Un-Conventional Thoughts

On Wednesday it was announced that $93 million of funding to the City of Edmonton for a new Royal Alberta Museum [RAM] was not forthcoming from the Federal Government. The process to build a new 36,000 square metre museum located in downtown Edmonton was already under way with a design and location finalized. It seems that without that money there will be no new museum, or at least not the same one as planned.

In a totally (but not) unrelated City of Edmonton document about the state of Edmonton's convention facilities "...there is the potential to nearly double the number of delegates that come to Edmonton, if the appropriate facilities exist." and the need to "...attract 800 to 900 more hotel rooms into the core and [a doubling] of the downtown convention space within one single facility".

I would suggest to not expand the Shaw Conference Centre [SCC] any further but to relocate the RAM into the SCC and build a new Conference Centre next to the proposed arena, where the new RAM was supposed to go.

Why do that? First the SCC monopolizes a good portion of Jasper Avenue and the river valley. This space is, by default, private. With a large public attraction, such as a museum, we could make that space public again. Second, we could attract more people to a part of downtown which needs that activity, and they will likely walk there to do it, supporting street level commercial activity. Third, the view is beautiful, the building is already connected to the pedway system, and is in good repair. Fourth, a new conference centre located on the other edge of downtown could be integrated into both the pedway system for hotel access and the proposed arena development which should help with the development of the additional hotel capacity necessary for increasing Edmonton's convention capacity. Fifth, expanding the current SCC would require eating up more of the river valley unnecessarily.

Is this feasible? The proposed RAM would have double the gallery space of the current one housed in a 36,000m2 building. Nobody seems to know what the current gallery space of the RAM is, but according to their own website it was 4,000m2 when the facility opened in 1967. The current SCC has approximately 10,000m2 of exhibition space. For comparison the Glenbow Museum in Calgary has ~8,600m2 of exhibition space.