NETWORKS: WATER AND ICE

JMB: More distinctive even than the 5km/hr lower posted speed limit in urban areas, snowmobile and all-terrain quads on the streets join float-planes and boats on the lakes to create an urban experience entirely unique to Yellowknife.

Moreover, the road system in Yellowknife is its greatest strength for urban design and stands to support one of the most successful urban form anywhere.

The urban network could be otherwise unremarkable for those who neither ride nor fly, with a hierarchy of roads typical of suburban cities, if it were not for the amazing choice given by lake-covered bedrock the city calls home, with ice surface in the winter and green shortcuts in the summer.

Pathways are usually a less efficient alternative to the vehicular network, but here in Yellowknife, lakes must be circumvented by roads, so lakeshore pathways in the summer, and iced lake surface in the winter, provide shortcuts for pedestrian and snowmobile alike.

In Old Town, the lake is part of the network to the point where even in the summer, it is the site of houseboats that sit off the shore.

Networks and the road system are the "seams" in the "urban fabric."

Yellowknife is a much different town whether you walk, ride, boat or fly, or whether you commute. All the same, Yellowknife is a pocket size metropolis, with one - just one - of everything. A divided urban arterial links downtown to the subdivision which it bisects with the Strip. On the other side of downtown, road access into Old Town is a winding delight of narrow one-way lakeshore access, which culminates with the bridge across the peninsula at the iconic Old Float Plane base.

The progression of the urban network in Yellowknife as it winds and weaves around the Lakes is perfectly suited to a well orchestrated experience of urban space. Views unfold at selected locations, while the pattern of urban districts is distinct and recognizable. The hierarchy of roads matches well both the change in urban texture and the sequencing of districts. And road design is significantly distinct to express a unique reference to each urban space.

If this really successful network were to be adequately supported with focal points and nodes, the experience of urban form in Yellowknife would be greatly enhanced to the point where blighted areas would be de-emphasized and given an incentive for revitalization.

Functional traditions in Yellowknife would also find numerous outlets as a result, through urban form, given the unique components of our northern lifestyle, the best example of which is currently the iconic buses that make the transit experience in this city.

OPEN SPACE: BOREAL FOREST, BEDROCK AND LAKES

JMB: Few towns are defined by Open Space like Yellowknife - possibly because of the stark contrast with its modern functional design.

Open Space in Yellowknife blends through the urban environment. The open space is made up of boreal vegetation - black spruce and aspen - the hilly bedrock of the canadian shield, and lakes everywhere. Yellowknife sits on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and five major lakes organize the city's footprint: Frame Lake, Jackfish Lake, Range Lake, Niven Lake and Long Lake. In addition, Kam Lake to the South defines the southern boundary.

The Tin Can hill area, as it is known sports a communication tower which can be seen, slender-like from just about all parts of the town. It sits on a bluff on the edge of marshy grounds that define the southern edge of suburban residential areas and the Con Mine site, and separates them from the shores of Great Slave Lake.

The interminable beauty of the wilderness creates a special experience of the urban place, which follows the climate, daylight and the seasons, even where it meets - as in this view - with the unforgiving utilitarianism of foreboding towers at the Con mine site.

While they can be called anything but beautiful, the towers and the mine site are a part of the meaning, history and culture of the town, as are the weather and the isolation.

In the winter, when the mercury drops well below -40C, the air takes on an indescribable quality - all is still, and the light plays off in pinks and blue through the frost from a sun that strays never too far, nor too long from the horizon.

From Old Town, the Canadian shield provides contrasting views as the weather changes, and urban developments terminate at the Niven Lake Subdivision.
This part of the open space marks the dividing line between Old Town which sits on the shores of a peninsula on Great Slave Lake, and the town which has developed around Frame Lake.

A rest stop on the outskirt of town gives the visitor a delightful view to Jackfish Lake. The lake shore and bedrock are all accessible in minutes from downtown via marked wilderness trails that wind up and down the bedrock.

This continuity with the wilderness brings everyone a sense of freedom known only to northern towns.

And in your backyard, the parking lot or on the pathways, count you will run into a fox and her brood, a bobcat, even sometimes a bear, maybe wolves in the distance, and ravens always and everywhere.

DISTRICTING: FUNCTION THEN FORM

JMB:"Everything in its place, and a place for everything..." and every place buffered with open space. That is the credo behind districting.

And zoning - the creation of districts - is the common denominator of urban form in a modern town, where "live, work and play" merge a motto into a mission.

Each zone exhibits a pattern that speaks to the district where it belongs. Districting is largely responsible for texture and content of urban form - what is commonly referred to as the "urban fabric."

Institutional
Institutional districts provide the community with distinctive buildings, urban amenities and features. A totem pole -bear, whale and eagle - stands in front of City hall.

The totem pole is the original tall structure, the first skyscraper. It is a symbol of community, of heritage and of a sedentary lifestyle. It is evidence that urbanization - as a human need for social gathering - predates the technologies of construction.

Social gathering translates into densification, which in turn causes a need for building and servicing and ultimately gives birth to civilization, literally the organization of social communities into cities.

Urban identity though calls for more than a generic vision, and districting cannot carry alone a community's expectation for urban form. What zoning starts in plan must be completed with strategies in the third dimension to provide a total experience of the urban place.

Located on the shores of Frame Lake and adjacent to City Hall and Federal buildings, the Heritage Northern Light Centre is an earth building fitted in the landscape typical of the architecture in Yellowknife's "Capital Area." Capital Area is the institutional sector in Yellowknife where downtown merges the Territorial, the Municipal and the Federal.

Capital Area stands at the heart of Yellowknife's existence, and expresses the necessity for city building to gather and coordinate.

One other institutional area in Yellowknife includes the Arena and the Swimming Pool, at the entrance to the core and the shores of Frame Lake, with the Hospital in the background, accessible from the Strip or by walking along the Lake.

The grouping of these institutional buildings creates an area of open space. They give as well the opportunity for some interest in the urban fabric. A more utilitarian building for the arena flanks the modernist design of the swimming pool with the hospital behind, set off against green open space in the background and built parking open space in the foreground.

The end result effectively punctuates and gives rhythm to the boulevard on the way between Downtown and the Strip.

Undoubtedly, there is an opportunity here for improved images of Yellowknife as a City in this strategic and key node in town - which would start with resolving the open space and by articulating the connection with Frame Lake and the pedestrian short cut to the Strip and downtown, so good design supports function.

Downtown Core
The office towers of the downtown core are consistent with the image of Yellowknife as a modern city. It complements the institutional and government service sector in and around Capital Area, for business in the North.
The downtown core is made up of high-rise office towers, low rise shopping malls, and apartment buildings, interspersed with some single detached buildings and mix-use lots, quite typical of a North American city. However, the immediacy of bedrock and boreal open space is altogether unique. Several design strategies could be implemented to emphasize and harmonize the contrast and juxtaposition. The weather plays a significant role in the enjoyment of city streets downtown. On clement days, long-rayed low-angled sunlight can enhance the experience. Downtown is moderately busy, and continues to be a centre of entertainment once traffic calms down past Yellowknife's "rush-minute." The combination of a modern city street with Northern Arctic parkas is only found here in Yellowknife. Life goes on double-digit below freezing, for all age groups and activity types. Other northern towns and metropoles around the Arctic Circle have their distinctive styles - and this is Yellowknife's. In this case, it's the lifestyle which gives us the clues to our identity within this frame of reference.

Could anything be done to our urban core to match the lifestyle more? And then, would we take more pride in keeping it in better condition, and prevent - both in the middle of downtown, and at the entrance to Old Town - blight and derelict buildings from conveying a strange message and urban experience, all the stranger when one sees the remarkable number of outstanding, unique and original private and public architecture around town?

Residential
Residential districts in Yellowknife are consistent with a Canadian town. The material, texture, form and context of this house are all congruent with a mature neighborhood. The gambrelled roof, natural wood siding, mature trees carefully preserved on site, living quarters and deck above the garage make this house the perfect accent at this T-intersection. It is consistent with single detached developments on either side which - if not exactly specific to Yellowknife - are typical of a Canadian neighborhood that fits perfectly this far north.

Once decried the social ghettos of the industrial revolution, zones - in industrial societies come of consumerist age- are simply too simplistic to resist.

It is easier to train the urban rat to race a square maze than to come up with better cheese. Cheaper too.

Zoning is a powerful determinant of urban form. It is ordered, repetitive and - most significantly - predictable.

Zoning alone has shortcomings. All urban design strategies affect the modern town. This snapshot of a manufactured residential neighborhood could be anywhere, North America. That is its purpose.

Multi-Family

Commercial Districts - The Strip
The Strip in Yellowknife is a functional area that responds effectively to the needs of a consumer market place. Chain brand box stores articulate with strip malls. And it is adequately supplemented with convenience services, entertainment and professional buildings.

The area is tucked between Frame Lake to the East and residential neighborhoods to the West. The divided boulevard provides the necessary thoroughfare at an urban scale. This gives it great connectivity both at the pedestrian and the vehicular level. Little is needed to make it an attractive urban form, which could become a template applicable elsewhere in North America.

However, commercial malls today are undoubtedly areas in transition. While box stores and parking lots fit an economic rationale, box stores are not socially sustainable and parking lots are not environmentally sustainable.

The Strip is an American invention - unfortunately, American towns have turned their back on it, and it has been replaced with the Shopping Mall. The Strip once orchestrated culture and community and celebrated the automobile. It seems we feel social guilt and even shame from the automobile which becomes the ultimate scapegoat of the unsustainable lifestyle - even though we continue to impact urban space with big parking lots around the shopping malls, can't kick the commuting habit, and still lust after the biggest possible vehicles.

The Strip celebrated the automobile as personal private space in public areas and tarmac as the ultimate urban surface. The nostalgia for roller skates and mini-skirts, dinner trays and loud speakers hung from car windows, large animated electric billboards and back seat family planning does not exactly make for good design today. Still, one cannot but ponder at the inefficiency of commuting and parking, and how today little use is made in fact of the automobile as personal private space.

Personal transportation is far more sophisticated today than it ever has been. Baroque writers used to complain the fifty kilometres from Paris to Versailles were chock-a-block with palanquin chairs, from where they did absolutely everything - from creating literary and musical masterpieces, to eating, negotiating politics, even once giving birth - and in which they could be taken anywhere, indoors and outdoors. We since replaced human palanquin bearers, and draughthorses with rubber wheels, but not before first inventing train transportation and public transit.

The parking lot and commuting could soon be a thing of the past - and while commuting and parking makes way for information technology and docking, offices, commercial areas and multi-family residences could be significantly transformed. Automobiles today have everything: from heated seats to on-board computers, to viewing screens, trays, cup-holders, reclining seats, on-board communication and internet. They morph, and store and fold - and the new hybrid and electric vehicles spend no energy and no emission on idle. How incredibly useful and sustainably effective a stationary vehicle could be today. We could do so much from our vehicles before even driving them anywhere, if our social patterns and urban systems were adapted to do so.

Yellowknife could take a significant lead in this, our incentive being the weather, and the opportunity we already have with an outstanding urban network - after all if we fail to plan for the new demands of the world, we plan to fail for the demands of the new world, just as surely as if we trail the leading edge today we become the trailing edge tomorrow.

Industrial
The industrial sector in Yellowknife is represented by the service industrial to the local and professional community, and to the aviation industry.
It can be made more pleasant with improved signage and adequate site standards. A long term vision may see the development of an upscale industrial park to substitute the current industrial subdivision. But the current subdivision responds to the needs for a service sector with additional impacts such as noise, truck traffic and yard storage. If it is maintained free from pollution and odours, it is an adequate urban form with an eye to the future.

Zoning and urban design
Urban design by zoning is predicated upon imposing design requirements that apply to each property. It is then assumed these will multiply to produce form.

The difficulty with this approach is two-fold. First, zoning implements minima - it cannot implement the ultimate vision of urban form. This only happens in planned units of development, and mass-produced new subdivisions - and it doesn't work well with infilling and retrofitting. It takes for all properties on a block to develop according to plan so as to produce the expected net positive result. Until that happens, the lack of uniform design standard on neighboring property is not met by uniform regulations. And subsequently, excellence in urban form is subjugated to the cyclical economics of urban renewal - which means it falls short and it falls behind.

That is most likely the major complaint registered with planning departments anywhere from residents who question why they should be subjected to increasingly exacting standards when run-down non-conforming properties next door drive down the neighborhood while they are themselves required to spend more than they were prepared to invest.

Second, good design is not just the quality of the development. It is development that orchestrates on a backbone of key design elements that take advantage of, draw meaning from and emphasize the experience of urban space.

This is accomplished by identifying urban corridors, places of assembly, strategic landscaping, vistas and focal points, and by concentrating urban revitalization accordingly. These can be defined further with theories and methods of urban design such as pattern language, elements of urban form, determinants of urban space, implements of urban forms, mental maps, and townscapes [1].

To the risk of overextending a metaphor into an analogy, if we look at districts as urban fabric and streets as seams, we need to tailor our towns to geography and landscape, fit them for the weather, outfit them for social activities, and make them stylish to express our urban identity.

The urban whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. So many neighborhoods in Europe and Asia have deteriorated for decades, even centuries - yet, the grand overall design provides an experience of the urban space at the human scale which is still unmatched in the modern town.

There is no doubt the quality of housing and the office environment is far superior in North America, and has become the worldwide standard for a modern lifestyle. Vitality and lifestyle in the urban space however does not compare, and American cities still need to come up with formulas which will open up the town to culture and community. It is the Indoor/Outdoor and the Private/Public dichotomies that are the two major stumbling blocks, and Yellowknife is no exception.

Yellowknife is a metropolis with an outstanding architectural stock, a strategic urban network and incomparable open space. American municipalities share the same mission to make the urban environment efficient and functional. But excellence in a city is the expression of a vision. And excellence of urban form will be met with guidance for urban design, and incentives for urban renewal at all levels of implementation so that it becomes the expression of a collective consciousness. Regulations are insufficient. And regulations alone might stifle, sterilize and paralyze.

Yellowknife has a unique opportunity as a modern metropolis: the vision for our community should express our northern identity, our tie to the landscape and our unique lifestyle.

[1] Footnote:

Pattern language (or linguistics of urban form): rhythm, accent, emphasis, punctuation, delineation and destination.

Elements of urban form: networks, built form, open space, urban furnishings.

Determinants of urban space: indoor/outdoor, private/public, collective/personal, social/cultural, function/form.

Implements of urban form: architecture, urbanism, landscaping, engineering, socio-economics, administration and politics.

Mental maps: focal points, nodes, paths, edges and districts.

Townscape: serial vision, place, content, function and tradition.