Reviving Downtown Victoria - Creating Cultural Capital
Why do cities exist? Okay… That might be too big a topic. But one of the main reasons that they do is because people want to come together in large groups to learn, create, and share. Enabling those aspects of humanity is an excellent way to make cities work better for everyone and for them to be a better place to spend time.
If you have been following my series on Reviving Downtown Victoria, you would know that this is the third article in that series. In my first article, I outlined the problem that we are facing with the loss of a significant number of office workers and some of the things we can do to stem the flow in the short-term. You can read that first article here.
In the second article, I looked at one of the first ramifications from a loss of downtown office workers, a glut of empty office space. Turning that empty space into vibrant and used space, whether it is for housing, markets or workshops is essential in maintaining downtown Victoria’s vibrancy. The article looked at some of these options and more, you can read it all here.
In this last article, I want to talk about something both bigger and more long term. As a city, Victoria has defined itself in a few challenging ways. While gone are the days of the “little piece of Britain,” the government town presentation is still dominant. We have seen a positive change in the working make up in the city over the last two decades; with a significant increase of people working in the tech sector, as well as in the film industry. We also have a large education industry with two big universities and a couple of colleges. For whatever reason, the last few items I have listed don’t seem to have bubbled up as core aspects of the city when people think about it though, and that is too bad.
Another piece that seems to have been lost is our art scene. When I moved to Victoria in the mid-1990’s Victoria was both very proud of the amount of artists here and the fact that this was an artsy town was part of the common lexicon. Unfortunately, as housing prices has risen, the ability for Victoria to be a hotbed for new artists has diminished. There are ways we could turn this around, but it would take some focused attention (more on that later). If we want to ensure that downtown Victoria remains an exciting place that people want to visit regionally and from afar, we need to have a plan for how to get there. I think that one of the best options for the city is to present itself as a creative cultural capital. To do this we need have a vision; expand on what we already have in place; and build supports for those pieces that we don’t have enough of.
The Vision
While I may not love all aspects of it, we do already have a vision for Victoria as a place of arts, culture and learning. You can read about it here on the City’s Create Victoria website. The key focus areas of Create Victoria are: Cultural Heritage, Community Cultural Heritage, Creative Cultural Industry, Festivals & Events, Natural Heritage, Intangible Cultural Assets, and Spaces and Facilities. Through these focus areas, everything from architecture to gardens is covered. The vision document is extensive and focuses on the entire city, not just downtown. There are four goals listed in the document:
Everyone feels welcome and able to access affordable spaces for creative participation, production and enjoyment.
The City demonstrates cultural leadership by collaborating with partners, and supporting and guiding creative initiatives.
Victoria champions and promotes its artistic excellence and creative scene, and continues to preserve and conserve its artistic and heritage legacies.
Victoria leads as a Creative City through innovation in fostering a thriving creative ecosystem.
Like many planning documents from the city, it is hardly a call to action, but it does have some solid ideas for moving forward. Unfortunately, having been written in 2018, it did not predict the pandemic. In 2022, city staff provided an update on how implementation of the plan was going. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, a fair amount of work had been completed in the intervening years, though a lot of it was planning that led to more planning. You can read the update to Council here.
Again, as with so many planning documents, the plan and the update are thin on truly bold initiatives that involve big pieces of work in the short-term. Still I think that a focused use of Create Victoria does provide an opportunity for us to implement changes to Downtown to make it a true cultural capital, especially when paired with the Victoria 3.0 economic plan.
Expanding On What We Have
Create Victoria does speak to leveraging the strengths we already have and this is truly important as it means we can enhance and promote our current assets and make a difference in the short-term. In particular, I think that Victoria could make some quick wins with highlighting our culinary scene, expanding the educational opportunities we have downtown, and expanding our festival season outside of the summer months.
Victoria has an exceptional number of great restaurants, as well as a thriving brewing and distillery industry. I have written numerous times about these aspects of Victoria (here and here are just two examples). Really promoting these businesses in our downtown is something that could happen tomorrow and would have an instant impact on the economy and employment. They also could become figureheads for our city’s identity. In particular, our brewing and distillery scene is immense given the relative size of the city. City funded advertising and defined tours of the operations could become a central part of our regional and international tourism brand. I do realise that there are tours of them, but when you look at advertising online, beer should be one of the first things you see.
As I said earlier, Victoria has an excellent selection of universities and colleges, working with them to expand their footprint to downtown would bring more students into the core. Having students in and around downtown instantly adds vibrancy through them just being there and providing the educational spaces would create a different aspect to the downtown mosaic. As I said in the previous article, we are about to see a lot of office space available in the near future, perhaps one of these buildings could be a new UVic or Camosun building? I also think that working with the Vancouver Island School of Art to expand its downtown campus would have a dramatic impact on our arts scene, as this would draw a different group of students and likely provide opportunities for news arts venues to see what they are producing.
Right now, Victoria’s festival season runs pretty much from late May until September, leaving the majority of the year without big events for locals or those from out of town. This is something that we should change. I think that Christmas in particular is a time that Victoria could focus on to expand the draw to downtown. As the Create Victoria document describes, we have a significant amount of venues available and being made available, creating a December city-wide music festival could be a significant draw. I think if this were paired with more work with businesses on creating a Christmas setting throughout the core, there would be an increase in visitors, especially from Seattle and Vancouver. New York has pulled off making itself a Christmas destination and so could we. Plus the weather here is usually better at that time of the year than in New York. Outside of Christmas, if we built a series of rain parks that allowed people to enjoy being outside in the rain, those could also potentially be used as venues outside of the summer season. These are some of the easier things to do, what are some of the harder more long-term ones?
Building Supports Where We Need It
As was discussed in the first and second article, with office workers leaving office buildings and many of those buildings potentially becoming vacant, it would seem that the last thing that we might need is a new development to further dilute the office market. There may be some scenarios or uses where new buildings may help to reinvigorate downtown Victoria. As was proposed in 2020, the City of Victoria is looking to redevelop a significant amount of land in the north west corner of downtown. Reliance Properties, the company currently working on the Northern Junk buildings, has now bought the area indicated for the new Arts and Innovation District and has begun to work on a plan. There are two parts of the plan that I really think could help downtown into the future. First, there is a plan to include significant marine light industrial in the project. These are jobs that work well with our city’s history and geography. Second, there is a plan to focus much of the project further from the harbour on the arts and housing. It is still not clear how the arts will be fully incorporated into the project, but there have been a couple of suggestions. There has been some discussion of moving the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria into the project. I am not sure that is the best idea, especially given the amount of bequeathed financing the art gallery has received to stay in its current spot and redevelop (I also still like the plan for the gallery in its current location). I would love to see a new gallery proposed instead, perhaps a west coast modern art gallery with emphasis on art produced in BC after 1950. Either way, a gallery will be part of the equation hopefully. Another part of the Arts and Innovation District plan that has had some discussion is artist housing. If this actually could be brought forward I think it could have a significant impact. As I said at the beginning of the article, as housing costs have risen, the ability for young artists to stay in Victoria and focus on their gift has dropped significantly. Beyond the arts and innovation district, I would also love to see resident housing provided for the Vancouver Island School of Art for students as well. Of course, just building a lot of housing everywhere, so we can get prices to drop would be the best solution to this problem and many others. While a new Arts and Innovation District is a long term project that has not even begun yet, I do think that something concrete like this does provide a visible place that demonstrates hope for Victoria’s downtown.
And that is what we need to focus on as we move through this challenging time, hope for a better downtown to emerge from the ashes of a massive shake-up of one of our core industries. We are already seeing some wonderful initiatives happening. Just last week we saw Victoria council announce almost a quarter of a million dollars to improve summer events. I said right at the beginning of the first article, Victoria is not alone in going through this massive change, it is happening around the world as everyone considers different ways of working, but that doesn’t mean we throw up our arms and let our wonderful downtown decay. We need to think of solutions ourselves, while keeping a keen eye on what ideas arise in other cities. I truly hope that in ten years I can look back at these three articles with a bit of a feeling of being a Chicken Little, either because it turned out not to be so bad or because we were able to easily transition into a new way forward. We shall see.
If you have thoughts on making Victoria in to a cultural capital, I would love to hear them in the comments. Also let me know what you have thought of the series.