Border Vacuums and the Old Strathcona Public Realm Strategy

Jane Jacobs’ 4 generators of diversity form the core of her 1962 classic “Life and Death of Great American Cities,” and they have become common parlance in city planning conversations.  Less discussed are the four forces of decline and regeneration that she describes in part three of the book.  In this post I am going to explore one of these four forces: Border Vacuums, and how this notion applies to our current reality in the settlement of Edmonton.  

Jane Jacobs defines a border as “the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory” (p. 257).  She notes that borders “represent, for most people, most of the time, barriers.” (p. 259)

To roughly summarize the concept: Borders act as barriers to cross use.  The effect of these barriers can spread beyond the physical space they take up, to the adjacent streets, and so expand their influence, creating a “vacuum” of city vitality.  Borders are not necessarily harmful; they may serve to define districts.  They do their harm when they act to fragment a region that otherwise might grow to function as a district.  In some cases borders can be reimagined as seams, which knit together adjacent districts, zones of single use, neighbourhoods, or fragments of neighbourhoods (depending on the developmental history of the area).  In other cases, the best way to mitigate their effects would be to encourage as much diversity of use as possible in their vicinity.

Jane Jacobs considers massive single uses of any kind as likely generators of border vacuums, but also notes: “Railroad tracks are the classic examples of borders.” (p.257).  Like any high speed transportation corridor (freeways being the other prime example), they act as barriers to cross use from both sides, and preclude the possibility of being reimagined as seams.  We see this in Edmonton on the north side where the GTP railroad sits within the desolate environment it helped to generate, with the Yellowhead trail running along roughly in parallel to the south.  On the south side, we have the corresponding example of the CPR spur line from Calgary running north-south, with the twinned freeway of Gateway Boulevard and Calgary Trail running along side.  The north side transportation corridor separates the Old Town Beverly, Downtown/Central, and West End districts from the north Edmonton districts.  The south side transportation corridor separates southeast districts from southwest districts for most of its length.  Given the fact that there will never be city life within or near these corridors, both railway/freeway pairs have probably been developed to their best use by putting car-oriented commercial and industrial uses in the space between the freeway and the railway, or between the two twins of the freeway in the case of the south side.

At it’s north end, the south side transportation corridor runs through the center of the Strathcona District, rending it asunder, and isolating the neighbourhoods of Argyll, Hazeldean, Ritchie, and East Strathcona.  North of Whyte avenue, however, something a little more interesting happened.  The railway, which used to run right up to the river, has been retired, and now stops short of Whyte Avenue on the south side.  Furthermore, the development between Gateway Boulevard and Calgary Trail consists not of purely auto-oriented development, but of a more human-oriented development: churches, a library, two parks, two restaurants, the arts barns, historic buildings, and even some residential. [go for a walk here to compile the full list]. The corridor between Gateway boulevard and 102 st, where the railway used to run has a small park and a concert hall on the north end, but most of it is currently used as a parking lot - a use which acts as a border too.  Here, however, there appears to be an opportunity to reimagine a border as a seam, to knit together the fabric of the city across elements which tend to act as borders.  And that in an area where this is sorely needed - the border in question currently divides, not just a district, but a neighbourhood; a central neighbourhood that the city plan envisions accommodating a high degree of density of development at that.

The Old Strathcona Public Realm Strategy takes some action to achieve the end of reimagining this border as a seam.  It will be interesting to track how well the plan succeeds in this, and to see what we can learn from it.  The parking lot between Gateway Boulevard and 102 street is reimagined as a park from 83 ave to 85 ave, a plaza from 82 ave to 83 ave, and a residential development north of the Yardbird Suite.  All could be uses that better encourage cross use and city vitality, though this will be considerably hampered, I think, as long as Gateway Boulevard and 104st remain as unsafe and difficult to cross for pedestrians as they are currently.  To truly benefit from these transformations, the two roads need to be reimagined as well.

What other borders do we have of different types in Edmonton?

Do these borders define districts or fragment them?