| A Calgary neighbourhood with a pioneer past is pioneering modern concepts to guide its future, defying the city’s suburban-oriented sensibilities.
The proud community of Inglewood, with its rich tradition of being a headache to city planners and unwanted developers, has developed a reputation for being scrappy, dating back to a fight for its existence in the late ’60s. Inglewood has since become a battleground for the advancement of the increasingly popular urban design movement, new urbanism.
"People in the development world say you can always tell who the pioneers are — they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs," quips Gian-Carlo Carra, a card-carrying new urbanist who is currently leading the project to make Inglewood a high-density, mixed-use urban environment.
As head of the Inglewood Community Association, Carra’s plan is an ambitious one, revolving largely around redevelopment and intensification in several of the community’s sparsely populated areas. The neighbourhood’s geographical centre, now occupied by a truck stop, will play a particularly important role in Carra’s Inglewood. As part of the "Inglewood Design Initiative," that Carra created based on community input, the plan is to create a vibrant, densely populated central plaza out of the truck stop (a key element in any new urbanist community) similar to the Garrison Woods model, with townhouses, midrise apartments over stores and a supermarket. The aim is a more human urban setting, free of the "big box store" influence.
"To be an urban designer today is to be a warrior for the human habitat," says Carra. "We want to gentrify in a positive way — which is to say redevelop without displacing people."
But plans are still on the books to expand Blackfoot Trail to accommodate future traffic demand, threatening the plans for a central plaza. Carra says the 1960’s freeway plans that originally threatened the community continue to obstruct the area’s growth. "When the city objected to this plan on the grounds that they still planned to widen Blackfoot Trail, we basically said ‘there’s no way we’ll let you do that.’"
The new urbanist movement gained popularity in the ’80s as a reaction to urban sprawl. Instead of segregated, vehicle-dependant suburbs, New Urbanism is about creating relatively self-sustaining, pedestrian-friendly living spaces – communities where people live, work and shop. The new urbanist ideal is not too different from Inglewood’s early days, says Carra. He believes it is a matter of staying true to the neighbourhood’s tradition.
The 33-year-old doctoral student’s motivation is fuelled by a combination of idealism and personal attachment. He grew up in New York, but spent his summers in Inglewood. The demolition of his grandmother’s Inglewood home, which was replaced by a large suburban enclave, stirred him to campaign on Inglewood’s behalf. In university, Carra developed a fascination with urban design, and jokingly admits his drive is probably connected to some deep psychological issue surrounding the loss of the little home where he spent his summers.
New urbanism, however, has its critics. Some argue that the concept is phoney, in that new urbanists often attempt to create quaint, pseudo small-town atmospheres. Others say a typical new urban community is often just another suburban subdivision (a charge to which Inglewood is exempt because it is already an established community in the inner city). Its most well-known critical portrayal was in The Truman Show, where the protagonist found himself literally trapped in the neighbourhood of Seaside, portrayed as a closed off, nightmarishly bland prison.
Critics also say it is naive to think human interaction, a key aspect of the idealism surrounding new urbanism, will automatically occur simply because buildings in a neighbourhood face each other, that central plazas and public walkways won’t necessarily draw people away from their televisions.
"You can’t make people interact and you can’t make people create communities, yet we try to do things by design to make it better," says Harry Hiller, a sociology professor at the University of Calgary. "You can arrange housing in such a way to create real communities. But one of the problems is interaction is not based on place at all. Someone might say ‘where I live is just my investment and where I sleep.’"
Inglewood will not exactly resemble the fictional Seaside, Carra says, and would ideally attract a broad mix of income levels and people from all walks of life in the interest of preserving the area’s character and historic roots. Inglewood’s population is diverse, with everything from young professionals, to labourers, to retired seniors.
Suburb-oriented planning policies are also problematic to Carra, who considers them out of date. He says freeway expansions and requirements for large parking lots tend to undermine any effort to create pedestrian-friendly communities.
According to Byron Miller, director of urban studies at the University of Calgary and co-author of Smart Growth (a report that assesses the human and financial costs of urban sprawl in Calgary): "In general most of the city’s development regulations are oriented toward suburban development, mostly toward accommodation of large numbers of vehicles. Inglewood is a place that could be (densified). It could provide an alternative to automobile-dependant suburban development."
Inglewood stands in contrast to the popular 17th Avenue S.W. and Kensington areas. While it is commonly viewed as trendy (even rated one of the 10 coolest neighbourhoods in Canada by En Route magazine), it lacks trendy bars and pubs. Its commercial strip is vibrant, but has virtually no chain stores. It is home to many high-tech businesses, modern design companies, unique furniture stores and a large number of antique shops, but the buildings along 9th Avenue are themselves old and distinctly pioneer.
It was originally intended to be Calgary’s downtown, but Canadian Pacific Railway abruptly altered its future route in the late 1800’s, placing its station where the Calgary Tower stands today. What followed was an exodus of tents and log cabins out of the Inglewood area following the train tracks over the Elbow River into the new downtown. The community, however, lived on as a vibrant, mixed-use and mixed-income neighbourhood.
During this early boom period for the city, a high-profile, Victorian-era urban designer by the name of Thomas Mawson set out to make Calgary the city of the future (by Victorian standards). His modernist influence lives on today in the colonnades of the Stephen Avenue Bay building and the lions guarding the Centre Street Bridge. Mawson sought to model Inglewood along traditional urban lines.
But the world wars and the Depression brought Mawson-esque planning to a halt, after which came the rise of suburbia across North America. Racial tension and increased disposable income for the working man aided the creation of predominately white, segregated suburban communities. Inner city neighbourhoods across North America became rundown due to lack of infrastructure funding. In Calgary, planning went from the walking-based, high-density European style associated with Mawson to the city we know today, due largely to influence from American planning policies.
"Oil guys from the States influenced the ideas on how the city of the future should look," Carra says. "That did not bode well for Inglewood, sitting in the pinch point (of access to downtown)."
Suburban planning created demand for greater freeway access into downtown. In the ’60s, Inglewood seemed like the ideal location for a cloverleaf interchange.
During this time, the history of Inglewood was rewritten to an extent, says Carra. Stories of Inglewood becoming deserted after the CPR station move became widely circulated, he explains, perhaps to justify the city’s imminent plans to pave over the community.
"I grew up hearing Inglewood was the community Calgary left behind, but I don’t think that was ever true. Inglewood lived on as a mixed-use community after the CPR station change."
As if the tempting location wasn’t enough, freeway plans were further encouraged by the fact that the railway industry was losing ground to commercial trucking, resulting in a decline in Inglewood’s industrial activity. Planners felt they could now flatten the neighbourhood with less resistance from the business community.
But resistance came from elsewhere. "What happened in the ’60s, is you had a rising up of people living in Inglewood, saying ‘don’t pave us over,’" explains Carra.
During this time, an American architect named Jack Long led a movement in Calgary to save mixed-use communities. With the help of residents, he succeeded in stopping the interchange plans.
Long created the Inglewood Design Brief based around the idea that Inglewood was unique and worth saving, and that the community association needed to be part of the development process. To prevent over-gentrification, Long promoted a policy called KISS (Keep Inglewood Slightly Sleazy).
"That is not a rallying cry for Inglewood today," says Carra. "But I think it speaks to how Jack Long also understood that cities are not lily-white suburban spaces. You have to have a little grey."
The community association recently took a stand against a proposal by Horizon Housing to create a low-income housing development in the area, that is likely to go ahead nevertheless.
While opposition to affordable housing seems contradictory to the ideals of Long, Carra says it is simply a matter of location, explaining that development is on the remote south side of Inglewood, its transit access is poor and residents would risk isolation from the community.
According to Hiller, such is the reality of affordable housing. "It’s simply not a sound investment to put low-income housing on highly valued land, that’s why low income apartments wind up on the fringes," he explains.
Transit access is expected to improve throughout Inglewood — the city is planning to build an LRT station in Ramsay, which will connect to Inglewood by an overpass.
Another development conflict occurred when Tim Hortons attempted to set up a location along 9th Avenue. Carra says the community association was willing to accept the proposal, but only on the condition the company scrap the drive-through, which would be inconsistent with the area’s urban character, according to Carra. Unwilling to make the compromise, the popular chain eventually gave up.
"They said they wanted to set up a location. We said, ‘that’s great, but you can’t set up a Macleod Trail style drive through on historic 9th Ave," Carra explains. The episode helped Inglewood’s reputation for being difficult take shape within the development community.
The community association does not want the neighbourhood filled with highrises. But Hiller believes highrise apartments may be a reality for the neighbourhood. The boom coupled with the area’s proximity to downtown may make them inevitable, but limiting high rises to the south side of the community (by the train tracks), leaving the North to be developed as the community wishes, may be a compromise, he adds.
Ald. Joe Ceci concedes highrises are not always appropriate. He suggests Inglewood may one day have medium-rise apartments, and envisions a future where Inglewood’s restaurant and retail scene is invigorated by the increased density.
Ever-increasing property values mean gentrification in Inglewood is basically inevitable. Time will tell if that will translate to a "yuppie" Inglewood or one that remains slightly sleazy. |
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