Lloydminster Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan

Client City of Lloydminster
Location Llyodminster | Alberta | Canada

As one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, Lloydminster has experienced substantial development pressure over the last 30 years. Auto-oriented commercial development along the City’s major highways has made Lloydminster a regional shopping destination. However, downtown Lloydminster has not shared in this growth. A Downtown Redevelopment Plan was commissioned in 1988 to address struggling core retail, improve the public realm, and encourage redevelopment, yet little reinvestment has occurred in the last 40 years. Rejuvenating downtown Lloydminster presents a unique economic development and placemaking challenge.

The City of Lloydminster retained O2 to develop an Area Redevelopment Plan to guide redevelopment of downtown over the next 15 years. The Plan focuses on implementation of actions to animate downtown, with a vision to redefine the area as a destination for locals. The plan includes a land use concept, public realm concept, and an action plan.

Extensive consultation with City staff and the development industry ensured plan recommendations were actionable and attainable. O2 crafted policy sensitive to Lloydminster’s unique context, including financial incentives to stimulate private sector development, small programming actions, and capital improvements in public space to encourage redevelopment.

Equally important to the plan’s long-term success was building community buy-in and momentum. O2’s comprehensive engagement strategy was designed to generate excitement and change perceptions of what downtown Lloyd is and could be. As a key objective of the Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan, O2 inspired action and ownership of downtown in Lloydminsterites by organizing, delivering, and facilitating community walking tours, pop-up engagement across the city, and pioneering a new “Downtown Toolkit” card game.

By matching tactical economic development with strategic placemaking interventions, the Lloydminster Downtown Area Redevelopment Plan guides redevelopment in a way that will define the core as a place to be for generations to come.