Architect proposes a 'tic-tac-toe' redevelopment at Edmonton City Centre
A Stantec architect with experience redeveloping aging malls in Canada said Edmonton City Centre could be repurposed in phases.
"Designers can phase and design elements, and parts of the mall can still operate," Terrance Wong, a senior principal architect for Stantec, said during a recent Edmonton Design Week event. "(The mall will) obviously have to be reinvigorated somehow, in the short term, but the longer-term play would be, because of the scale of the property … a little bit of tic-tac-toe."
Edmonton City Centre is now in receivership, following changing downtown office work expectations, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the loss of anchor tenants such as Hudson's Bay. It has roughly 1.4 million square feet of retail and office space, created through the 1999 merger of Edmonton Centre (opened in 1974) and the Eaton Centre (opened in 1987).
Wong's thoughts add to an ongoing discussion about the future of the property, in the core of downtown. Taproot has previously reported on one consultant's perspective about how it could be reimagined, and on a very slow Friday night at the Landmark Cinemas inside.
To explain his thinking on phases, Wong walked attendees through phased changes to what's now known as The Amazing Brentwood at a former mall in Burnaby, near Vancouver. The first phase of the redevelopment was completed in 2021, and added nearly 500,000 square feet for outdoor retail, new offices, three residential towers, a plaza, and six levels of underground parking. Wong said elected officials in Burnaby and British Columbia have pushed for more density in the city, especially near LRT, and that this was a guiding force in the redevelopment.
If Edmonton City Centre was redeveloped, Wong told Taproot in a subsequent interview that he would start with the last home of Hudson's Bay, on the southwest corner of the property. The former store's space spans 168,000 square feet. The downtown Edmonton location closed in 2020, and the entire company closed in 2025.
The refreshed portion "would be a mixture of everything," Wong said, noting it would be subject to a developer's goals while emphasizing housing development. "I think you could easily put (in) two (residential) towers … It could be a mixture of rental, market, market condo, student housing, (and) some different forms of retail."
Wong suggested this and other parts of the mall could be repurposed into offices, post-secondary institutions, and street-level retail to make up the lowest floors in mixed-use towers. Part of the reason why downtown malls from the '70s and '80s, like Edmonton City Centre, are struggling is because the trend when they were built was to put storefront entrances inside malls rather than on the street, Wong said, noting that trend has reversed.
Another idea Wong floated for Edmonton City Centre is to renovate part of it with restaurant-quality heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (or HVAC). "Edmontonians love to eat," Wong said, at the recent event. "Why don't we renovate part of (the mall) to be a pop-up restaurant? Bring in the world's leading chefs and have them set up shop for a few months?"
He added it will take "all these little moves" to find a solution.
