The following is the second of a four-part series on the City of Calgary’s Plan It proposal. Lastweek, we looked at Calgary’s planning history. Thisweek, we will look at why Calgary needs a newplan.

Photos, Calgary Herald ArchiveTourists on Cypress Mountain on the north shore viewthe downtown core of Vancouver, B.C.

Ithink it is pretty safe to say that much less than one per cent of Calgarians (in other words, 10,000 people) will read the 300plus page Plan It document from cover to cover— it becomes mind-numbing after about 30 minutes.

A wise university professor once told me “the most difficult thing to do is write about something complex in a clear and concise manner.” However, I will give it a shot. The City of Calgary, and all municipalities in Alberta, are required by the provincial government to have a comprehensive master plan. Calgary’s new master plan has been titled Plan It, and it will govern our city’s development for the next 60 years.

The underlying hypothesis driving all of the thinking and policy changes proposed in Plan It is that Calgary will continue to grow— and that from environmental, economic and quality of life perspectives, we must “grow up, not out.” In other words, there will be less construction of single-family homes and more high-density, multi-family developments.

To do this, the city proposes to stop annexing more land and encourage Calgarians to live in denser communities.

The goal is to develop new suburban communities at 14 to 20 units per acre (currently, new communities are being developed at six to eight units per acre), which means all new communities will be about twice the current density.

It should be noted that during the past 15 years, the density for new suburbs has doubled from the original three to four units per acre, which means new single-family housing communities will be four to five times more dense that those built in the ’80s.

Calgary is already moving in the right direction.

These new, higher-density suburban communities will not only be higher density, they will also be more pedestrian-and transit-oriented. Shopping, transit and other amenities will be within a five-minute walk of 95 per cent of the homes.

Transit will be available from about 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with a minimum frequency of 10 minutes.

Plan It recommends that in the future, 50 per cent of all new homes will be built each year in new communities (in other words, communities with new housing developments), with the other half built in established communities (those that have been completely built-out).

I would estimate that about 90 per cent of new residential development is currently taking place in new communities, with the other 10 per cent taking place in older single-family communities and in the city centre.

Plan It recognizes this huge shift will not take place immediately— that for the next 10 years, most of the growth will continue to be on the edges of Calgary.

But after 2020, growth will gradually shift. By 2040, the goal will be to have 30 per cent of new development in established communities and in the city centre — mostly at LRT stations and redeveloped sites like the former Currie Barracks area. That is it in a nutshell. In a utopian world, Plan It is great. But in the real world, will Calgarians want to live in a high-density, transit-oriented city— and can city hall deliver on all of its promises to create a pedestrian-first city? That is the billion-dollar question.

Calgaryvs. Vancouver

andPortland

The two poster cities that Plan It is based on— Vancouver, B.C., and Portland, Ore.— are recognizedworld-wide by planners as the leaders in contemporary urban planning.

Vancouver is heralded for its “living first” policy that places more importance on the development of high-quality, high-density residential development downtown over commercial development.

This has resulted in the development of newhigh-density residential communities like Coal Harbour and Yaletown.

Portland is known for pioneering the concept of an “urban growth boundary” in 1979 that encouraged high-density urban development inside the boundary, protecting farmland on the outside by restricting non-agricultural development.

Besides being admired for their contemporary urban planning policies, Portland andVancouver are often ranked as being two of the most livable cities in theworld.

Calgary on the other hand, is known and often criticized for its urban sprawl.

Our city has a footprint of 726 square kilometres— about the size ofNewYork, which at 8.3 million people is the most populous urban area of theUnited States — yet only containing one million.

In contrast, Vancouver has 578,041 people in 115 square kilometres, while Portland 575,930 people in 347 square kilometres.

Of course, when you look a little deeper at the total metropolitan areas, Vancouver has more than two million people living in an area of 2,877 square kilometres, and Portland has 1.6 million in an area of 1,425 square kilometres.

This means that only 27 per cent ofVancouver’s metropolitan population actually lives inVancouver and only 36 per cent lives in Portland— while 97 per cent of Calgarians live in the central city and only three per cent in the metro area. It is difficult to compare cities. In the case of Calgary, Vancouver and Portland, you are comparing apples, oranges and bananas.
Calgary is unique because it has been annexing towns like Midnapore, Bowness, Forest Lawn and Beddington rather than letting them evolve into independent cities like that of theVancouver or Portland areas.

As a result, Calgary has a massive footprint of 726 square kilometres for only one million people.

In manyways, Calgary has a more contiguous urban development than eitherVancouver or Portland.

Our built urban form is one with a large central city and a fewrural cities and towns, rather than the Vancouver and Portland model that has a small, densely-populated central city and numerous regional cities and towns.

Calgary’s metropolitan area is a whopping 5,107 square kilometres.

I did some research and found out thatMetro Calgary is so large because its boundaries are determined using a complex Census Canada formula based on commuter flowbetween the core city and the neighboring cities and towns.

Calgary’s footprint

isn’ttheproblem

For Calgary, the formula for calculating the size of its metropolitan area is the problem because the rural communities surrounding Calgary have almost no employment base and no density, unlike those cities surrounding Vancouver and Portland.

This exaggerates Calgary’s metropolitan area and as a consequence, exaggerates our lack of density— which is the cornerstone of Plan It’s rational for building up, not out.

Roger Gibbins, president and CEO of the CanadaWest Foundation, pointed this out in a Calgary Herald article in 2006 called “Sprawl on the prairies not all bad.”

“Residential densities with city boundaries have been steadily increasing and the most striking prevalence of low-density residential development is to be found in “rurban” (rural) communities outside the city,” he said.

Calgary is too often unfairly criticized by planners.

For example, Vancouver is praised for having 100,000 people living in their city centre, which is defined as the entire peninsula, or about 10 square kilometres— an area containing about five per cent of the metro population.

In Calgary, we have about 40,000 people living in our city centre, or about four per cent of our metro population.

Vancouver is often praised for being pedestrian-friendly. Yet it is Ottawawhich is Canada’s most pedestrian city, with 7.5 per cent of commuterswalking there, compared to 6.5 per cent inVancouver, says Statistics Canada.

Calgary andMontreal are tied for third spot not far behind with 5.9 per centwalking towork.

We should be very careful about adopting theVancouver urban planning model, or something similar to it. While many love their urban vitality, it also has its critics.

During the past 10 to 15 years, downtownVancouver has lost one-third of its head offices, and many office buildings have been torn down or converted into condos.

The newurban communities like Bayshore and Coal Harbour have no street life and have been called “vertical suburbs,” or “vertical gated communities.”

At the same time, Calgary’s city centre has seen a much more diverse urban development, with numerous office and condo projects in both the Beltline and downtown.

Calgary has one of the densest downtown cores inNorth America, significantly denser from a commercial perspective than Vancouver, and it consequently requires a quite different model than Vancouver’s.

One should also remember that only a small minority, about 100,000, ofVancouver citizens live the urban lifestyle that contemporary planners are lobbying for. The other twomillion live in the suburbs with poor transit and road networks, which results in horrendous commutes.

Calgary isn’t perfect, butwe are not as bad as somewould have us believe. I am not convinced thatwe should be using the best practices of places likeVancouver or Portland for Calgary— what works in one city doesn’t necessarilywork in another.

We need more innovative, rather than imitative, urban thinking to create amade-for-Calgary master plan.


Nextweek, I will look at some of the unintended consequences that may result if Plan It is adopted in its current form.