The Neighbourhoods

An excuse to explore Winnipeg

This project is inspired (read copied) from Rob Stephenson’s project “The Neighborhoods,” which is a project to visit a shoot every neighbourhood in the five boroughs of New York City.

I gravitated towards this idea of photographing a certain neighbourhood because it gives me tangible markers. Thinking of it as a specific photo assignment. But how exactly are Winnipeg’s neighbourhoods divided up?

Over the years I have seen the city divided up many different ways. There are divisions from both the federal and provincial election. There are different divisions for the 15 wards of Winnipeg.

Similar to New York City, Winnipeg is an amalgamation of several small towns and cities. These older small towns and cities are also another way to divide up the city.

The problem is all of these areas are still too large.

I did a little digging and realized that Winnipeg has even smaller designations for their neighbourhoods, which brought me to this map.

Map via City of Winnipeg’s website

According to this map and also this Wikipedia article, we have 236/237 neighbourhoods in Winnipeg. Not all of these are what you think of as neighbourhoods. Some are just mostly industrial parks and areas. Some are mostly uninhabited areas at the edges of the city, past the perimeter. I believe some people have mentioned that this breakdown of Winnipeg is only for statistical purposes. However, I feel like this division breaks down the city into small enough areas to make these self-imposed “photo assignments” more manageable.

Also would love to hear from you if you live in any part of Winnipeg! Would love to hear about your area’s oddities! Also if you have any stories or history of the place would love to chat about it.

I’ll try to include as much history or stories of these places that I can feasibly get easily. (I’m a history major and would love to spend time in the archives learning all of this, but that takes away from getting out and taking those photos during the summer!)

An idea that I am also inspired (again read copied) by Stephenson’s “The Neighborhoods” is that he usually includes an audio recording of his walk through the neighbourhood he is photographing, so hopefully expect an audio recording too! These might be stereotypical sounds of cars, Canadian geese, or lawn sprinklers, but who knows it might also be something interesting.

*This whole endeavour will be entirely carbon neutral. I will be biking to all these areas and then biking/walking through these areas to capture the images and sounds.