By Noah Cote, Interim Director, Marketing and Communications, The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce
Bob Somers is a principal and registered landscape architect at Scatliff+Miller+Murray with more than 30 years of experience designing Winnipeg’s public spaces, serving on local boards, and helping grow his firm.
But his earliest memory of community comes from colliding with cold concrete.
It was early-1980s Winnipeg where Bob and friends would venture from the safety of their St. Vital suburb in search of spots to skateboard – handrails to grind, stairs to jump, and ad-hoc halfpipes to huck themselves off.
The shared search led to hours scouring the city with a close group of like-minded people. They were there to cheer when you landed a trick, but also to wince when you fell down that flight of stairs, bring you your runaway skateboard, and offer you a hand up to try again.
“I found my people through skateboarding,” Bob says. “There’s a strength and diversity in that community built around a shared activity rather than a background, age, or upbringing.”
It also taught him to see our city through a different lens.
“Where other people saw gaps and barriers, we saw possibilities.”
Plazas, parkades, and courtyards were places to spend time trying a trick over, and over, and over again, each failure an opportunity to identify your mistake and innovate on your approach.
“It’s basically the scientific method with more broken bones. You may have failed 50 times, but if you landed it once, the feeling of succeeding in that creation is next level.”
Then, he became a criminal.
In 1987, Mayor Bill Norrie and city council declared Bob’s favourite pastime and community connection a crime. In 1988, he found himself in the back of a police car.
The charge?
“Skateboarding in front of my friend’s house back in St. Vital.”
This would prove to be only a minor setback. Skateboarding had planted the seed for his fascination with the city between the buildings. Shortly after starting classes at the University of Manitoba, Bob took a job at Saint Mary’s Garden Centre, where that fascination bloomed.
When he wasn’t in the nursery planting, potting, and propagating, he was connecting with the on-staff landscape architect, who introduced him to a world that combined innovation, seeing the world through a different lens, and creating spaces where people could gather and grow.
Bob applied to the Faculty of Architecture and was eventually accepted.
“I remember day one of being in the program thinking, ‘This place is my place.’”
The professors and numerous classmates who went through the program with him became another community.
Bob was also creating and collaborating across communities somewhere… louder. He had began playing bass in bands as a kid, despite one minor obstacle.
“None of us really knew how to play our instruments. So, instead of learning other people’s songs, we wrote our own. If nobody knew what the song was supposed to sound like, nobody could tell how bad we were playing it.
Smart, right?”
They kept at it. Eventually, they got “slightly” better, started recording, and working around his University schedule, Bob embarked on his first cross-country tour with indie-rock band The Bonaduces.
It was on tour where he met and meshed with fellow performers who helped him recognize something special about the community waiting for him back home.
“They were always surprised by how much our creative worlds overlapped.
Playing a show with Propagandhi, Fubuki Daiko, Mood Ruff, and any one of my quirky indie-rock bands on the same night wasn’t something that happened anywhere else across the country.
Back home, that was a Tuesday.”
In Winnipeg, painters know musicians. Musicians work with dancers. Actors, designers, and writers all borrow from and collaborate with one another.
“No other Canadian city can match the depth and consistency of our collaboration. It’s why our creative community has punched above its weight for decades.”
The more communities he explored and experience he gained, Bob began to understand his place within them.
“I was the bass player.
I wasn’t the lead singer. I was never the songwriter. I’m the guy who tries to hold things together, keeps things moving, and provides a foundation that lets everyone else bring their talent and creativity to the composition.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that’s not such a bad model for leadership.”
After graduating university, Bob joined Scatliff+Miller+Murray, where he found the opportunity to build a career around the spaces and communities he was fascinated by since his first kickflip.
Then, in 2005, a project came that brought almost every piece of his life together.
The Plaza at The Forks.
“It didn’t feel real.”
Bob had already been advocating for better skateboarding infrastructure when a Vancouver skatepark design firm (VDZ+A) came to town to meet with the City, and his name made its way into the conversation as both a local landscape architect and someone who understood the skate community. Around the same time, a local foundation had roughly $10,000 available for a skatepark project. Bob joined the team, and with every conversation he had, they pushed the idea of “what makes world’s best” further and further until the project evolved into the $2.5 million dollar Plaza at The Forks.
“I learned so much during that project. I didn’t know how to design a skatepark, much less build one.”
So, he picked a rhythm and held the bassline. He brought in SK8 Skates’ Genico Aiello to ensure that the local skaters were involved, Graffiti Gallery’s Pat Lazlo came in to help bring public art into the space, and countless others to contribute where he saw the opportunity.
Then came the pitch. Bob presented the final design to The Forks Renewal Corporation board and in classic Winnipeg fashion, looked across the table at a familiar name from his skateboarding past.
The man who’d declared skateboarding illegal decades earlier, Former Winnipeg Mayor Bill Norrie.
Mayor Norrie asked Bob one question: When this skateboarding fad goes away, can we simply turn this park into a lily pond?
“My mind raced through all the possible answers. But I paused, looked at him and said… ‘absolutely.’
Bob thought it was a fair question.
“Bill saw possibility in Winnipeg, too – I’d like to think you don’t run for public office unless you do.
But skateboarding just wasn’t part of his frame of reference. For all he knew, a skateboard was just another pogo stick.
He did, however, present a way of thinking. When we create policy, when we design public spaces, and when we build a city for the future, we have no way of knowing what that future holds.”
The thinking landed, the project was completed, and its impact is hard to miss. The Plaza would go on to draw an estimated one million plus visits every season, become a destination for international skate events and pros, and help prove the case for further investment in world-class public spaces downtown, all while giving generations of young Winnipeggers a place to gather, learn, fail, celebrate and be part of a community.
But it also presented Bob with an unexpected problem.
“I feel like I peaked early in my career,” Bob laughs.
“Where do I go from here?”
His answer started with understanding the business around the design. SMM was still a small office, with only six or seven people at the time.
“You could see top to bottom very easily.”
Bob realized he had a choice. He could wait for somebody to hand him the next Plaza project, or he could start creating the opportunities himself.
That meant getting out of the office.
With encouragement from the leadership at SMM, Bob began attending his first networking event hosted by The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.
“I didn’t know anyone, and that was the point.”
At first, his motivation was straightforward: Meet prospective clients and learn what architecture school couldn’t teach him.
But he quickly found himself enjoying the people as much as the prospecting. He met leaders in transport and technology, finance and fabrication, government, and education. He learned that business is business, and whether you’re designing half-pipes, building cars, or selling insurance, there’s always a new opportunity to connect, help solve each other’s challenges, and learn from each other’s successes.
“I saw The Chamber bring people together to reimagine what our city could be, then actually do something about it.
I learned the value of relationships and networks, I saw the role of policy, governance, and public service.
The Winnipeg Chamber isn’t just the voice of big business. It brings together business and organizations of every size, across sectors, with different perspectives and different expertise.
Everybody brings something special to the composition.”
Bob stayed involved. He joined our board. And more than two decades after first walking into a Chamber event not knowing who he might meet, he got the call asking him to become Chair.
“It was weird.”
Today, he embraces his role as the bass player, providing the foundation for creative contribution and collaboration across disciplines.
The landscape architect creating a blueprint for a better city.
The skateboarder pushing his community to try something new, pick each other up when they fall, and celebrate when it finally lands.
Today, he leads our community as the 133rd Chair of the Board of The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.
His mission for the year is rooted in what he’s seen work his entire life.
Winnipeg’s creative community has punched above its weight because it refuses to stay in neatly divided lanes.
Bob wants to bring more of that same cross-pollination to Winnipeg’s business community.
And he sees the opportunity to start by bringing those two communities closer together.
“We keep trying to sell the creative sector as a reason to be in Winnipeg, and I don’t think that we participate enough and give it enough back.”
For businesses, participation doesn’t have to mean writing a huge sponsorship check.
Buy the ticket. Take your staff to a local theatre. See a local band. Visit a gallery. Get outside your same four walls and experience what people across the city are creating.
And Bob wants the relationship to run both ways.
Creatives and artists may not always think of themselves as businesses, but they face the same questions around accounting, legal services, benefits, growth and sustainability, as any entrepreneur. Bob sees an opportunity for Chamber members to connect them with the expertise and relationships already within its membership.
For Bob, that relationship is also a model of what The Chamber can be at its best.
Approximately 2,000 organizations spanning industries, sizes, and perspectives, each seeing Winnipeg through a different lens.
Now, he says, is our chance to put those lenses in the same room.
It’s this same lesson he learned from skateboarding, touring in a band, building the Plaza, and 20 years of Chamber networking.
Get outside your lane.
Meet people who widen your frame of reference. Participate in your city. Bring your expertise to the table and make room for somebody else’s.
And when you do, take a lesson from Bob’s story.
The value of joining and participating in a community isn’t in collecting business cards.
It’s in the collisions.
