Elevating Water to Amenity

Considering Water As Amenity Rather Than Problem

Winnipeg's streams, where they exist, could be unburied as shown above in the view of Seoul's delightful Cheonggyecheon urban renewal, at least here and there--to provide people the stress-reduction benefits of water features, and to allow for riparian benefits: filtration, riparian animals and plants, irrigation of gardens supporting food security.

Below: A stream-side cafe in California displays one of the relaxing pleasures of unburied streams. In colder Stockholm, Sweden, moored barges serve up civilization as spring-to-fall outdoor cafe-pubs. Stockholmare, eager for the lengthening days, heap pub-provided wool blankets upon their laps while they sip beers and chat over water sparkling in the sun. You know it's true: life on water is really better.

Commerical-ag flatlands (romantically: prairies) are notoriously poor in amenities for people. It's very unfortunate that Winnipeg was not sited 2 hours east, where the geography is beautiful and engaging; but as the city is where it is, it needs to claim and build up something natural as a fundamental public amenity to bring some reliable, ambient cheer to residents. (The Jets are not natural and they are not enough.) The rivers are pretty much what we've got to work with. 

Winnipeg needs a campaign to build attractive pedestrian/bike bridges (The one in La Barriere Park is a good, basic example.), and a big, bold plan for water quality, access, and navigability remediation for residents' leisure and transport. The rivers should be navigable for small, non-motorized boats (as are Stockholm's and Minneapolis' waterways).


Winnipeg needs public water access--more river bank public land, and realistic, above-water bank-side pedestrian and bicycling trails. The City of Winnipeg should conduct a Legacy public-good will-bequeathing campaign (carrots) with the assistance of the Winnipeg Foundation, as well as use eminent domain (sticks), to launch a long-term program to reclaim riverbank land in the city limits for public walkways, bike paths and gardens, and for recreational swimming and nonmotorized boat access. Public-spirited benefactors can be commemorated on riverside public park benches. Minneapolis is a model here. Wealthy residents' homes and commercial buildings are situated across public parks and their big front lawns from the water. They still have the best views and access that they feel their wealth entitles them to, but they don't have a petty-spirited private monopoly on nature. 


As well, Winnipeg needs continuing emphasis on facilitating ice skating on the rivers (a la Ottawa) and sledding on the river banks (a la Whittier Park in St. Boniface).

Urban water systems, mosquito control, and insectivores

Wherever there's water (everywhere), mosquitoes and other bugs are a problem in the flat, wintery, inland north. (Let's face it, in the spring and even summer, you can see from the air that Manitoba is one gigantic swamp.) How can we have the ambient water we need to grow food, increase security, and improve quality of life? Consider that the ecological steps taken through the Winnipeg dragonfly program (so far combined with other, more-toxic measures) are fairly successful and can be improved.

One thing that's instantly noticeable to a new Winnipeg resident is that there's an obvious dearth of bats in the summer evening sky. Can insectivore bats be bred for colder weather? Can government invest in insulated hibernation enclaves that would permit bats to live this far north in more significant numbers? Bats are fun to watch in the evening, and it's comforting to know they're gobbling up bazillions of mosquitoes overhead. They could be part of a better, more ecological approach to insect control. If so, perhaps the city and province could provide winter hibernation enclaves for bats, swallow houses along waterways, and education and incentives encouraging people to hang up summer bat houses to combat the mosquito and fly populations.

Winnipeg is at the northern boundary of bats' ranges; perhaps insectivore bats cannot be a significant part of the Winnipeg ecology. But since we are biotic, it's important to investigate modifications that would allow us to build up more robust (risk reducing), less toxic, higher carrying capacity ecosystems in the urban and suburban landscape.

Dam the Assiniboine

A major engineering and construction project to enhance water-based quality of life would be to build filtering dam on the Assiniboine at the entry/west side of Winnipeg (west of the Perimeter). The dam would control the mud-fest flooding, clean the river of its poisonous agricultural effluent, create a recreational lake out past the Perimeter, and turn the Assiniboine River east of the dam into a clean, pretty, recreational waterway, thereby vastly improving quality of life in Winnipeg. 

Southwest Manitoba has always flooded in the spring, traditionally carrying prairie mud eastward to Lake Winnipeg, and in the modern era spreading industrial ag effluent with it. But now in the Global Warming era, Southwest Manitoba is one big welling, weeping sore (And perhaps there too flood prone for the profitable continuance of 20th century commercial export agriculture). A west-of-Winnipeg dam would block that toxic ag runoff, and, along with programs to reduce cottager lake pollution, ease the woes of the pollution-devastated east side of Lake Winnipeg, restoring fishing and improving recreation. The feds, the province and the city should thus fund this.

For a model of clean urban water, refer to the expertise of Stockholm, Sweden.

There are some places where dams are environmentally destructive, such as in the North American Pacific Northwest, where dams destroy wild salmon ecology. By contrast, what is destructive to rivers and lakes in Manitoba is commercial agriculture and the runoff of its poisons. Waterways in monocrop export ag country, such as in the central North American flatlands, need chemical clean up.