Downtown Edmonton is the city's administrative and financial centre, built on the north bank of the North Saskatchewan River. Churchill Square sits at the heart of it, surrounded by the city's major cultural institutions: the Royal Alberta Museum, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Winspear Centre, and City Hall. The downtown core is more compact than you might expect for a city of Edmonton's size, and much of it is connected by a pedway system — an elevated network of enclosed walkways that allows movement between buildings without going outside, a practical necessity given the winters.
The Jasper Avenue corridor runs east-west through downtown and has the city's most concentrated mix of restaurants, hotels, and retail. The LRT (Light Rail Transit) connects downtown to the University of Alberta campus in Old Strathcona, making the two areas easy to move between.
Downtown Edmonton is considerably more active since the ice district was developed around Rogers Place arena in the mid-2010s, which brought new restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues to what had been a quiet corner of the core.