What makes a great public space?

Submitted by Brad Lindeburgh, Senior Principal (Calgary, AB)

Spacing magazine recently published a list of the top 100 best public spaces in Canadian cities. As a landscape architect and urban designer, it got me thinking about what it takes to create a “great” public space.

The best urban design projects in landscape architecture come together with some key but crucial ingredients: opportunity, support, and collaboration. When the combination is just right, the result is a truly great public space.

Good opportunities for public spaces are rare, and when they present themselves it takes a committed team of design professionals, clients, and approval authorities to make the dedicated effort and see the way through challenges and obstacles to realize a vision.

Building support for a project is also fundamental. Public and stakeholder engagement not only provides valuable input for consideration in the design process but can also, if managed effectively, create a broad base of public support and on-going interest, creating grassroots champions-at-large to see the project through.

Collaboration is the ingredient that pulls the project through. It starts within the design team of landscape architects and urban planners, sharing ideas and striving for the best creative solutions. This collaboration extends to a broader team to include creative structural engineers, lighting designers, horticulturalists, and other specialists. The best projects are realized when the client and the public are also truly part of this collaborative team.

A rendering of a section of Calgary’s RiverWalk

These three ingredients all came together in a spectacular way for Calgary’s new urban waterfront, The RiverWalk. The RiverWalk is a key component of an ambitious revitalization effort for the Rivers District in downtown Calgary being undertaken by the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation. The RiverWalk Master Plan outlined a new vision for the Bow and Elbow Rivers waterfront and a new generation of public life and urban spaces in downtown Calgary. It establishes a continuous promenade that connects a number of the city’s premier attractions and communities through a network of waterfront plazas, natural areas, commuter routes, cultural corridors, and other gateways. We were privileged enough to lead and manage a multi-firm and multi-disciplinary team through the design development and detailed design process that brought the vision of this master plan through to reality.

While seeing great projects being built can be its own reward, it’s even more rewarding when your peers acknowledge a project’s success. So far the RiverWalk has been recognized with the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Award of National Merit and an Urban Design Award of Merit. And in the Spacing article, Phase 1 of the RiverWalk, now built and open to the public, was included as one of the top 100 best public spaces in Canadian cities and as #4 in their Calgary-specific top 10. The list was compiled through votes from a group of 135 architects, designers, writers, and Spacing readers from across Canada.

While the full list isn’t available online, you can find where to buy Spacing on their website. See if your city’s public spaces made the cut. We’re certainly proud ours did.