Here It Once Stood

When strangers in Montreal ask me what Edmonton is like, I often respond, “There’s lots of parking.” It’s the kind of potshot one can take only against one’s own hometown. But my answer is also rooted in architectural despair: Alberta’s capital is a place of urban sprawl and strip malls, shaped by decades-long zoning rules that required new developments to provide a minimum number of parking spaces. And though city council removed this policy in 2020 (blessings be upon them), Edmonton would be hard pressed to compete with Montreal’s gentle density and visual character. Quebec’s metropole features churches repurposed as performance spaces, street after street of balconied triplexes, and enough stained glass and crown moulding for us prairie people to dub it “European.” Indeed, you have to go quite far from the centre before suburbia kicks in and things start to look the same as they do almost everywhere else in North America.