When Dan Christian and his wife recently decided to move their family from Toronto to London, Ont., they were looking for a place to raise their children and launch a new tech venture.
But rather than head for the suburbs, as hordes of people have done for decades in this and other mid-sized Canadian cities, they found the lifestyle they were looking for in a rejuvenating downtown core.
They were blown away by the funky boutiques and fine dining on King Street and other bustling boulevards. They were equally impressed by an influx of new companies and an increasingly sophisticated entrepreneurial environment.
“There’s a lot more industry there now. There’s an educated work force and an affluent community, but without the high costs of (Toronto),” Mr. Christian explains. “(London) is also becoming more tech savvy and can foster more opportunities like that.”
With an appealing downtown fit for their new business – as well as closer proximity to family – they concluded that a move to this city of about 355,000 made sense.
Like London, smaller cities across Canada are investing millions to kick-start growth and bring foot traffic and entrepreneurs like Mr. Christian back to their downtown cores.
But revitalizing a tired downtown is an uphill battle that requires more than money – it takes time, strategic vision, a diversity of businesses and a realization that competing head-to-head with the likes of Wal-Mart is a non-starter.
“I believe making a main street from scratch or keeping a vibrant street in a small or medium-sized city is the most difficult task in city-making,” says David Gordon, the director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
“The market forces that are arrayed against you are very difficult to deal with.”
Over time, those forces – in particular the drive toward suburbanization – have slowly squeezed the life out of once-thriving downtowns.
“We did a survey seven years ago of planners across North America and we asked them to identify downtowns of medium-sized cities of between 70,000 and 700,000 people which were in a bad state, unhealthy or declining, and it was virtually all of them,” Pierre Filion, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning, recalls.
“There was only about 10 per cent that were doing well.”
Despite the bleak assessments, cities across the country are making progress in transforming dilapidated downtowns. The key, say urban planners, is to understand that injecting new life into a downtown core takes a careful blend of innovative tinkering and visionary planning.
Here are five key truths that civic leaders should embrace to reinvigorate their tired downtowns:
Traditional downtown retail is dead
The retail revitalization of central London is working, says Joe Berridge, a partner at Toronto-based urban planning consultancy Urban Strategies Inc., because local officials accepted the idea that once major retailers bolted to regional shopping malls or big-box “power centres,” they weren’t coming back.
Instead, the city focused on restoring its vibrancy with renewed residential and office development, and a completely different retail product – cafes, restaurants and specialty entertainment in place of major department stores.
Case in point: the downtown shopping centre Citi Plaza – which once housed The Bay – has been re-imagined as a multipurpose venue housing London’s central library, retail and office space, as well as satellite campuses of Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario.
Restrictive levies and bylaws no longer make sense
To attract new businesses and residential development to downtown, London removed development charges and parking requirements for new residential construction.
The result? Property value assessments in the core have increased by 22 per cent since 1998, while the city’s downtown population has grown by nearly 37 per cent.
Downtown is a dynamic event space
