The City of Victoria was recognized at the 2024 Community Excellence Awards for its concerted and creative effort to revitalize the downtown core through OUR DWTN, a program that zeroes in on safety, cleanliness, beautification and activation.
Victoria is an international tourism destination, and its downtown core has a long history of vibrant businesses and sights to see for visitors and locals alike. But in recent years, public perception increasingly viewed Victoria’s downtown as “unsafe and dirty with nothing fun to do.”
Council directed staff to explore solutions. They collaborated with the public and stakeholder organizations to come up with a slate of creative, efficient and practical ways to revitalize Victoria’s core. OUR DWTN is the result: an integreated plan focused on safety, cleanliness, beautification and activation.
Beginning with safety and cleanliness, bylaw staff started a new “Feet on the Street” program, and collaborated with a dedicated team at Public Works to identify and respond to issues. In the first eight months of OUR DWTN, 95% of the 488 calls for service were closed within three business days.
Beautification: The Downtown Victoria Business Association participated in a “Scrub-Up” event to give streets a facelift, and is administering a the city-funded Facade Beautification Grant to support beautification downtown.
Victoria also invested in new and revitalized public art installations, including an interactive mural in historic Chinatown. Hundreds of new banners were hung, and the city was decorated for winter with hundreds of beautiful live hanging baskets on lamposts and throughout parks. The city also put in new planters, Adirondack chairs, and 885 square metres of turf in public places.
Activation: Throughout the first eight months of OUR DWTN, Victoria hosted or supported 73 free concerts and 17 arts and crafts activities, and contracted an event producer to put on a Winter Arts Festival over the Family Day long weekend. Pop-up activities like a giant chess board in a downtown park, food and craft vendors, and more, activated public spaces.
Internally, OUR DWTN was a success because staff were given power to develop the program and encouragement to take creative risks.
“Staff embraced a culture of testing and trying new ideas, collaborating across departments and taking calculated, creative risk,” staff wrote about the process. “Leaning on the expertise of subject matter experts within each department, staff were able to quickly identify team leads for projects that required multiple department participation.”
Funding for most of OUR DWTN is generated from City-owned downtown parking spaces – a sustainable source of revenue which is being invested back into the downtown experience. Larger events use sponsorship and revenue from vendor operations.
Using a “theory of change model” the City is measuring causal linkages to show progress towards outcomes and impact: Hotel occupancy, on-street parking, pedestrian traffic have all increased since 2022, and downtown streetfront vacancy has decresed.
The Presidents Committee awarded this project with Excellence in Service Delivery for the way it encouraged innovation and empowered staff to take action. An initiative like this is scalable and could be transferable to other communities.
One of the objectives of the Community Excellence Awards is to encourage peer-to-peer learning among local governments, by highlighting exceptional projects. To learn more about Victoria’s OUR DTWN initiative, get in touch with Nichola Reddington, Manager of Arts, Culture and Events.