We Built This City on Urban Sprawl
How to make Cowtown come downtown
BY Christopher DeWolf
Illustration by Marc Ngui
It’s a snowless December night in Calgary and there’s just a hint of chill in the air as I wander down quiet streets, jacket open. I’m on my way to Broken City, a deliberately ramshackle bar on Eleventh Avenue where I’ve arranged to meet a handful of people from the Calgary Urban Initiative (CUI), an upstart group of young Calgarians concerned with the development of their city. There’s a first-year university student, a real estate agent, an art school slacker, even an orchestral musician who plays bass for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.
Then there’s Josh White, a master’s student in urban planning at Queen’s University and the group’s founder. “I started CUI to give more voice to citizens of Calgary who want to help push it in a more urban, diverse and cosmopolitan direction,” he explains to me. The Calgary that White envisions is one that is high-density, transit-friendly, pedestrian-oriented and architecturally sophisticated. His hometown, he says, “is at a critical juncture. Either Calgary will simply grow and become an unremarkable place, or it can develop into an extremely livable and interesting city.”
White’s ambition mirrors that of his hometown. Calgary, population one million, has always been a boom-and-bust city, but this latest surge in activity seems to be more substantial than those of previous decades. For many of its hundred-odd years as a settlement, dependent on the vagaries of the oil market, Calgary has succumbed to expediency: get it done and get it done quick, before the money runs out. This has created a largely uninspired cityscape of dreary stucco suburbs, uninviting streets and appallingly bland office towers. For too long, few Calgarians have cast a critical eye upon their built environment, choosing instead to accept its flimsy façade of urbanity as if it were the real thing.
But something has changed. Despite its well-earned reputation as a car-reliant city, Calgary has a popular and effective transit system that revolves around the C-Train, a 24-year-old, 42-kilometre-long light rail network that carries 188,000 riders per day and runs entirely on wind energy. Recently, Calgary adopted a transit-oriented development policy, encouraging high-density residential and commercial development within walking distance of train stations. Even more important, the city is working on an ambitious plan to transform its inner neighbourhoods into a bustling, environmentally sustainable urban core.
Brent Toderian is an urban planner and manager of the Centre City Plan, a scheme that is crafting a new and comprehensive vision of centre-city Calgary. “On a macro scale,” Toderian says, “smart growth is all about densifying your inner city and doing it in a pattern that is not auto-oriented.” The Plan aims to more than triple the population of established parts of Centre City and increase the number of people living in the East Village, a parking lot wasteland, five-fold. Negotiations are underway to build a new multi-institutional urban campus in the East Village that will include the University of Calgary and other schools.
All of this will be done with an emphasis on pedestrian-friendly streets, good architecture and finely mixed residential, retail and office uses. In order to guarantee the quality of its public realm, Calgary has borrowed some ideas from its neighbour to the west, Vancouver. A new urban design panel is being established to give planners and architects more influence over individual developments. The city will also cut deals with developers, similar to what Vancouver has been doing for 20 years. In new condo and office developments, for instance, significant streetscape improvements and eco-friendly green roofs could be secured in exchange for height and density bonuses. Already, behind-the-scenes pressure from planners has noticeably boosted the calibre of new condo construction: the mediocre slabs of the late 1990s and early 2000s are giving way to more graceful towers.
For the first time, Canada’s fastest-growing city has decided to take a firmly activist approach to development. “Calgary has always had a tremendous respect for the private sector, but we’ve realized that the city has to be the one pushing the envelope,” says Toderian. And that envelope is being pushed. Walking back from Broken City, through a clay slab of a town just waiting to be shaped, it’s easy to see why Toderian and White are so enthusiastic. For this oil-driven city of faceless suburbs and too many cars, the Centre City Plan is a step in a more sustainable direction. Maybe, when the current boom ends, Calgary will have more to show for it than in years past.
