Do You Like Being Here?
The simplest question in urban design is the one nobody thinks to ask. A conversation with DIALOG about sustainable urban integration on Edmonton's Valley Line.
Infrasound Podcast | reVerb Communications
Nineteen minutes into our conversation with Georg Josi and Larissa Ulcar from DIALOG, we asked how you measure the success of sustainable urban integration on a public infrastructure project. The answer had nothing to do with design theory.
"Do you like being here?"
That's it. That's the metric. Not whether the architecture is award-worthy. Not whether the sustainability rating checks out. Whether a person standing on a platform or walking along a corridor feels like they want to be there. Whether they'd linger. Whether they'd come back.
It's a disarmingly simple standard for something that took 14 years to develop, codify and fight for across one of the most complex infrastructure projects Edmonton has ever built.
The Problem SUI Was Built to Solve
If you've ridden Edmonton's Capital Line, you know what utilitarian transit feels like. The northeast leg runs alongside what is essentially a rail yard. The shared-use path beside it is straight and bare. You get from A to B. That's the transaction.
The Valley Line LRT, Edmonton's first low-floor urban line, presented a different proposition. The stops are closer together. The train runs through established neighbourhoods. People aren't commuting from a park-and-ride to a downtown office tower. They're hopping off at Bonnie Doon to grab groceries, stopping at the Muttart to meet a friend, living the line rather than taking it.
That shift in use required a shift in design thinking. And the design thinking that existed at the start of the Valley Line project kept getting lost.
This is the pattern Josi described: every major linear infrastructure project starts with a grand vision. Planners and urban designers set the tone. Then the project moves into engineering. Then procurement. Then construction. At each handoff, the vision erodes. Cost pressures flatten it. Schedule constraints trim it. By the time someone is pouring concrete, the original intent is a memory.
Sustainable urban integration, or SUI, was created to prevent that erosion. DIALOG developed it into a set of guidelines that run parallel to the technical specs, giving the design vision the same contractual weight as the structural requirements. If it's in the contract, the contractor has to build it. If it's an aspiration, it gets value-engineered out.
Making It Contractual Changed Everything
The most practical insight from the episode is how SUI survived contact with reality.
DIALOG's team wrote visual requirements into the Valley Line contracts. Renderings of what stations were supposed to look like became deliverables the contractor was held to. "We said, okay, now build it. Make it look like this." And when they compared the renders to what was actually built, the result was close.
That level of fidelity between design intent and finished product is rare on large infrastructure. It happened because the SUI principles were baked into procurement documents, repeated during construction team onboarding, and enforced by designated SUI leads on the owner's side, the design side and the construction side.
The engineers who were initially skeptical, the ones who asked "what is this fluffy SUI stuff?" became some of the strongest advocates. Josi put it simply: engineers are smart. You explain it to them, they see it, and they start living it.
The Details Nobody Notices (and That's the Point)
Ulcar walked us through examples that most riders will never consciously register. The curved cantilever arms on the overhead catenary poles. The sack-rub concrete finish on station platforms that smooths out imperfections. The hook-shaped railing detail where tracks split at a centre-loading platform on the Davies elevated guideway, designed to replace what would have been a blunt wall.
These are choices that cost a bit more time and a bit more thought. They don't show up in ribbon-cutting photos. They show up in whether someone standing on a platform at 7:30 on a January morning feels like the place was built with them in mind.
The refuge areas at the base of platform ramps are a good example. You step off, you walk down the sloped walkway, you wait for the light. There are bollards. Delineation. It's flat. You feel safe. You don't think about why you feel safe. You just do. Josi's take: "That's big for you, that you're not even thinking about it."
The goal of good urban integration is to disappear. If you notice it, something went wrong. If you feel welcome and can't quite articulate why, the work is doing its job.
Four Values, One Measure
SUI operates on four principles. Pedestrians first: every design decision scaled to human experience. Integrated: the infrastructure belongs in its neighbourhood, responds to its character zones, adapts to the communities along the corridor. Flexible and adaptable: some of these structures have 100-year design service lives. And sustainable, in the full sense of the word. Environmental, economic, social, cultural. The Envision rating system, designed specifically for linear infrastructure, is the framework DIALOG wants to see Edmonton adopt more broadly.
But the measure of success remains the same question Josi posed at the 19-minute mark. A question that has nothing to do with design credentials. A question any rider on any platform can answer for themselves.
Do you like being here?
Where It Came From (and Where It Could Go)
DIALOG drew early inspiration from Seattle's Link Light Rail, particularly the stretch along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard where the at-grade line sits comfortably inside the neighbourhood. The pier design on Seattle's elevated sections, with a recess down the middle that conceals rainwater leaders and makes the structure feel less massive, was directly adapted for the Valley Line's elevated guideways. Every pier on Edmonton's line carries that detail.
European systems were also a reference point. French cities like Toulouse, where trams run through downtown so smoothly they almost disappear, represent the end state SUI is working toward. A system so well integrated it stops being a system and becomes part of daily life.
Josi's hope for the next 50 years is straightforward. SUI spreads beyond the Valley Line. Beyond Edmonton. It becomes standard practice to the point where the guidelines aren't needed anymore because the thinking is already embedded in how people design linear infrastructure. It stops being a specialty and starts being the baseline.
The incremental cost of SUI on a project is real. Josi didn't pretend otherwise. It's also, in his words, "minuscule compared to the benefits." A city that feels worth living in attracts the people and the business that sustain it. The investment pays for itself in a tax base, in commercial activity, in the simple fact that someone chose to stay.
Referenced in this episode:
DIALOG — integrated design firm (architecture, engineering, planning, landscape architecture) and developer of the SUI framework for the Valley Line
City of Edmonton — project owner for the Valley Line LRT
Valley Line LRT — Edmonton's low-floor urban light rail transit line
Valley Line West — the western extension currently under construction
Walterdale Bridge — referenced as an example of SUI principles applied to a single structure
Envision Rating System — sustainability framework for civil infrastructure, developed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure
Seattle Link Light Rail — cited as a design inspiration, particularly the MLK Boulevard at-grade section and elevated guideway pier details
Edmonton Arts Council — collaborated with DIALOG on integrated public art throughout the Valley Line stations
Infrasound is produced by reVerb Communications. We tell the stories behind the infrastructure that shapes how communities live, move and grow.
