hub within minutes of the centre of the city.
Developers, said Lintern, are generally risk adverse, hence the term conservative. But what he saw here — Autograph Group’s Mercury and Cobalt blocks (both rental apartments just off 124th Street and 102nd Avenue); Cantiro’s Ascension Block (nearby townhomes under construction), the Oliver Exchange, O-day’min Park and Maclab Development Group’s The Parks (a rental apartment tower adjacent to O-day’min Park) — was inspiring, he said.
“These projects are coming to life,” added Lintern. “There’s occupancies happening. We’re clearly, I think, hopefully, in a post-pandemic world now and we’re able to go back to the agenda of building really great inclusive, livable cities, and what I’ve seen so far in Edmonton is some really great indicators of some pretty positive urbanism.”
Read more in the full Edmonton Journal article: https://edmontonjournal.com/life/homes/risk-taking-in-redevelopment-is-paying-off-for-edmonton