What could we create here? Edmonton Project gears up to accept more ideas

WATCH ABOVE: Is there something missing in Edmonton that you'd like to see happen here? Emily Mertz tells us about the Edmonton Project gearing up for another campaign to get great ideas for Alberta's capital.

Is there something missing in Edmonton that you’d really like to see built? Now is the time to hone your idea. Soon, the Edmonton Project will be accepting more submissions.

“At the very beginning, we are just looking for a very high-level idea,” co-founder Alyson Hodson said.

“We’re not expecting people to come to the table with a budget or with feasibility or anything like that. We just kind of want to get the Cole’s Notes of what the idea is.”

She stressed this is not a branding project. People interested in submitting ideas should think: is this something — an actual physical structure — that would really add to the city?

“That’s the whole spirit of the Edmonton Project; you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it.

“It might just be an idea that you’ve always had that now you have a platform where you can kind of put it forward to see if you can bring it to life.”

The Edmonton Project launched last year to help take ideas from concept to much closer to reality. The winning submission last time was a gondola over the North Saskatchewan River, now called the Prairie Sky Gondola.

“Prairie Sky Gondola… was probably one of the largest and most adventurous ideas that would require the most work and the most funding… But it doesn’t have to be a huge idea either.”

Edmonton Project does not fund these ideas nor does it want any taxpayer dollars to be used for them.

“We’re not asking for any funding whatsoever from any levels of government,” Hodson said.

“Depending on what the idea is, it’s then kind of up to, to some degree, the feasibility of the project to see what it’s going to take to make that happen… whether that be the actual people who generated the idea taking it to the next level, or someone else in the community taking it to the next level, or even someone who’s a foreign investor coming in potentially to do it. The sky’s the limit.”

Watch below: Commuters and tourists in Edmonton may soon have a unique and scenic way to cross the river. Fletcher Kent has more on the River Valley Gondola proposal.

Hodson said the idea doesn’t even have be selected by the judges as the “winning” submission in order to come to fruition. The Edmonton Project hopes to help generate and nurture lots of great ideas. Founders are expecting an uptick in interest over last year.

“We were really, really pleased with it. Honestly, at the end of the day, we didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t know if we’d expect one, or 100 or 300 ideas and I think it generated exactly what we wanted it to.

“We’ve got a great city with a lot of bright minds and I don’t think we have to sit around and wait for people to make ideas happen for us.

“Sometimes we wait for municipal or provincial or federal government or other people to do these things but this proved people could generate their own ideas and then take them and make them happen.”