Edmonton wants you living in a WinterCity
By Elizabeth Walters
EDMONTON — The city of Edmonton is working on a couple of ways to make you fall in love with winter.
WinterCity will be launched in January and aims to create a more fun and interactive winter environment.
“Hopefully it will mean that we’ll be developing a strategy that will help make Edmonton a leading winter city,” project manager Susan Holdsworth. “It touches on the way our city’s designed: Is it designed for all four seasons, for winter conditions? It’s about active transportation, it’s about our quality of life in the heart of winter.”
The first step in the strategy will be to talk to local businesses about what they think will make winter life better. “If there’s more interesting things going on locally in Edmonton and around, then more people are going to want to come,” she said. “The point with developing this strategy is to tap into expertise and engage the local business community.”
The official launch will be the evening of Jan. 19 and will include keynote speakers at a symposium. A decision has not been made yet on who will be speaking.
“Any time anybody thinks about winter, there’s no positive.” Holdsworth said, “We need to change our perception. We’ve somehow lost touch with anything positive about winter.”
The ground is covered by snow in West Edmonton on Nov. 28 2011. Photograph by Elizabeth Walters
Part of the plan is to launch a “Winter Life’” contest to “ask people what they think will make them fall in love with winter in Edmonton,” Holdsworth said.
“We have to deal with limited daylight hours in the winter months, especially January, that’s the one thing that we’re guaranteed, is more hours of darkness,” she said, “So light becomes really important.”
While the WinterCity strategy is being built, a new festival called Metropolis is also being launched with a view to improving our opinion of winter.
Metropolis will take place in Churchill Square starting New Year’s Eve and run through the Family Day weekend.
Giuseppe Albi, the general manager of Events Edmonton, hopes the two-month long festival “will bring people downtown to enjoy the festival, do some shopping, and go skating at the City Hall plaza.”
The festival will also include bright light structures. “It’s a new winter festival in downtown Edmonton, and it’s based on cold climate construction technology,” Albi said. “We’re building four pavilions. They’re built with scaffolding and then they’re wrapped in shrink-wrap”
The Edmonton International Winter Festival will include a multimedia light and sound show, live entertainment and winter food.
Winter Light will be producing two festival events in 2012 that are not a part of Metropolis. The first will be an Adventure Walk in a snowy winter wonderland taking place Jan. 27 and 28 from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Mill Creek Park. The second festival, Illuminations, will celebrate the Year of the Dragon through fire, and will include a circus aspect. The event will be taking place Feb. 10 and 11, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Louise McKinney Park.