Vancouver Convention Centre BUILD A VENUE’S LIVING ASSETS INTO YOUR EVENT emissions measurement, waste reduction and local procurement. For example, the chef’s garden supplies seasonal produce, herbs and edible flowers, while the terrace beehive produced about 35 kilograms of honey last year, which is incorporated into culinary programming through the centre’s Honey Bee menu, which features items such as honey balsamic vinaigrette and the ECC Bee’s Knees cocktail. HOW CANADIAN CONVENTION CENTRES ARE TURNING SUSTAINABILITY FEATURES INTO MEANINGFUL ON-SITE EXPERIENCES Across Canada, a growing number of convention centres are turning their living infrastructure—gardens, green roofs, apiaries, pollinator habitats and waterfront ecosystems—into part of the event experience itself. Living infrastructure can do more than support a venue’s environmental performance; it can deepen an event’s sense of place, create built-in wellness moments and make food and beverage programming more meaningful. It can also help planners add memorable moments to their programs without moving delegates off site. A rooftop hive can become a chef- led honey tasting. A garden can support a local procurement story. A green roof can frame a sustainability session and a Community Medicine Wheel Garden can create space for Indigenous learning. While not every living roof or chef’s garden is accessible to groups, planners can still bring the stories into their programs via menu features, beekeeper talks, cultural interpreters, chef activations or community-impact sessions. EDMONTON CONVENTION CENTRE: BUILT INTO THE RIVER VALLEY The Edmonton Convention Centre’s most distinctive sustainability feature may be the building itself. The centre is built into the Edmonton River Valley, with a sun-lit atrium covering three floors and featuring hundreds of plants. The venue’s spacious outside terraces host publically-accessible features such as a chef’s garden, bee colony and the Community Medicine Wheel Garden. Designed by a local Cree Elder, the garden features Indigenous plants with cultural and ceremonial significance, including sweetgrass, wild bergamot, Saskatoon berry, strawberries and Alberta rose. The garden can support educational programming or a quieter moment of connection to place. The centre has also coupled garden tours with an Indigenous tea tasting where participants created their own tea combinations using plants native to the Edmonton region. “If event planners are interested in learning more, we can connect them with Indigenous partners who provide educational sessions on the different plants and their significance geographically and culturally,” says Demetria Zinyemba, director, environmental and social sustainability, destination stewardship, Explore Edmonton. The convention centre’s living infrastructure connects directly to its Responsible Events Program, which offers planners options around 72 | Ignitemag.ca | Fall 2026 VANCOUVER CONVENTION CENTRE: THE LIVING EDGE At Vancouver Convention Centre, living infrastructure is both highly visible and carefully protected. The west building’s six-acre living roof is the largest in Canada and the biggest non-industrial living roof in North America, with more than 400,000 Indigenous plants and grasses. And while the green roof is a protected ecosystem with no public access, it remains an important part of the attendee experience with a number of venue meeting rooms looking onto the living roof. A restored marine habitat is built into the west building’s foundation, 40% of which sits over the waters of the Burrard Inlet. The site once served as the terminus of the CPR railway line in Western Canada. The marine habitat’s concrete layers and molded pieces channel water to prevent stagnation and it has places for mussels, seaweed, seagulls and other marine life to thrive. “There was an awful lot of cleanup done around and underneath the building. It’s not just intentional water design, but a habitat skirt built to bring life back to the shoreline,” explains Craig Lehto, general manager of the Vancouver Convention Centre. The habitat can be seen from multiple vantage points around the convention centre, and planners can bring in speakers who helped design it, regulatory partners who manage the shoreline and convention centre team members who understand the system. EXHIBITION PLACE: POLLINATORS ON THE PROGRAM At Toronto’s Exhibition Place, living infrastructure unfolds across a 192- acre urban campus that is home to everything from beehives, pollinator gardens and a wind turbine, to green roofs, an indoor vertical kitchen garden and a Milkweed Monarch Butterfly Program. Inside the Automotive Building’s kitchen, Cerise Fine Catering grows herbs and microgreens year-round in a vertical garden and incorporates them into menus. That means fewer food miles, fresher ingredients and a story that can be shared at the table. Exhibition Place also uses honey from its Enercare Centre beehives in chocolates and planner gifts. During warmer weather, an interactive workshop has participants suited up in beekeeping gear before visiting the rooftop apiary with an expert beekeeper. Next, an indoor honey harvest activity includes uncapping, spinning, filtering and bottling honey. The Milkweed Monarch Butterfly Program adds another layer. After a staff member flagged the importance of milkweed to migrating monarch butterflies, Exhibition Place stopped pulling it out and added signage to explain its role, says Hughena Walsh, the destination’s director of sales and marketing. The Exhibition Place living infrastructure story can be delivered through a self-guided sustainable walking tour map, which can be incorporated
