2011 State of our City
Green Shoots of a Sustainable 21st Century
Introduction by Chris Turner
Indulge me for a moment while I brag. There have been moments in my downtown Cal- gary neighbourhood over the past year when I’ve felt like I had this urban sustainability thing licked. The CTrain station is just two blocks away, and I pass the neighbourhood grocer along the way, and my favourite pub and coffee shop are even closer. To take the family to the Folkfest last summer, we hopped on our bikes, not into our car; an- other fine summer’s day, we strolled over to the Bow River Flow, the city’s first explicitly sustainability-themed festival. On Wednesdays all summer long, our community cen- tre’s parking lot was a thrumming farmers’ market, and our options included succulent greens and herbs from a stall that gathered its produce from a dispersed “farm” made up of dozens of backyard gardens across the city.
I feel entitled to the smugness, at least a little, since we chose the neighbourhood be- cause it was so well positioned for sustainability – because it was walkable, dense with people and businesses and services, well connected to transit, close to arts venues and nightspots and parks. A mature, mixed-use, profoundly urban place.
Through a certain lens, my neighbourhood sits at the leading edge of a citywide trend. As the following report from my colleagues at Sustainable Calgary attests, Calgary is a fast-growing and rapidly evolving city that has begun to embrace its urban bustle as a vital asset. The City of Calgary now spends more of its transportation budget on public transit than ever before (fully two-thirds of it in 2010). Residential development is boom- ing in the downtown core, the long-neglected East Village is finally being stitched back into the city’s broader fabric, and a new CTrain line will soon link the western suburbs to the centre and beyond. For these and other reasons, no major city in Canada has done more to reduce its dependence on the automobile over the last decade as Calgary has. And maybe no other has so fully rediscovered its urban soul, either. Attendance at pub- lic institutions, from neighbourhood libraries to big city festivals, is booming. And there are more of those festivals than ever before – not just the riverside sustainability fest I already mentioned but celebrations of Calgary’s blossoming diversity (ImagineAsia and GlobalFest) and its vibrant arts community (from the avant-garde music at Sled Is- land to the world-class puppetry at the International Festival of Animated Objects). The number of farmers’ markets in Calgary, meanwhile, has more than tripled since 2004. The general trend in Calgary is toward a more integrated, more lively and more diverse urban existence – toward sustainability, in other words.
In this trend, Calgary joins a dynamic and fast-growing global movement. More than half the world’s people now live in cities, and those cities are pursuing sustainability as never before. Farmers’ markets and community gardens are springing up wherever the urban soil will allow them across North America (there are now more than three times as many farmers’ markets across the United States as there were in 1994, for example). Mulitmodal transit is also increasingly de rigueur on city streets the world over. Denver, Colorado, is building LRT lines similar to Calgary’s at the fastest rate ever seen in North America; Delhi’s efficient new subway system is the pride of India’s capital; New York has returned Times Square to its natural state as a vibrant public space as part of Amer- ica’s most ambitious pedestrianization program; the forefathers of Calgary’s Bus Rapid Transit line reside in the Latin American cities of Curitiba, Brazil and Bogota, Colombia, where it has inspired an urban sustainability renaissance; and the state-of-the-art bike- sharing system developed in Montreal – Bixi, by name – now finds welcoming new bike lanes in Washington, D.C., and London, England.
The twenty-first century, in short, is by necessity an urban century, and sustainability is being embraced as the best path to our brightest possible future in metropolises the world over. Calgary is in good company in its pursuit of sustainable living.
Notwithstanding Calgary’s impressive progress, the city has a long journey to sustain- ability ahead of it. We could begin again with my own neighbourhood and all the things it still lacks. A sufficient number of affordable housing units, for starters. A substantial boost in residential density. A transit system that looks more like a web than a series of spokes pointed at the single hub of the city centre. And again, my neighbourhood’s shortcomings stand in amply for the whole city’s. There’s nowhere near enough afford- able housing in Calgary – more than 17 percent of the city’s residents spend beyond their means for their shelter – and the most shameful urban boom of the last few years has been in the ranks of the city’s homeless. Though the city as a whole is growing denser and more transit-oriented, Calgary still has a ways to go before it returns to the population density it reached 60 years ago. (Calgary is 30 percent less dense as a whole today than it was in 1951.) Partially as a result of that sprawling half-century, Calgary is in a class of its own in terms its environmental footprint – on average, each of us Calgarians require 33 percent more than the Canadian average and four times as much as the “global fair share” of land and resources to meet our daily needs. Calgary may be less unsustainable than ever, but this is emphatically not the same thing as being sustainable.
There are a great many ways to think about urban sustainability and a wide range of factors to indicate its presence or absence (the many pages of data to follow attest to that, among other facts). But we could begin, in Calgary, with a singular transformation born of a single change in perspective. Think of this report, in shorthand as a measure- ment of the sustainability of Calgary’s urban density. We do not yet understand density in Calgary, and if we intend to become a sustainable city, we will have to learn it all: What density means, what it does and doesn’t do for property values (increases them) and crime rates (lowers them) and the health of the city (vastly improves it), and why it is far more important than a green office tower or a bank of solar panels to reducing the environmental footprint of the city. Density is the precondition for sustainable public transit, for complete streets and bustling farmers’ markets, for walkability and diversity.
Perhaps most importantly, density is not bitter medicine to be swallowed down but a better urban future to be embraced. Imagine your favourite urban scene – a café on a plaza in Rome or Paris, a street thick with chic boutiques in New York or London, a bazaar in Mumbai or Marrakech, a night market in Bangkok, music blaring out of a nightclub in New Orleans or Havana, the Stampede Parade or a barhop along the Red Mile, alley burgers at CharCut, families strolling the stalls of Lilacfest or music lovers bopping from venue to venue at Sled Island – imagine almost anything called to mind by the word urban, and the image it inspires is one of people spending time in a dense neighbourhood. Great cities are dense cities. Sustainable cities are dense cities. Let’s make our city one of them.