Douglas Street's Plaza Problem
A couple of weeks ago, Victoria’s City Council passed a massive new mixed use development on the corner of Caledonia and Douglas. Overall, this is going to be a much needed addition to the city. The project includes a massive amount of affordable housing being built in conjunction with BC Housing and also has a full-sized grocery store at its base. With new homes and a grocery store, there is a lot to be happy with here for sure. Since the project was first announced in early 2022 though, I have had one big reservation about it, the large open space being proposed for the corner of Douglas and Caledonia. I have written about my concerns with this development before here.
I do love a good urban plaza or a park, but if you are a long time reader, you will know that one of the things I go on about are useless public spaces. You can read some of those articles here, here, here and here. When a new public space is created, it needs to done because it is needed, not because it looks nice in a rendering.
As you can see in the rendering from the developer, the plaza is very nice looking. It has a terraced plan that includes lots of stairs, a water feature with a main access from the corner of Douglas and Caledonia. Despite its looks, I am highly dubious of the ability of this plaza to live up to its purpose as a place for people to gather and enjoy the outdoors. Another thing that makes me even more certain about the unlikelihood of this plaza being successful is that I can look south along Douglas, block after block, and see one failed attempt to create a gathering space after another. None of them are used as they were hoped. I should mention that there has been a great discussion of this issue on Vibrant Victoria that started with this development over the last 18 months. If you read it, make sure to pay attention to Aastra’s comments in the thread, as they have wonderful and nuanced perspective on the plaza (and those to the south) that is foundational in me writing this article.
So I guess there are really two questions that come out of this new development: Why do we think that we need to put public plaza space on Douglas Street at all; and if we do need / want them, why do we keep doing such a bad job of building them?
To answer the first question, I would first go back to the purpose of an urban plaza. A plaza should be a place of refuge, relaxation and amusement. By that I mean, somewhere where we can step out of the way of those walking along the sidewalks; a place where we can sit down and rest; and a place where we can either do something or watch something. I would say that to be successful, a plaza would have to have all three of these aspects. In general, I believe a plaza to be smaller than a square, but I am not sure there is a real definition of the difference between them. We actually don’t have a lot great plaza spaces in Downtown Victoria. The best example might be Millie’s Lane on Yates, though it needs to get another café back to replace Fol Epi. There you have seating, it is pulled away from the street, so it has a relaxed and quieter feel, and (when the café was there) there is a lot going on with people walking by. There are people going to the video game shop or into the Caribbean restaurant or just walking through the lane. Despite not having the best seating, it is a fun spot to pause and just watch people go about their day. If you have a favourite plaza downtown, I would love to hear about it in the comments.
As I said, we keep trying to build plazas on Douglas Street. Depending on how you count them we have between 7 - 10 attempts at creating plaza spaces on Douglas north of the Royal Bank at Fort. I would say that with perhaps one exception, none of them are used as such. So why do we keep trying? Douglas is downtown Victoria’s main thoroughfare, it has a massive amount of traffic and many of the city’s main office buildings are located on Douglas. It is in essence, the most ‘downtown’ part of our downtown. As such, I think we feel we need to counteract that ‘downtownness’ at every chance, to create a space to get away from the city at the heart of the city. The idea is not terrible; I am sure there are many examples around the world where this had been achieved, but the attempts we create all seem to either not go far enough or really don’t take in the reality that is Douglas Street, a loud, busy downtown thoroughfare.
I am sure that many of you are already saying that there couldn’t be 10 attempts at plaza spaces along Douglas, and your right, there are more than that, but as I said, I started counting at Douglas and Fort Street and I can think of three more south of there that I haven’t factored in, as the downtown aspect starts to blend with the tourist elements a bit too much the further south you go. I am not going to talk about all of them, and instead focus in on three or four examples. I have left pictures of all of the plaza attempts below though. Let’s look at the best, the worst, the saddest and one honourable mention.
The Best
The best plaza based on use, is at the corner of Douglas and Fort. This space is created by the stepping back of the entrance to the Royal Bank building. There is a busy bus stop, a convenience store, the bank and there are just a lot of people moving about. There is also a large planter that has seating all around it. This spot is so busy that I think that it gets used because of that. It is a great place to sit and watch the real busyness of downtown. On a summer day, the spot is well shaded which I think helps as well. Being at the crossroads of two of the busiest transit stops definitely helps the space and also being at the western terminus of one of the best shopping blocks in the city is another bonus. It is interesting to note that while there is seating here, there is no escaping the urban aspect of this place, and yet it is almost always busy. It wouldn’t take much to make this an even more vibrant space by improving the planter and maybe adding some good lighting to the square.
The Worst
I mean this is hard, as there are so many terrible options, but I think the worst has to be City Centre Plaza. This one could likely have been decent if the building had been built at grade. Instead, you have this weird set of stairs going down to the businesses there. There is also a busy bus stop and the lower businesses are generally leased and focused on pedestrians. There is no where to sit though outside of the bus stop and you don’t really feel like you would want to sit on the steps because you would face away from the street. Rather than having a broad relaxing pedestrian space, you have the stairs that create a dead zone. Plus you get a cramped sidewalk, despite there being so much distance to the building face. It is all round terrible and given the grade difference, I don’t think it can be fixed.
The Saddest
I find a lot of these spaces a bit sad. I think they are sad because they show someone thinking about creating a space for people to enjoy. In the most optimistic perspective, someone was trying to create an urban refuge and just failed. The pessimistic perspective is that a lot of these were added to the design of the building to likely appease City Hall and really no more thought than that went into it. That all said, the saddest attempt at plaza creation along Douglas Street was done by the city itself. I forget the name of the initiative, but there was an attempt about 7 or 8 years ago to enliven downtown (we have a new initiative going on again now). Paint was put on some buildings, some buildings got big colourful wraps put on them and Douglas and Yates got this odd set of bird themed kiosks. The space at this corner is certainly big enough to create some sort of plaza space but the idea that was put forward was for these three sort of standing tables. I believe there was an idea for a food truck or maybe a vendor of another sort to set-up here and use the space, but it never happened. I have never seen these little kiosks being used outside of an #1hourphotoyyj event. As this corner is our meeting spot for the photo walks, the kiosks do get used to load film and show off cameras at least a few of times a year. It is an odd spot and I think that the kiosks have just melted into peoples minds and don’t even get seen anymore.
Honourable Mention
I want to give an honourable mention to the plaza space outside of 1515 Douglas Street, directly across from City Hall. There are a couple of things to say about this space. First, it is a beautiful looking plaza space. I truly love the sculpture and I think the high quality elements like the granite benches are beautiful. I also love that the reason it exists is not because a developer thought it might convince City Hall to approve the building, but because City Hall put arbitrary view cone perimeters around certain landmarks in the city, including City Hall’s clock tower. Still, while I will go down and sit next to the fountain and people watch occasionally, it is no where near as used as the space at Douglas and Fort. Most days at lunch time, when it should be full of people eating, it is empty. It likely doesn’t help that you have Centennial Square across the street and another large space at the other end of the building, Rotheringham Square, which are also both usually empty. I do think that if the bus stop was moved north in front of here, the space would be busier. The new restaurant that opened may make a difference, but given that it is a high end seafood place, I am not sure it is going to add a lot of pedestrian traffic.
As I have said in relation to so many public spaces, we need to look at them in the same way a business may consider a move to a new neighbourhood. If there is a lot of competition for customers, than you are going to have to really do something amazing to succeed, otherwise we are just creating another empty space. When we create an empty plaza we are doing that at a cost as we could have actually built a real business or provided more homes. Land is precious downtown and we need to be purposeful in the decisions we make around creating places for people.
I really would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments!