While most 21st-century riverfront redevelopments are driven by urbanization, Touch the Water Promenade is distinct: it seeks to regenerate the ecology of the North Saskatchewan River Valley, while bringing people to the water’s edge and accommodating complex infrastructural functions. In a unique context within Canada’s northernmost major city, the plan strikes a delicate balance between the needs of wildlife and those of Edmontonians who cherish the river, whose daily use of the space has increased dramatically since the onset of COVID-19. A wilderness in the heart of the city, the riverfront is essential ecologically but also culturally, representing an identity specific to Edmonton–as an Indigenous space, where gathering, hunting, fishing, and trading has occurred since time immemorial, and a former industrial space whose degradation is finally being addressed.
