How One City Forgot Who Was Changing the Light Bulbs

Back in 2012, Mack Male, an entrepreneur known for pop-up restaurants, proposed to open one such temporary eatery on a pedway bridge in downtown Edmonton. That's when the tragedy of Edmonton's pedway commons got in the way.

Male first approached Edmonton city officials for permits, but bureaucrats deferred to one another before finally sending him to the owners of the office towers on either side of the glass-enclosed bridge; the property owners, in turn, deferred back to the city. Nobody, it seems, felt they had authority over a heavily used pedestrian bridge that's at once both a public space and, in many ways, privately owned. "The pedway is such an unavoidable and functional part of downtown that I had incorrectly assumed it would be easy to find the owners," Male says. "Turns out the system is highly decentralized."