Have You Fallen In Love With Winter Yet? WinterCity Coordinator Sue Holdsworth explains why even if you hate the winter, Edmonton’s WinterCity Strategy is worthy of love.
How do you see winter? Is it a season of skiing, skating and snowforts? Cozy evenings in front of the fire? Hot chocolate spiked with love? Or is it a time of dark mornings, cars that won’t start, endless windrows and freezing temperatures?
When I first started as project manager during the development of the WinterCity strategy, our collective vision of our city weighed heavily on the latter. While there were some winter lovers in our city, their voices were in the minority. We had forgotten the joy of winter we had as children, and we focused on the inconvenience cold temperatures bring.
So we asked a simple question: “What would it take to make you fall in love with winter?”
And Edmontonians told us. Everything from more winter festivals to better snow removal to creative winter design to year-round patio culture and beyond.
Under the leadership of the WinterCity Think Tank, a group of community leaders and volunteers, a vision document with 10 goals was put together. It wasn’t a branding exercise or a tourism strategy – but a wholistic and broad-based look at how we can embrace winter more. We listened to what Edmontonians wanted and incorporated those ideas to the best of our abilities.
That was three years ago.
And now, the conversations have changed a lot in Edmonton – people are focusing more on making the most of what our winters offer, taking the opportunity to play, and transforming our city with their creativity and brilliant ideas. And we’ve tried to make clear to Edmontonians that this strategy isn’t just about ‘liking’ winter. In fact, you can hate the cold and still support the strategy – because really it’s about seeing opportunity in being a northern city.
We’re thrilled that a lot of our work has been pretty high profile. We’ve had tons of support from local media and bloggers, and we couldn’t be more excited about projects like the Winter Cities Shake Up conference and events like Red Bull Crashed Ice. But there’s also tons of things going on behind the scenes that you might not know about. For example, the Winter Design Working Group of the WinterCity Advisory Council (successor of the Think Tank) has been leading the development of winter design guidelines. They are in draft form now and were shared with the experts attending the Winter Cities Shake-Up conference. We have been exploring how to set up a winter festival coordinating body that would help increase the capacity and sustainability of our amazing winter festivals. Also, we have been working on a winter party toolkit for communities, looking at developing a winter patio development program, and taking part in conversations to change the rules around how alcohol can be served…among other things.
Some of the work that is most exciting is with partners like EPCOR who have sponsored the winter chalet in Victoria Park. We love working with partners like EPCOR, Edmonton Tourism, the City Centre Mall/Oxford Properties, the ski clubs and hospitality establishments, and are thrilled to support a number of community initiatives.
The WinterCity Strategy is not just about talking about embracing winter more and getting the word out about all there is to do. It is about actually making it easier to embrace winter in concrete and tangible ways. It focuses on making our everyday life in winter better – applying a winter lens to the way we build our city and design our public spaces, providing the right infrastructure to support desired winter life, and changing the way we budget, regulate and manage all kinds of things. It is about realizing the full return on our city building investments and supporting the shift to a more vibrant, more connected community in winter – thereby making Edmonton a better year-round city. We are thrilled with how far Edmonton has come in such a short time.
At the WinterCity office, we feel strongly that embracing the potential of our nearly 6 months of winter is a necessary part of city building – impacting our economy, our quality of life, the stories we tell about ourselves, and the very fabric of what it means to be Edmontonian.
I look forward to the blog posts by our contributors – all amazing people doing amazing things. I invite you all to join in on the conversations here, on Facebook and on Twitter.