| A new advocacy group called the Urban Design Initiative is hoping to kick-start debate about urban sprawl, redevelopment of the inner city and the need for overall sustainable growth in Calgary.
Josh White says his group will push city council to introduce policy to make Calgary a more vibrant city with a larger inner-city population and better planned, more sustainable new communities.
White praises the city’s recently approved East Village Area Redevelopment Plan and the draft Beltline Area Redevelopment Plan as "outstanding," but says the plans themselves aren’t enough. His group wants city council to follow through and reinvest in the inner city to make it attractive to new residents, and he says green spaces, parks, schools, libraries and other amenities are crucial. "Some areas are quite unattractive and blighted," he adds.
Transportation will also be a major focus for the group. "We want to push transportation in a different direction," says White. "Capital budget plans are ridiculously skewed towards roads and interchanges."
He says Calgarians often have a "knee-jerk reaction" to traffic congestion, thinking the problem will go away if the city just builds more roads.
"Communities are simply designed for automobiles, not transit," he says.
As far as urban sprawl is concerned, White says Mayor Dave Bronconnier, as well as Calgary’s development lobby, deny that it’s a problem.
"They’re using semantics to say there is no sprawl, arguing sprawl is uncontrolled development. We have an extremely strong group of developers who don’t want change and (who) have the ear of the mayor…. The status quo seems to be dominating," he says.
The group is calling for new smart growth approaches to be incorporated into new communities. White cites Symons Valley in the city’s northeast as an example of a badly planned community that, like many suburban neighbourhoods, was designed around cars and is not at all pedestrian or transit friendly. "It’s designed like subdivisions in the 1970s were designed," he says.
However, White also concedes that the city has been making overall improvements in increasing density in new developments, including Symons Valley.
The Urban Design Initiative is not the only group criticizing the city’s growth patterns. The Sierra Club has been trying to raise awareness about urban sprawl and its resulting problems for years, and is launching a public awareness campaign on the issue next week.
"The goal is to frame the discussion so we can move forward on a sustainable growth pattern for Calgary," says Sierra Club member Brian Pincott. "There’s a lot of denial that we have urban sprawl."
Pincott says the Sierra Club’s definition of urban sprawl is low density, high car usage and separated use (residential not combined with commercial and light industrial, forcing people to drive to buy what they need or to get to work).
"The general public knows that what we’re doing isn’t working. They know they’re stuck in traffic and that they have to drive forever, and if they want to buy a house it has to be 25 kilometres from downtown," says Pincott. "Spending all your tax dollars on roads isn’t going to solve the problem."
Pincott says what’s needed is a city-wide smart growth plan. "If Calgarians are knowledgeable, they’ll start asking the right questions of their politicians," he says. |
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