| Imagine Calgary recently released a $2 million report outlining recommendations for the future of this city. Dubbed "visioning" by these homegrown futurists the process of delivering this report that was two years in the making is an attempt to outline a sustainable future for Calgary during the next 100 years.
In case you missed it, Imagine Calgary is a project that was initiated by the City of Calgary that hired The Praxis Group in 2004 to carry out the work of figuring out what Calgary should be like far into the future. Pre-teens and teens were involved in the initial work through a "visioning event" called YOUth Takeover. The original plan was to have a pizza and pop night followed by a theatre workshop that would provoke responses to big questions facing our community. Instead, because of an organizational failure, there were not enough volunteers to handle the 500 youth who showed up. The workshop was abandoned for good, old-fashioned questionnaires with answers documented on flip charts. So what did the kids come up with? Responses such as: less poor people, teach people how to be nice and, my favourite, more love and hugs.
The theatre-to-flip-chart event was only one in a series of activities to find out what was on the minds of Calgarians. Imagine Calgary reports involving more than 18,000 people in the process of creating Calgary’s Long Range Urban Sustainability Plan stating "we have achieved one of the largest scale citizen involvements in a visioning process to occur in any city, anywhere in the world."
Well no one asked me what I thought so here are a few more ideas that I hope will be used right away, not decades from now.
I would like to see a mayor who is as excited about public transit as he is about building multi-million-dollar traffic interchanges. As most Calgarians know, this city is spreading like fungus and the only chance we have of preserving any semblance of quality of life is to stop making it easy for everyone to jump in their cars, especially when that means a short trip to the convenience store a block away or the daily commute to work. High gas prices are good, tolls on roads make sense. Make driving inconvenient and stop building roads through the middle of neighbourhoods that people have been living peacefully in for decades.
Start making public transit a real priority. There are large metropolitan areas in the world where millions of people can board a subway car and get to almost any point in the city safely and on time. In Calgary boarding a C-Train during the rush hour means being crammed like a sardine while a Calgary Transit security officer requests proof of payment. Quit treating customers like criminals. The vast majority of people using public transit pay the fare. Not because they fear being given a ticket but because they are honest, hard-working individuals. Stop building roads that lead to suburbs where people are living in homes that are far too big and start buying buses and C-Train cars for citizens who are trying to get to work in an environmentally responsible way.
Stop patronizing children with made-up events. If you want to know what children and teenagers think about the world, ask them. They don’t need theatre and pizza in order to tell us that they are concerned about their future when, in the present, renewable resources are being wasted, global warming is still being debated and schools are left to crumble in the richest province in the country.
Start asking more from our corporate citizens. In an era where oil and gas companies headquartered in this city are taking billions of dollars of profit from exploiting our resources, shouldn’t we be expecting more? Corporations pay billions of dollars in taxes but it’s Canada’s middle class that shares the largest tax burden. If we have to fund health projects by buying plastic bracelets and staging walks, shouldn’t Calgary’s corporations be asked to take a greater role in solving our community’s problems?
Eliminate homelessness. This is a community issue that demands a sustained and vigilant effort to solve. The three levels of government, business, service organizations, action groups, private citizens and, most importantly, those who are living on the streets and in shelters need to join together to come up with a wide-ranging set of solutions. The homeless in Calgary are not one anonymous group but thousands, yes thousands, of individuals with different and complex needs. If we are to solve homelessness in Calgary we have to stop viewing these human beings as some glut of humanity that is to be feared. Instead of counting the homeless, as the City of Calgary does every two years, why not ask them what kind of housing they require?
Stop being afraid. The vast majority of people living in this city are peaceful individuals who are only trying to live decent lives. Muslim Canadians are not terrorists. Immigrants who arrive here are not taking our jobs away. Mexican workers who are here to fill the labour shortage should have the opportunity to become permanent citizens and not be treated like a disposable resource. Diversity is the underpinning of Canadian society. Other than Aboriginal Canadians we’re all immigrants. Accept it, deal with it and embrace it.
And, oh yeah, one more thing — more love and hugs. |
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