“Diversity is the primary characteristic of Mill Woods. There’s ethnic diversity, there’s housing diversity. It’s a very diverse place. For [people] who have lived here for more than 30 years, it’s a place where we’ve put down roots. It’s a place where we’ve planted trees and watched them grow. But I think for a lot of people, it’s kind of an arrival place. It’s a place [where] people have come and landed from different countries, sometimes from conflict in different countries and have established themselves before they have moved on to other communities.”
Woodvale Village under construction, 1980. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, ET-28-574)
Frank Greif in an interview for the Mill Woods Living Heritage project, 2014. (Image courtesy of millwoodshistory.org)
Zard Sarty in an interview for the Mill Woods Living Heritage project, 2014. (Image courtesy of millwoodshistory.org)
Mill Woods in 1980. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, 28-1385)
Millbourne Mall, [ca. 1980]. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, ET-28-419)
Jannie Edwards has lived for more than three decades in Michaels Park, one of the four neighbourhoods that make up the Millbourne community in Mill Woods. Diversity is one of things Edwards loves the most about where she lives. And that diversity was taken into account from the get-go when it came to designing Mill Woods.
Frank Greif was a young urban planner with the City of Edmonton when, in 1970, he was put on a team tasked with designing the brand new 23.3 square kilometres (9 square miles) suburb. Greif spoke to historian Catherine Cole for the Mill Woods Living Heritage project in 2014.
“It was recognized that there would be cultural diversity in Mill Woods,” he says. “There would be people from Asian backgrounds, Middle East backgrounds, African backgrounds, who would choose to live there. And how do you design for that? If you can integrate things like open spaces, the transit system and education system together… wherever you’re from in the world, that will work for you.”
One of the defining features of Mill Woods is its curving streets and cul-de-sacs. They have caused no end of frustration over the years to drivers unfamiliar with the area. But Greif said there was a reason for designing it that way:
“There were a lot of interesting things going on in terms of the type of urban planning that was being done, the architecture that was being done, moving out of the old gridiron pattern into more curvilinear design. More open space. The whole use of walkways. That was something totally new. And trying to link the green spaces together so that there was a continuous movement that allowed people to wander through school yards, parks, walkways, public areas. It was to try to create a human, urban environment.”
“If you provide an opportunity for people to at least meet each other,” Grief continues, “whether it be on the bus or on the walkway, or in the local neighbourhood shopping area, or in the Mill Woods Town Centre, there will be some degree of cultural integration.”
Another young urban planner at the time was Zard Sarty. He joined the Mill Woods project in 1973. He was greatly influenced by the move to curvilinear design that originated in the 1920s in Radburn, New Jersey as a way to combat shortcutting by automobiles.
“They closed off grids,” Sarty said in an interview for the Mill Woods Living Heritage project. “They said streets should curve so if you were walking on the sidewalk, you would see a varied perspective. There wasn’t this wall of gridiron that had been traditional in North America for 200 years.”
But according to Sarty, the curvilinear concept backfired in Mill Woods.
“Everything in Mill Woods turned into a curvilinear design,” he said, “impossible to cut through, but also caused people to lose their way. Nobody could find where they were going. This had been overdone because engineers in the land development industry had copied what we had done as an experiment, but they took it as gospel and stamped everything as curvilinear.”
For better or worse, the curvy streets in Mill Woods are here to stay. But the new Valley Line LRT that goes through Mill Woods is a much more straightforward way to get around. And Jannie Edwards, who lives not far from the Millbourne/Woodvale Stop, is eager to use it.
“We’ve been waiting for it for as long as we’ve been in the community, which is over 30 years,” she says. “The community was promised LRT since its inception, so we’re really looking forward to it. We’re planning to take out art gallery memberships, symphony memberships, and have that accessibility. And also the environmental aspect of not driving and parking downtown is going to be great.”
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