Land Use in Edmonton: The Downtown Neighbourhoods

Land use can be defined as the management and modification of the natural environment to, in the case of Edmonton, create built or urban environments. Land use dovetails with zoning where a land use plan provides the big picture view of how a city can grow, and zoning provides a ‘block-by-block’ description of the rules used to manage the big picture. Within the context of Edmonton, both land use planning and zoning are settler-colonial constructs that entrench inequity within the fundamental building blocks of the city.

Within this context, I was interested in land that is “under utilized”[1] greyfield land across the downtown core. Some of the questions I am trying to tackle are: Is there a concentration of greyfield land? What communities surround it? Why is it under utilized? Is there a connection between land that is under utilized and zoning?

To do this, I created a land use map of Edmonton[2], and measured to footprint area of land classified as parking, vacant and undeveloped within the 8 neighborhoods that make up the downtown core of Edmonton. From west to east, those neighborhoods are Westmount, Oliver, Queen Mary Park, Downtown, Rossdale, Central McDougall, McCauley and Boyle Street.

What is the extent of underutilized land in Edmonton’s downtown core?

Figure 2 (below) shows the areas of the downtown neighbourhoods that are occupied by parking, undeveloped and vacant land[3]. I’ve grouped all parking polygons (surface paved and surface gravel, parking structures, etc) in the land use data set as parking and I am only considering their footprints. I am also only considering the footprints for vacant and undeveloped land. Finally, the polygons in Figure 1 (in the header) directly correspond to the land cover percentages in Figure 2. Looking at the map, we can see that all of the 8 neighbourhoods have some portion of their area relegated as parking, vacant, and undeveloped, and the graph defines the percentage of land cover for each parameter.

Figure 2: Parking, Undeveloped and Vacant land in Edmonton’s downtown neighborhoods.

What’s going on here?

I was surprised by the variety of zoning in Westmount and Queen Mary Park (QMP). Single family detached, direct development control (I’ll get back to this) and small scale infill define the larger blocks, with some business and other zoning rounding out the neighbourhoods. There is not a lot of surface parking lots in either neighbourhood, and less than 2% of other land use is vacant or undeveloped.

Central McDougal has a variety of land uses from the Royal Alex Hospital in the N.E, to the Victoria School of the Arts and Boyle Street Community Services and some amount of parking desert in the S.E., behind rogers Place[4]. The parking associated with the Alex, down 101 Street and behind Roger’s Place accounts for the majority of the 5% parking allocated to land use. There is a small about of vacant land and undeveloped land the looks to be waiting for development. The neighbourhood is underlain by zoning that supports low and medium rise apartments, urban services and low intensity commercial development, and direct development control provisions.

Downtown also has a variety of land uses from Grant MacEwan and the RAM in the north, to the Legislature to the south. Almost 7% of the land area downtown is devoted to parking. Please note that I’ve only considered parking foot prints. I’ve not included parking that is under commercial buildings - for instance Commerce Place. I have included the footprint of multi level parkades. There is a not a lot of vacant or undeveloped land. Of the ~7% of land covered by parking, some is associated with the ‘business’ area. There is a cluster of parking in the ‘Warehouse Zone’ between 109 and 105 Streets, north of Jasper. Many of these will be removed with the great development of the Warehouse Campus Neighbourhood Park.

McCauley is a very eclectic community, with “Church Street”, as the cluster of churches along 96th Street is called, the North portion of Chinatown, Little Italy, and a number of railways as will as residential and business zoning. Considering all the business located in Chinatown and Little Italy, the amount of land devoted to parking is around 3%, and there is a small portion of undeveloped and vacant land.

The remaining neighbourhood, Boyle Street, is unique in an Edmonton context. Over 16% of Boyle Street is covered by greenfield, and of that almost 8% is surface parking. As such, I will discuss Boyle Street in my next post.

Conclusions

1. I find the language used and the act of land classification to be cold and transactional, removed from the connection, the emotional value and health we derive from land. It’s like the values we espouse as a city related to place making, reconciliation and being in the midst of a climate crisis are divorced from the transactional way we settlers use and value unceded, stolen Indigenous land.

2. Not included in the Land Use data is transportation infrastructure, despite the fact that it will occupy, as a rough calculation, up to a third of the land use in Edmonton with the blacktop alone being valued at $9 billion[5]. I will examine transportation infrastructure in more detail in an upcoming blog post.

3. While I have not done the math (yet) on this, it seems that there is a correlation between “Direct Development Control” zoning and a prevalence of surface parking lots (see below). I will get into this in more detail in my next post on Boyle Street.

4. In the beginning I asked “Is there a concentration of greyfield land? What communities surround it? Why is it under utilized? Is there a connection between land that is under utilized and zoning?” Generally, I don’t think that there is a strong correlation between zoning in the downtown neighbourhoods and greyfield land. Unless you happen to live in Boyle Street. I will get to that more complete and complex analysis in next time.

5. Finally, I did not consider gender, class or race in relation to greenfield land use and zoning. These are huge issues that should be treated with robust analysis and great sensitivity. I am still trying to understand how to adequately do this.

Blue represents Direct Development Control zoning, grey represents parking and black represents vacant land.

1 - “Greenfield” is used to generally describe the land that is classified as ‘parking’, ‘vacant’, and ‘derelict’. I found it extremely challenging to write about land without any value judgements. I think the language we use - “development”, “greyfield”, “greenfield”, and I have not succeeded in this, and I understand that different communities may view a parking lot, for example, as a gathering place that is relatively safe and away from the scrutiny of security that “protects” both public and private land in Edmonton.

2 - The datasets I used for this mapping project are: Land Use, Neighbourhood Boundaries, Zoning, and the road network. I created the maps in QGIS3.10.12, and used Open Street Map as a base map for reference.

3 - “Parking” can be defined as an area designated as a parking lot that charges a fee to park. I did not consider on-road parking. I am not sure of the distinction between “vacant” and “undeveloped”.

4 - Rylan Kafara, a University of Alberta PhD Student, wrote a great paper on the stigma faced by people experiencing homelessness proximal to Roger’s Place: Sociology of Sport Journal - Negotiating the New Urban Sporting Territory: Policing, Settler Colonialism, and Edmonton’s Ice District.

5 - From the City of Edmonton’s Integrated Infrastructure Services 2020 Infrastructure State and Condition report, page 31, Appendix A - Inventory, State & Condition and Replacement Value,