The Exchange District

A breathtaking full-colour photography book celebrating the architectural splendour and cultural heritage of Winnipeg's famed Exchange District, a National Historic Site and one of the city's most vibrant artistic, commercial, and tourist hubs. The Exchange District is the architectural jewel of Winnipeg's downtown core, a thirty-block area featuring 150 remarkably preserved heritage buildings dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These iconic buildings are among the best examples in North America of several turn-of-the-century architectural styles, including Romanesque, Italianate, Beaux-Arts, and Chicago School. From its origins in the 1880s as a commercial and industrial gateway to the Canadian West to its current revitalization, the Exchange exemplifies the spirit of a modern city embracing its past while creating a bright and dynamic future. Treasures of Winnipeg's Historical Exchangeis a sumptuous visual feast for residents and visitors. With stunning photography highlighting the impressive scale and intricate detail of the Exchange's imposing banks, sprawling warehouses, and commercial towers, this book will amaze and delight anyone interested in Winnipeg's history and architecture. In addition, the book captures the renewed energy, creativity, hospitality, and entrepreneurial spirit that have invigorated the Exchange in recent years, making it one of Canada's most vibrant up-and-coming neighbourhoods.

Exchange District -- Interpretive Center -- Museum -- Interior Design -- Post-museum -- Public space -- Constructivist Learning Theory -- Adaptive Reuse.

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This book is about a city’s current state versus its potential state. It examines the dynamic beginnings that gave the city an exciting promise for the future and how that promise evaporated through the 20th century. The premise is that the author falls asleep in the forward of the book and wakes up in the epilogue, only to realize that all of the grand ideas discussed in the 16 chapters to help the city reach its potential were just a dream. Find out how the development mistakes of Winnipeg parallel the lunacy of Monty Python, Get Smart and Police Squad. Even though the subject matter focuses on one city, the issues raised affect most cities to varying degrees. Any reader with an interest in urban development, design or the twilight zone should find the material relevant to their experiences.

From commercial retail environments to branded urban villages, brands are now a salient feature of contemporary cityscapes and are deeply entwined in people’s everyday lives. Drawing on extensive empirical material and recent theoretical developments in the sociology of brands, this book explores the complex relationship between brands, consumption and urban life. Covering a range of brands and branding in the city, from themed retail stores to branded cultural quarters, it considers how brands provide new ways of mediating identities, lifestyles and social relations. At the same time, the book reveals how brands are bound up with forms of socio-spatial division and exclusion in the city, defining what kinds of practices, images or attitudes are acceptable in a particular place, constituting cultural boundaries that keep certain people and activities out. With attention throughout to the social and cultural implications of the presence of brands in urban space, Brands and the City examines how people engage with brands, and how brands shape urbanites’ experiences and sense of self, society and space. An extensive exploration of the processes through which brands are integrated into cities, their effects on everyday experiences and their role in the policing and governance of urban space, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in urban studies, consumption and branding.