University of Alberta moves 500 employees to Downtown Edmonton offices

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The University of Alberta is bolstering its presence in Downtown Edmonton by moving hundreds of employees to the core.

University officials announced the move Tuesday at the Enterprise Square building on Jasper Avenue and 103 Street, where more than 500 workers have moved in over the past year from various departments that generally provide academic support and administrative services.

Andrew Sharman, the university’s vice-president of facilities and operations, said there were less than 200 people in the building before the COVID-19 pandemic, but now there are over 600 including university staff and industry partners.

“We have 20 companies in an incubation space on the fourth floor and we aim to grow that,” he said.

The university bought the building in 2005 with support from local, provincial and federal governments, and intended to use it to create a strong connection with the city’s core, president and vice-chancellor Bill Flanagan said.

“The vision was to create a Downtown hub of education, innovation and excellence that would strengthen the partnerships between the university, the city and local businesses,” he said. “It took a while to bring this vision to life, but I think today we really have achieved that.”

‘The lifeblood is the people’

Representatives from the Edmonton Downtown Business Association, Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, and Edmonton city hall spoke to the value of having more people in the core amid efforts to revitalize the neighbourhood following economic challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coun. Anne Stevenson, who represents Downtown as part of Ward O-day’min, said the city has been working with partners including police, social services and business groups to channel support to the core.

“Downtown is a physical place, but the lifeblood is the people,” she said. “When the pandemic hit, we lost that — we lost that lifeblood and the heart of Downtown just stopped.”

Earlier in January, commercial real-estate firm CBRE reported an uptick in office vacancies for the third quarter of 2022, which climbed to 23 per cent from 22.4 per cent in the previous quarter, and attributed it in part to remote work conditions since the onset of the pandemic. But it also pointed to a “flight to quality” as tenants seek out newer spaces.

Sharman said the Enterprise Square location is currently the best space in the university’s inventory, and it’s saving $1.2 million per year by allowing the university to relocate tenants from spaces leased closer to the north campus.

Context for research

Martin Ferguson-Pell, professor in the university’s faculty of rehabilitation medicine, said the building has been a home for his work since 2005, allowing him to take innovations out of the lab and into the world to provide both business and social benefits.

Focused on developing technological solutions that help people with disabilities live more active lives, he said he’s worked on an app that functions as a map allowing parties who create barriers, such as construction companies, to communicate with users looking for assistance navigating public spaces.

Also the founder of a not-for-profit called Enhanced Learning Incorporating Extended Reality (ELIXR), which creates awareness and opportunities to develop applications, Ferguson-Pell said he’s seen participants in ELIXR’s integrated learning program work on simulations that help users navigate difficult situations, such as sexual harassment.

“In all cases, Downtown has been critical because it provides us with the context,” he said, “and secondly, this building is critical because it provides us with the ecosystem that we can work with.”

hissawi@postmedia.com

@hamdiissawi