Been a lot of action surrounding the city’s downtown this week. First, we got another dose of CRL news. So far, most of the talk has surrounded the proposed levy for the arena – something we’ve talked about at length. But it’s not the only CRL floating around out there. And it’s not even the first one. That honour goes to the Quarters revitalization levy that has been approved by the province this week.

The Quarters CRL covers the entire Boyle neighbourhood. As the city points out, that includes both the Boyle Renaissance project and The Quarters. They’re hoping to raise $56 million for those projects and other infrastructure work in the area.

While much more attention has been given to the bigger, sexier projects like the proposed downtown arena or the City Centre airport redevelopment, this is a big deal. I honestly think that the redevelopment of The Quarters will be the project that would have the greatest effect on the city’s core and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it is the most important project when it comes to revitalizing our sad downtown. It’s a good thing to see more movement on it, even if it does continue to be overshadowed by those other projects.

Speaking of those other projects, Wednesday saw a start to the creation of a Master Plan for the City Centre lands. Along with the winners of the design competition, Perkins+Will, they’re kicking off with three public meetings in October, with more planned in 2012.

Of course, we’re still talking about the early, early stages of this project – it’ll take a couple years before we’re even in the prologue. Even so, I have to say that I was pretty pleased to see the comments made by some of the Perkins+Will team.

“This development will appeal to families,” says Joyce Drohan, Director of Urban Design, Perkins+Will. “There are all kinds of possibilities for ground-level housing, where the front door opens to the street. Housing should be diverse so that it allows access to the broad spectrum of people looking for homes.”

I touched on a few of those ideas when I wrote on bringing more families downtown, so it’s nice to see emphasis on that early on in the planning stages.

Finally, we have the wining design to the new Royal Alberta Museum – and guess what? The boxy one won!

Okay, I’ll have to narrow it down a little bit more. This particular box-like design was submitted by Ledcor.

Now, in my opinion, this is a kind of the “best of a bad situation” type of thing. The four submitted designs were pretty uninspiring – big on the large, featureless walls that we’ve got enough of downtown. None of them were particularly friendly or inviting to people walking by. While it’s always hard to get a real idea of what it will end up as with only a few renderings, I would say that the Ledcor design was the one I personally disliked the least.

As always, comments are open. What do you guys think?