Public give insight on Downtown

When Ted Zurbrigg was a young boy, his mother would send him to downtown London to catch a show with his brother.
More than 50 years later, Zubrigg avoids Dundas and Richmond streets, sticking to King Street and others to avoid the iconic intersection.
“It’s disheartening to me what happened to this city . . . I’ve traveled enough to know there are places in the world where it’s really fun to be in the downtown, and I’m glad London is trying to bring that here,” Zubrigg said Tuesday night at a public input session into the downtown master plan.
“There are a lot of people with a passion for our city and London has a lot of creative people and creative ideas, it’s just a slow evolution.”
More than 100 people showed up to the public workshops, held by the city at Museum London, the third in a series of input sessions for Londoners about the core.
Tuesday night’s event focused on “big ideas” — ways to transform downtown with a comprehensive vision that would change it from a sometimes scary, dirty and maligned area of the city into a bustling pedestrian center.
“We’re looking for those trans formative notions that tell us what we want downtown to be, how we will get there and how we’ll know that we got there,” said Gregg Barrett, London’s manager of city planning and research.
Previous public meetings had narrowed down about 300 problem areas for downtown to 15 major issues. Tuesday’s discussion focused on narrowing down the 15 even further and choosing priorities.
The main 15 areas included things like making Dundas Street and the Forks of the Thames more active, redistributing social service offices from Dundas and Richmond streets, establishing a City of London downtown parking authority and dealing with negative public perceptions of safety downtown.
People like Sandra Murillo came to give their input armed with a vision of what downtown London could be.
“When you think of downtown areas around the world, there is always a meeting space for all kinds of activities, something that connects people,” said Murillo, an internationally trained architect who currently works in landscape architecture.
“I’m really committed to this.”
Others, like University of Western Ontario student Chandra Dougall, said she sees a lot of opportunities for city..
“One of the biggest opportunities they’re missing out on is the students,” she said of downtown.
“Many have never gone past Richmond.”
The city’s urban designer, Sean Galloway, showed a number of 3D mock-ups of what areas around Museum London, the John Labatt Centre and the Forks could look like if some changes were made, including making the Kensington Bridge pedestrian-only and creating more shared public space.
Meanwhile, Zubrigg is hopeful that the downtown he knew in his youth can be revived.
“It’s doable. It’s happening,” he said.
“City planners will take the big ideas developed Tuesday night and draft a downtown master plan by April. After that, public input sessions begin on the draft plan and carry into June.