By Katharine Sandiford -- It’s Wednesday evening near the Black Knight Pub in Yellowknife and you’ve just finished your pint of ale. The table is sticky, the chicken bones are piled up, you have to work the next day, so you bid adieu to your pals and head out into the cold, dark, and very empty street. You start walking – it’s only 10 minutes down windswept Franklin Avenue to your home – but you stop and flag down a cab instead. All the shops and restaurants are closed, the buildings are dark, and ahead, you spot a group of loitering drunks you think you should best avoid.

It’s Monday morning and you’re walking to work through downtown Iqaluit, narrowly escaping untimely death by dodging the haphazard stream of unruly vehicles and snowmobiles. You need breakfast and would love to grab a coffee and muffin, but there are not many businesses, let alone cafés, on your route. The wind is cold and blows hard past the bland, grey buildings, but you’re thankful it’s not summer, when even the slightest breeze whips the dust off the unpaved streets and into your eyes and lungs.

It’s lunchtime in Whitehorse and you’ve wasted your hour off deciding which of the dozen eateries around Main Street you should patronize. Strolling the extra-wide brick sidewalks, you’re distracted by the smell of the hanging flower baskets, the street-side sculptures, the display windows and sidewalk sales of boutique shops and the steady stream of friends and acquaintances you bump into. Finally, you settle on a caribou smokie from the cornervendor and dash back up to your office, where, mustard dripping down your chin, you look out at the nearby waterfront wasteland and wonder when someone’s finally going to build something there.

It’s tough being the downtown of a North of Sixty capital city. They’re supposed to be the heart of a region – the place to shop, dine, work, socialize and get stuff done. But a proper downtown is also supposed to exude the unique character and identity of a place. With transient populations, extreme climate, fluctuating economies and frontierstyle architecture and planning, downtown Yellowknife, Iqaluit and to some extent, Whitehorse, face a gamut of obstacles on their way to achieving their full potential.

But achieve their full potential they must. Across North America, downtown revitalization projects have proven to not only makes cities more livable; they’ve been good for contractors and businesses as well. Although each has its own distinct challenges, well-attended planning workshops in each Northern capital city articulate a common vision: people want a vibrant, safe, unique, attractive, mixed-use downtown where pedestrians, vehicles – and sometimes snowmobiles – can access the small businesses, parks and homes that thrive there.

Iqaluit – the capital of Nunavut – is still so young it’s hard to be too critical of the place. Thrust into the role of capital city only 10 years ago, it has scrambled to keep up with insane growth. With its origins as an American airbase, streets, buildings and homes went up with little care for long-term planning, design, or aesthetics. Complicated, inefficient, unpaved roads circuit a confusion of pre-fab government-issue buildings and homes. But now Iqaluit is the beating heart of a proud new public government that needs to operate at a higher level. “We have to find ways to adapt that existing fabric to the needs of a modern community,” says Michele Bertol, senior director of planning and lands with the city. “This is the capital of Nunavut and it has to function according to this identity.”

Iqaluit’s population grew to 6,000 in 2006, an 18 per cent growth since the 2001 census, swamping infrastructure. By 2020, its population is expected to swell to 10,000, and the city is doing everything it can to concentrate a portion of that growth in the downtown. Bertol says it’s aiming to house 17 per cent of the future population in the core area. That’s 280 units – mostly condos, triplexes and apartment buildings. Already, 185 have been approved by the city.

But more people means more cars. And in Iqaluit, if people drive, it’s often slow and there is a shortage of parking space. If they walk, they risk personal injury as there are few sidewalks. If they snowmobile – legal on downtown streets – they just weave in and out between the cars in a mad dash to claim some space.

“Lack of parking is a problem,” says Claire Kennedy, long-time owner of DJ Sensations gift and specialty store at the bustling Four Corners intersection of downtown Iqaluit. “New buildings are going up all around, but nobody’s adding any parking. There’s not going to be enough.” Kennedy chooses to walk to work and uses walkways the city just installed. “I try to walk inside of them so I’m not on the road but I have to tell you, I detest them,” she says. “They’re an eyesore.”

The new walkways are part of Bertol’s larger downtown plan, an internationalaward- winning document produced in 2004. When the city couldn’t afford raised concrete sidewalks it devised a cheaper scheme that kills two birds with one stone. For a few blocks, pedestrians walk inside a path demarcated by wooden posts shaped to look like traditional whaling harpoons; one part public art, one part civil engineering.

Bertol’s mission is to give Iqaluit an identity. There are things in this sea-can-made downtown that tell you you’re in the Inuit capital: hunters cutting meat in their front yards; snowmobiles on the roads; locals staring out from behind furry anorak hoods. But what Bertol’s looking for is something different: design and architecture, a built form that reflects a place’s identity and pride. “Everything was built in a very practical way,” she says. “Now we have to make a lot of effort, especially with the public space, to integrate an element of the culture in the design.” After three years of hard work, one of these dreams just came true: Nunavut Square and Iqaluit Square were completed last year, public gathering spaces right downtown linked by a linear sculpture garden and the harpoon-delineated walkway. “There is a lot of pride now. There are a lot of people using these spaces. Transformation is happening.”

Other work slated for completion includes a snowmobile route network, paving 80 per cent of the roads, redeveloping lots with new high density mixed-use buildings, more walkways, and improved lighting and litter pick-up programs. “I am very much excited,” says Bertol. “I feel blessed to be the planner that is here at such an important time in history.”

In Yellowknife, the downtown is also on the verge of a major transformation. Although neighbourhoods like Old Town give the NWT’s capital character, the downtown – with its out-of-place sky-rise office towers, straight, bland industrial grid of streets, only one street leading into and out of the main drag and general lack of welcoming features – has less to offer. During the day, it’s alive with thousands of office workers scurrying around to complete their tasks, grab lunch, pick up groceries and visit the art shops. But at five o’clock, the place is vacated.

“There’s certainly a lot of work to be done,” says Jeff Humble, Yellowknife’s director of planning and development. Eight years ago, planners and citizens wrote the visionary 2002 downtown plan. It asks for redevelopment with residential, mixed-use buildings, streetscaping and beautification projects, economic incentives to help businesses and developers and social initiatives for the homeless. But even though the plan won widespread support, it got shelved and collected dust for several years.

The only thing to come out of the plan was the creation of a Downtown Enhancement Steering Committee, made up of business owners, city council members, and residents. “It was very, very frustrating for many years,” says committee member Adrian Bell. “Knowing the downtown plan had been written yet nobody was developing and nobody was co-coordinating.” Bell has owned the downtown Javaroma coffee shop since 1995. He’s long been a believer that high-density, high-end residential developments will not only help to alleviate the housing and land shortage in the city – it will transform downtown into a living neighbourhood. “I will dance a jig when the first multi-use condo is built downtown. I want to buy one.” Bell thinks with more people living there, more eyes are on the street, more living room lights shining out, it will make downtown safer and better for businesses.

Much to Bell’s delight, momentum for revitalizing Yellowknife’s downtown has picked up. In late April, the city hosted a four-day community planning event to design layouts and identify future strategies for four key Yellowknife neighbourhoods – including downtown. “Maybe it’s the political will,” he says. “We’ve got a forward-thinking council and they’re trying to make improvements.”

Although there’s not much to show, the groundwork is there and revitalization activity is set to explode. The big launch is this summer. As city crews repave the main block of 50th Street, they’ll also complete full streetscaping extras: wider sidewalks, street furniture, bike racks, paving stones, plantings and jazzy new lights. Each year, a new lucky downtown block will undergo a similar makeover.

Also pushing through council this summer is a jaw-dropping new residential intensification program. It offers full tax abatement for five years to any developer that builds a medium-to-high-density residential development in the core. There’s also a “brownfield” incentive program, with a sliding abatement for redevelopment of abandoned lots. A facade improvement program is already funding the classy new Fuego restaurant to build a year-round deck overlooking 50th Street.

As for the city’s downtown social ills, Humble acknowledges it’s a complex problem. “I know some people who won’t go downtown because of that,” he says, pointing out the concentration of drinking establishments and a liquor store around downtown’s City Square Mall. “But you can’t just uproot the problem and relocate it somewhere else.”

Always the optimist, Bell believes Yellowknife is set for a big transformation. “It’s a very exciting time to be in Yellowknife. We could easily turn a corner within the next 10 years,” he says. “I’d like to see our own version of Whitehorse’s Main Street.”

Downtown Whitehorse, with its picturepostcard Main Street, seems to show up Yellowknife and Iqaluit, but success didn’t happen overnight. It’s taken a few decades of planning, compromise and hard work.

Some of the recent achievements: 125 condo units built within a block or two of Main Street since 2004. The waterfront, a precious band of now-vacant land perpendicular to Main Street, is ready for action. This fall, the new river-facing Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre and Yukon Public Library will break ground.

Other lots are serviced and for sale. The territory is also building a huge wharf over the Yukon River at the end of Main Street. It’s right behind the old fire hall that the city converted into a performance and fine art venue last year.

But despite Whitehorse’s seemingly vibrant downtown compared to its Northern capital city cousins, the work is not without its challenges. “There’s a battle going on between the big box world and the Main Street world,” says Zoe Morrison, the former downtown planner for Whitehorse, who now works in Juneau, Alaska. She points to towns like Grande Prairie, Alta., where downtown storefronts lay empty yet suburban parking lots overflow around big box retail stores. “Whitehorse hasn’t suffered yet,” says Morrison. “But it’s not because the city did anything to prevent big boxes. I think it has more to do with citizens that are dedicated to preserving the town’s vitality and a few business owners who really believe in Main Street.”

M.J. Warshawski, owner of four Main Street retail businesses and chair of the Main Street Yukon Society business association, is the leader of this pack. “Main Street has to be cherished and preserved,” she says. “We are lucky that those big boxes are downtown and not up on the highway, but now we need to better connect them to us.” She proposes a bus that handily transports tourists and other shoppers from the vast, free parking at the big boxes into the densly crowded, culturally interesting Main Street core.

Warshawski loves the hustle and bustle, even the slow-moving traffic, and cites something she calls “the Granville Island effect” – how some of the most interesting places in the world have the worst parking. She’s asking for a lot one block off Main Street to be turned into a multi-level parkade to funnel more customers to the core. But Morrison doesn’t think that’s a good idea. “That’s so expensive,” she argues. “And the need hasn’t really been demonstrated at this point.”

Compared to Yellowknife and Iqaluit’s issues, Warshawki’s complaints seem almost trite. Her other gripes are with archaic, unfair Main Street property taxes, with the slow trend of festivals moving out of downtown and into the new waterfront Shipyards Park, and the city’s recent decision to make business owners responsible for their own streetfront hanging flower baskets. “Man, that one bugs me,” she says. “It’s the mayor saying Main Street is not any more special than any other area. Well, she’s wrong.”