Why Winnipeg?

Winnipeg is a decaying, dirty, freezing, crime-ridden, fascinatingly beautiful city. It's home to 700,000 people, roughly the same size as the inner city populations of Saint Paul and Minneapolis together. Combined with wind, Winnipeg's winters are characterized by the coldest temperatures of any major North American city. And depending on your definition of a city, it's the coldest one in the world. As Winnipeg's 6 month long winter concludes, its icy roads thaw, revealing the city's decrepit infrastructure while adding an exclamation point behind its numerous enclaves of poverty. If you ever talk to a Canadian from, say, Calgary or Toronto, they'll probably talk about Winnipeg in terms of it being the armpit of Canada. And while most will say this without actually having been there, whether or not they're right is besides the point. I don't care how many people hate Winnipeg, or love it, or never even think about it—it's still one of my favorite cities in the world.

Downtown Winnipeg, viewed from the Canadian Museum for Human rights

Geography is everything. Every culture in the world is fundamentally challenged and shaped by the geography for which it originated. If you have a spouse, you alter your geography every day just to be near each other. You live together, you vacation together. Geography is what we use to measure how vast the earth is, yet it's also what brings us together.

The geography of a city is what fundamentally separates it from the rest of the world—a unique haven of human existence with its own set of customs, weather, people. Geography and history often intersect, but this becomes especially true when it comes to the formation of a metropolis. For thousands of years, indigenous people lived and died in the place that is now called Winnipeg. At the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, humans long ago determined Winnipeg as a worthy place to settle. But other than these two rivers, what geographically makes Winnipeg an attractive place? Why settle there? As someone who experiences and analyzes cities through a spatial lense, it may seem odd that I would ever consider a place like Winnipeg. Because to me, the fascinating thing about Winnipeg's geography is that there's nothing particularly fascinating about it.

Winnipeg is one of the flattest urban area's in the world. This view is found at the top of the city's highest "natural" point, garbage hill—a hill literally formed out of historical trash.

You see, Winnipeg doesn't just seem to sit in the middle of nowhere. It actually does. But in the realm of geography, nowhere is still somewhere, and that somewhere happens to be a frigid, yet fertile river valley in the center of North America. One Winnipeger writes that his city is a paradox, "an unspectacular shack amidst the prairie’s desolation and a subtle beacon of Canada’s cultural fringe. It’s a disappointment and a pleasant surprise; an unexpected collision of the peculiar and the blasé. It’s both the middle of nowhere and the heart of the continent, and there’s no reason to pretend it’s anything else."

For most people, the simple fact that a city like Winnipeg exists in the midst of Earth's coldest prairie is its most compelling quality. Its ability to be forgotten is what's remembered most; its primary relevance lies in its irrelevance. Fine, whatever. Leave it at that if you want. But if you've never actually been in the streets of Winnipeg, if you haven't observed its lonely wanderer in -40° wind chill, if you've yet to see alcoholism in the form of an entire neighborhood, then you don't really know how ridiculous, if not tragic, Winnipeg can be. Winnipeg isn't interesting because it's a grungy city. And it certainly isn't interesting because it's situated on a prairie in the middle of Canada. Winnipeg is interesting because it's audacious enough to be both at the same time.

The emptiest, saddest Chinatown of all time

Most North American cities follow the same crude outline: downtown economic core in the center, surrounded by low-income neighborhoods, surrounded by middle-income neighborhoods, surrounded by high-income neighborhoods, surrounded by farmland. But what's intriguing about Winnipeg is its ability to skip steps along the way. Say for example, you were riding a bike down Portage avenue in downtown Winnipeg. Now take a left on Main Street, and proceed 10 kilometers northbound. You are now completely surrounded by farmland. And yet, the juxtaposition of skyscrapers to prairie isn't even the most disconcerting part of the trip! Because as you leave Winnipeg's downtown economic core and travel through its infamously low-income North Side, you begin to realize that that's all you've traveled through before reaching, well, not Winnipeg. 

So what happened to the winding rows of houses with expansive, perfectly green yards you should have traveled through? And why didn't you have to get on a 5-lane expressway to reach the countryside? Where OH WHERE are the swaths of suburbs necessary to transition from the urban to rural environment? For a solid 10 minutes, I stood next to my bike at the edge of the prairie on Winnipeg's North side and wondered those questions. For a solid 10 minutes, I looked out at the farmland and almost tricked myself into thinking I was in small-town North Dakota. For a moment, it seemed as if I'd just left someone's unfinished imagination of a city, and woke up to what had been there all along.

By now you're probably wondering, if Winnipeg is mostly just a few tall buildings surrounded by poor to mixed income neighborhoods in the middle of nowhere, what's the draw? Why Winnipeg? Why even bother visiting a city like that, let alone live in it? I still can't answer that question in confidence, but in less than a week, I can say that I discovered one of Winnipeg's most unique charms: it skips out on suburbia. In the Twin Cities, the pedestrian is completely contained. Without a car or bus, the inner-city citizen may travel in any direction and never lose sight of the built environment. But with Winnipeg, I can head Northbound for a few minutes and suddenly leave humanity behind. With Winnipeg, I can get on my bike, exit the shadowy boulevards of downtown, and travel back to a time before any of us existed.