This is the eighth post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, introduced here by series editor Shannon Stunden Bower.
In spring 2024, I visited Allan Gardens in Tkaronto/Toronto, one of the city’s oldest parks, as part of an urban heritage conference I was participating in. The urban park contains a conservatory, greenhouses, a children’s playground, an off-leash dog park, and leisure green spaces.
Historically, the park was home to a settler urban horticulture practice in the 1860s and was a scenic landscape for the area’s elite to stroll through and get a reprieve from Victorian industrial life.1 Since then, the park has become something rather different from its previously instituted role of flora and fauna consumption. In the last century, Allan Gardens has become a central community space: a site of political organizing and counter-culture movements, as well as a home to many people who live in the park in semi-permanent or permanent tents and structures.2
Upon speaking with and listening to the staff and volunteers of Friends of Allan Gardens, a community-led project overseeing the park’s stewardship, our group learned of the many great initiatives currently underway in the park, like the growing of food and crops for a community food bank, public workshops and employment opportunities, and the protection of a Sacred Fire that has been kept burning in the park for over a year by Indigenous Fire Keepers. The visit demonstrated how Allan Gardens exists as a new kind of environmental and historical space, one that adheres to and has adapted to the current needs of its community members.
Like Allan Gardens, the nature of historic urban parks and places is changing in the twenty-first century—a self-adaptation process that reflects the current socio-economic climate and housing crisis in and across Turtle Island. This provoked change, and the necessity for urban historic spaces to assume new roles and definitions, is acutely apparent across so-called Canada. One such place is the Exchange District in Winnipeg, capital city of the province of Manitoba, in Treaty One Territory.
Developing and Memorializing a Settler City
The Exchange District, locally often termed the Exchange, is a multifaceted urban space in Winnipeg’s downtown, one where heritage, urban development, business, tourism, and the arts blend and overlap.
The area is most famously recognized for its wealth of preserved late nineteenth and early twentieth-century buildings and warehouses, which have been sites for many film and television productions. Architecturally, the area remembers Winnipeg’s metropolitan history, a period in which the city was a global leader in settler colonial grain production, transportation, and retail and wholesale trade.3
The Exchange was designated a national historic site in 1997, a commemoration that helped fortify a foundational settler colonial history of the nation’s expansion west and further situate the idea of Winnipeg as a “settler city” into public dominant memory.4 As a result, the site’s memorialization has contributed to negating Winnipeg’s historical and contemporary existence as an Indigenous urban space, which derives in part from Winnipeg’s precursor city, the Indigenous city of Red River.5
On top of its heritage veneration, the Exchange has also been the hub of the city’s art and cultural scene, with artists and creatives having congregated in the district for decades following the area’s deindustrialization in the mid-twentieth century.6 The area’s artistic history has shaped and steered the Exchange’s evolution as an urban space in Winnipeg’s downtown, and this history has heavily contributed to the current stylish cultural vibe the Exchange District Business Improvement Zone (BIZ) is envisioning and aiming to create as per their 2022 urban plan for the space. As one of the city’s business improvement initiatives, The Exchange District BIZ aims to uplift and support businesses in the Exchange through urban development programs, public events, and heritage-focused activities.
Like other downtown neighbourhoods in Winnipeg, development and businesses in the Exchange have gone up and down in the last few decades due to intermittent investment and energy directed toward the area.7 More recently, the Exchange has become the site of expensive development, with old warehouses being converted into condominiums, new builds appearing along the waterfront area, and expensive bars and restaurants popping up.
Although the area is currently marketed towards a younger and wealthier crowd, the space itself holds many different communities and people, including low-income and unhoused community members. The Exchange, like the entirety of Winnipeg’s downtown, is experiencing acute poverty and social inequality, due to systems of settler colonial urbanism, gentrification, and the lack of affordable and subsidized housing. Despite this, the district is currently being built and imagined for a certain public, one envisioned in ways that neither accounts for all the members of the urban space nor considers all members as equal stakeholders in new and upcoming development.
“Exchange Living” and Negating Home
The City of Winnipeg is still working to get “homeless people out of there in a friendly way,” Jamil Mahmood stated, replacing the more police-like model from before.8
Jamil Mahmood is the Executive Director of Main Street Project, a non-profit organization in Winnipeg that provides street-level services and support to those downtown residents who do not have housing or who require additional support. He and I discussed the previous and current policing methods used to displace unhoused people from the downtown urban areas, including the Exchange. Despite shifting from a more aggressive method of arresting panhandlers to a more ‘friendly’ and “community support[ive] mode of displacement,” the process still functions to displace houseless people from the urban space, Jamil explained.
Many unhoused people live in encampments in parts of the Exchange District. One such area is Stephen Juba Park, an urban park running along the Red River in the Exchange’s east end along Waterfront Drive. Created in 1983 and named after Winnipeg’s longest-serving mayor, the park was redeveloped in 2004 to accompany the rebuilding of Waterfront Drive, which began in the early 2000s. Even though the park is meant to serve the residents of the condos that run along the waterfront, it has taken on an unexpected and undesired role (from the city’s perspective) by becoming the home and community of a large unhoused population in the summer months.
As geographer Owen Toews describes, ‘There is still a prevailing form of public life in the area now dubbed ‘Waterfront Drive,’ a reality the urban wing dismisses and erases at every turn.”9 Although the City, urban developers, and the Winnipeg Police likely do not consider the unhoused community of Stephen Juba Park as desirable inhabitants of the space, this community does, in fact, form part of the Exchange’s public.
In their current redevelopment plan, aimed at producing a certain kind of urban neighbourhood and historic site, the Exchange District BIZ maintains a very limited view of who makes up the Exchange’s public. While the plan mentions houseless people briefly in a section entitled “Enhance Mechanisms for Coordination with Stakeholder Groups,” it does not address the acute and prevailing housing crisis that is the reality of the area and the broader downtown. Nor does it focus on developing subsidized housing in the neighbourhood.
There is also an omittance of how the plan’s goals will impact Indigenous peoples in the space. Despite stating (in one sentence) their desire to support Indigenous peoples in “reclaim[ing] areas that are culturally, symbolically, and spiritually significant through policies that encourage the identification, creation, and transformation of spaces,” the Exchange District BIZ provides no further details into what these policies might look like and how they might be delivered.10 Moreover, the plan lacks a meaningful conversation directed toward the present and future needs of Indigenous community members.
My conversation with Jamil revealed that the clientele and communities Main Street Project serves and works with, who are by majority unhoused and/or requiring social assistance, are not viewed as “real” stakeholders in the downtown or the Exchange by the city and those pushing development. This determination of who constitutes the area’s stakeholders is echoed by the Exchange District BIZ, which identifies the following major stakeholders in their plan: property owners, developers, art groups, business owners, and Exchange residents. Those determined to be lesser stakeholders are, by default, unhoused people, organizations who work with and serve urban Indigenous communities in the Exchange, houseless-centred organizations and shelters, and other community groups supporting lower-income residents living in the Exchange and downtown.
The marginalization and exclusion of certain stakeholders from the planning, consultation, and urban space-making processes in the Exchange is harmful and contributes to the disconnect between the district’s de facto public and how the area is being envisioned for the future.
A Neighbourhood Next Door
Much of the development in the Exchange also affects Winnipeg’s Chinatown, which is situated right next to the district. Although harbouring its own distinct historical and cultural properties, Chinatown is currently included as one of the Exchange’s areas in the planning boundaries put forth by the Exchange District BIZ.
I spoke with Tina Chen, a long-time community member of Chinatown and a Board member of the Winnipeg Chinese Cultural and Community Centre, to learn about if and how new development in the Exchange was impacting Chinatown.11 In our discussion, Tina used the term “Exchange Living” in reference to the urban life of the newer wealthier residents now occupying the newly-built condos, lofts, and apartments in Chinatown and the Exchange. Despite their presence in the neighbourhood, Tina noted that these wealthier newcomers are not often contributing economically to “Chinatown as a space and community.”
We also talked about the current urban imaginary being fostered for the neighbourhood by CentreVenture, the city’s urban development corporation. CentreVenture emerged from a late 1990s municipal political agenda to merge all planning authorities and capitalist capability into one urban development agency with complete dominion over civic development projects in the downtown.12 Tina stated that CentreVenture has come up with a “good formula” for development in urban communities. However, she doesn’t feel there is “an attention to thinking about what communities are there.”
Despite the large-scale and (on paper) community-centred redevelopment plans for Chinatown released in 2018 by the City of Winnipeg and CentreVenture, Tina expressed her concern for how new development proposals for the area will impact community residents: “Making the space is important […] But I think there hasn’t been enough [discussion] about for whom at this moment.”
The Changing Nature of Historic Urban Places
Like with Allan Gardens, an urban park that was successfully reimagined to serve its community of users, there needs to be a shift in how the Exchange is currently understood and envisioned as a historic urban area and site. No longer can the historic urban space solely function as a place to tour, visit, and gentrify. New development and imaginings of the space need to better reflect communities currently living in the district and view them as proper stakeholders and a part of the downtown’s public.
More attention needs to be given to thinking about how urban places can be managed now and in the future, in the aim of supporting those for whom the spaces serve as home.
Feature image: The conservatory at Allan Gardens. Attribution: Diego Torres Silvestre (CC),
Notes
1. Matthew Cowley, “Design, Intent and Changing Nature of Allan Gardens,” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 13 (2004): 25-26, https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/40429.
2. “Once Upon a City: Allan Gardens’ rich history of revolution,” Toronto Star, Dec. 3, 2015, https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/once-upon-a-city-allan-gardens-rich-history-of-revolution/article_bb955697-9cf4-5fe1-83f6-7071919c8c9a.html.
3. Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 275; Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2018), 61, 69.
4. Kari Valmestad, “(Re)Building a Prairie Capital: Development, Gentrification, and Settler City-Making in Winnipeg’s Exchange District,” Master’sMajor Research Essay (Carleton University, 2024), 25-36.
5. Toews, Stolen City, 32; Heather Dorries, David Hugill, and Julie Tomiak, “Racial Capitalism and the Production of Settler Colonial Cities,” Geoforum 132 (June 2022): 266.
6. Justin Lee, “Art Factories & cre8ery: A Case Study of Cultural Producers in Winnipeg’s Exchange District,” Practicum, Master of City Planning (University of Manitoba, 2008), 67-68, http://hdl.handle.net/1993/3103; Louisa Garbo, “The Revitalization of the Exchange District: Biennial as Catalyst,” Practicum, Master of City Planning (University of Manitoba, 1999), 12, http://hdl.handle.net/1993/2223.
7. Susan Algie, interview by Kari Valmestad, August 24, 2023; David O’Brien, “Exchange comes alive: New businesses, residents filling up the downtown,” Winnipeg Free Press, August 25, 2003, Winnipeg Neighbourhoods – Exchange District, Manitoba Legislative Library, Winnipeg, MB.
8. Jamil Mahmood, interview by Kari Valmestad, September 14, 2023.
9. Owen Toews, Stolen City, 200.
10. The Exchange District BIZ, Exchange District Plan 2022 (Winnipeg: Exchange District BIZ, 2022), 62, https://www.exchangedistrict.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2-Exchange-District-Plan-2022.pdf.
11. Tina Chen, interview by Kari Valmestad, November 20, 2023.
12. Owen Toews, Stolen City, 185-189.
