The new growth represents “almost a pent-up demand.” Money went to basic infrastructure and “potholes,” he recalls. “We weren’t building anything for a long time,” says Belanger, who got his start in Edmonton with the private sector in the early 1990s, arriving with an undergrad degree from the University of Manitoba and a master’s from Halifax’s Dalhousie University.
Since the latter, the city’s population has grown by about 300,000. Before all these, the last new library was opened in Riverbend in 2000, the last rec centre completed in Mill Woods in the ’80s. Since Belanger took the senior role in September 2010 after serving as an architect in his department, he hasoverseen the new Commonwealth Community Rec Centre, two library branches (Jasper Place and Highlands), two rec centre-library complexes (Clareview and The Meadows) and a park pavilion (Borden Park), to say nothing of new transit centres and numerous redevelopments. He wants this because the physical transformation of the city is underway. He wants them to be proud of our aesthetic maturation and excited about where it could lead. He wants to get citizens re-energized and re-engaged with urban design. But, of course, it’s bigger than that.īelanger sees his job as involving more than enacting a municipal mandate to get beautiful buildings up and running during what’s become one of the city’s biggest public construction booms in years. He shares this “just so they know,” he says. Milner Library renewal that he believes trumps Calgary’s stunning New Central Library project, or the avant-garde murals at the Ambleside Eco-Station (yes, art at the dump).
He could mention the sheets of purple carpet in the Clareview Community Recreation Centre, the Stanley A. Gregarious and energetic, and with a noticeable francophone accent, he’ll introduce himself to seatmates as “Carl” and ask where in the city they live.ĭescribed by Mayor Don Iveson as having “a vision for what Edmonton can look like and feel like,” Belanger will steer the conversation toward the new recreation centre or library or public art going up in or scheduled for his row-mate’s neighbourhood. This is where Edmonton’s city architect – a friendly guy with the look of a hipster cresting middle age, with fashionable modern eyewear, a trimmed beard and grey hair long enough to straddle carefree and career-minded – takes an evangelical bent. Some of Carol Belanger’s most important work happens on airplanes.
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