The Decline of Downtown Retail: Exploring Edmonton’s Struggle and the Impact on Canadian Cities [Podcast]

Places like West Edmonton Mall, Polo Park , Yorkdale and Metropolis at Metrotown have the advantage of functioning like public spaces but operating with the efficiency of private commercial fiefdoms. Their tenants have the advantage of trading in a controlled, attractive environment overseen by a single landlord who can filter out all the unattractive stuff a business might have to contend with at a city centre location on a busy street with multiple proprietors: panhandlers, dirty alleyways, the mentally ill, the threat of crime, poorly maintained, vacant and decrepit buildings, etc. Instead, shoppers will encounter all the good things, theme park-level immaculate streets and corridors, a feeling of safety among the carefully landscaped and thematically designed pseudo-urbanity, no disruptions like demonstrations, or places roped off and under construction for infrastructure improvements, and last but not least, acres and ramps of free parking. What’s happened to downtown Edmonton makes it pretty typical of most North American cities: downtown is not where the merchants generally speaking want to be or where the customers want to consume. Edmonton and Winnipeg have somehow lacked those factors that anchor a central business district as a popular place for shoppers. Canada’s big three along with a few cities in the U.S. (New York, Boston, Washington D.C.) are exceptions in that they have managed to maintain the viability of their downtowns, but the blows keep coming, the coronavirus pandemic and the work-from-home phenomenon being the latest. The city centre will have no choice but to re-invent itself. Montreal, for example, has the advantage of extensive pre-automobile era deveIopment and a resulting legacy of middle density quartiers that help to anchor its downtown in general and its principle commercial artery, Rue Sainte-Catherine, in particular. Next year, a glittering retail theme park in the Yorkdale-West Edmonton mold will challenge the primacy of that locale. Royalmount will open with an array of brands that have hitherto eschewed Quebec. Now, they have chosen not to open downtown, but instead at the junction of two traffic-clogged, outlying highways on the edge of an industrial district. The crowds will show up, but I also believe that as in Toronto where Bloor street and the Eaton Centre continue to attract retailers and shoppers, Montreal Centre-ville has reached a critical mass of residents, institutions, and business interests that will allow it to maintain the viability of its iconic street.