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Tom Monto

Mill Woods a designed city that works (Millwoods Mosaic)

Jan, 2023:

Mill Woods is now about 50 years old. When it was first developed, it was one of the first and largest designed urban centres in North America.

Other designed cities had been built by that time internationally. Brasilia, a designed city set in the interior of Brazil, had been built to be the new national capital. It was built in four years, opening in 1960. Brasilia, like Mill Woods, was designed to be a modern city with a cutting-edge layout.

But that city has a very different approach to car traffic. Brasilia was built with fast traffic in mind. One complaint in that city is that drivers often start their journey by going in the direction opposite to their destination to get to an on-ramp for the freeway they have to use.

Mill Woods too had a special road network. But, unlike Brasilia’s design, Mill Wood’s design emphasizes dampening the automobile traffic, of funnelling it into definite high-flow routes and producing lighter traffic in the neighbourhoods themselves. Mill Wood’s curvilinear roads - crescents and ring roads - does stop through traffic and produces quiet cul de sacs and side roads. However the curvilinear roads have taken some getting used to. For years people had great trouble finding locations in the district.

Through the 1960s, the site of today’s Mill Woods was mostly farmland with sloughs where farm kids skated and played hockey in the winter. Part of it was used as a landfill dump.

Edmonton was growing rapidly, and the need for affordable quality housing was recognized by Mayor Ivor Dent. (Dent later ran as federal candidate for the NDP.)

The province secretly purchased 23 sq. kms. of land, at the time inside Strathcona County. When the time was right, Mayor Dent announced the ambitious plan - for the city to annex the land and to gradually and carefully develop the land, building the thousands of houses that today make up about ten percent of Edmonton. The plan, he said, was to avoid the problems that Brasilia and other designed cities had experienced.

And over the next couple decades the project was completed successfully.

If Mill Woods was a city on its own, it would be the fifth largest in Alberta -- only Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Lethbridge having more people. Mill Woods by itself has more residents than Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray or Medicine Hat.

Its scale is quite eye-popping.

Covering 6000 acres, it is bounded by 91st Street and 34th Street, Whitemud Drive (38th Avenue) and 15th Avenue. It contains 24 neighbourhoods plus a golf course and the large Mill Woods Park. Having many young families, it contains a large number of public and separate schools - 32 elementary, seven junior high and two high schools.

The old dump was covered with 10 metres of dirt, and the resulting hill now forms a feature of the Mill Woods Golf Course. It is one of the highest points of land on the southside of the river, and from there one can see the downtown and West Edmonton Mall. This long view also demonstrates the flatness of the prairie countryside, which has contributed to the ease of planning the massive undertaking that Mill Woods is. There were few physical obstacles in the way of a consistent plan.

Of course, there was Mill Creek that winds through the site on its way to the river from the countryside to the south. And it gave Mil Woods its name. The name, of course, evokes an old-time pastoral feeling that is a selling point for real estate agents. But it also serves to root the urban development with the land itself.

Actually the name from the start has been a source of confusion. Although commonly spelled as two words, many businesses use its one-word form - Millwoods. And if memory serves, even City of Edmonton signage at one time spelled the name the two different ways.

Mill Woods was conceived as a “city within a city.” The Grey Nuns Hospital serves the residents’ needs.

And the Mill Woods Town Centre satisfies the shopping needs for many area residents. Recently coming under new ownership, its appearance may be altered, with rental housing being built on site. The city’s newest transit line, Valley Line LRT line, is built to end at that location. Once the LRT line goes into operation, the Town Centre will be a way station on many people’s commute to and from other parts of the city. However, with recent detection of structural defects, the line, originally scheduled to open in 2020, is now still a long way from going into operation.

This is not the first transportation problem Mill Woods has faced. Despite Mill Woods being a designed community, connection to the rest of the city was not carefully considered. For a time in the 1970s, commuters had to drive across a dirt field to get between paved roads.

And once that was ironed out, where that traffic would go farther up the line was the source of a heated battle that involved the Mill Creek itself.

Mill Creek today is not the waterway it once was. When the countryside was farmland, the creek had a wide watershed of water-absorbing soil to draw water from. But today much of the water that once flowed down its creekbed is directed into city pipes. Part of the creek’s run is now through tunnels underground.

The Mill Woods housing development was once almost responsible for Mill Creek being routed underground much more than it is. Experts saw the creek’s ravine as a suitable route for a freeway connecting Mill Woods to the downtown and they said the ravine should be paved over from Argyll Road to the river. Fans of the ravine in the Bonnie Doon area fought that proposal hard and won, and the creek’s ravine park is now one of the pearls of the city. But motorists driving north on 91st Street must wonder why they have to turn right or left at Argyll Road instead of proceeding directly north, their intended direction.

But despite the problems Mill Woods has faced through the years, many families, newly arrived in Edmonton, have settled and made a home for themselves in that part of the city. It is said that 85 percent of the world’s cultures are represented in today’s Mill Woods, and today multicultural Mill Woods is an important part of Edmonton.

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sources:

“Local developer buys Mill Woods Town Centre, plans for infill housing” (Hamdi Issawi) Edmonton Journal, Dec. 17, 2022

“Mill Woods From experimental start on the city’s edge to hub of multicultural living” Sept. 10, 2018

CBC Radio online




Mill Woods Living Heritage, a group dedicated to preserving the area's development and cultural history, has an informative website.

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originally published in Millwoods Mosaic Jan 2023

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