Where infrastructure and community planning meet
A dispatch from the province's fastest-changing resource corridor.
PRINCE GEORGE — The maps on the wall of the regional planning office tell the corridor's story in layers: the transmission line under construction, the highway upgrades behind it, the subdivision applications behind those, and — in the newest layer, added this year — the schools and clinics that the first three layers eventually require.
The north has hosted resource booms before, and the towns along the corridor carry the architecture of each: the instant neighbourhoods of the seventies, the empty storefronts of the busts between. What planners here say is different this time is sequencing — an attempt, imperfect and underfunded, to build the community infrastructure alongside the industrial kind rather than a decade after it.
The attempt shows in small decisions. A workforce camp approved only with a transition plan to permanent housing. A water treatment plant sized for the town the projections describe, not the town that exists. A school site banked beside a subdivision that is still gravel.
Whether the sequencing holds depends on budgets set far from here, which is the corridor's oldest story. But the planning rooms of the north are, for the moment, doing something the south could study: treating growth as a thing to be designed, not merely absorbed.