As a young settler town in the mountainous west of the continent, we've grown and integrated rapidly, due to our agricultural and energy production economy. Despite our rapid approach to 2 million residents, Calgary is still described with the parlance of “town” or even sometimes “village” Despite our struggles with sprawl & inner-city decline — stemming from our post-war economic success as an oil-and-gas powerhouse in North America — Calgary remains a welcoming and empowering place for innovation, where professionals keep an open inbox, and cross-disciplinary collaboration is the norm.
Calgary is situated at the heart of the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy and Treaty 7 signatories, who despite their complete linguistic independence from each other, arrived to describe the region by the same word - "elbow". Radiating from where two glacial rivers come together, our sunny, chinook-blanketed city has been forever understood as a natural gathering place for diverse peoples - putting aside our differences to build vibrant and resilient communities together.
Calgary is leading the world in adaptive reuse of brownfield and office land, and as of last year is among the first class of cities in North America to adopt a flexible base residential zone citywide.
Due both to effective municipal policy, and a strong local construction economy, our Downtown and inner-city neighbourhoods have seen significant reinvestment in the last decade, and especially after COVID. Thousands of homes have added, both through high-rise conversion and intensification Downtown, and the modest secondary suite, duplex, and townhome development in suburban communities across the city.
In the last 30 years, Calgary has seen significant growth. Between 1995 and 2024, Calgary’s population doubled to 1.5 million people, experiencing between 11-14% growth in every 5-year census since the new century. More recently, interprovincial migration has become a larger part of our population growth, as folks move out of more unaffordable housing markets across Canada.
In 2023, Calgary grew by a shocking 6% - about 100,000 new residents - among the highest one-year growth rates of any city in the world. While we've worked hard in recent years to build housing, we've struggled to build nearly enough, and especially without relying on new suburban expanses.
Though for nearly a decade, even our newest suburban communities have allowed for the next increment, using a flexible base-residential zone called R-G which enables uses between single-detached homes to 4-unit rowhomes with secondary suites.
Since then, Council has fought to bring this flexibility into the established area. In 2018, Council enabled secondary suites or backyard suites as discretionary uses in most areas with detached houses. Council introduced an amnesty period (initially until 2020, later extended to 2023) for owners to legalize existing suites. In 2024, Council approved an incentive program that offered up to $10,000 to build a suite within an existing home (not backyard or detached suite).
For decades, Calgary paved streets at rates that exceeded population growth. In 1955, Calgary had 1.2 lane metres of street pavement/person; in 1985, 7.3 lane m/person; in 2017, 13.0 lane m/person.
In the last decade or so, Calgary has begun using some of its lanes to prioritize people moving outside of private automobiles and made streets safer.
In 2015 and 2016, a pilot program was used to modify 6.5 kilometres of existing lanes downtown to create in a network of protected cycle tracks. In December 2016, the network was made permanent. It has since been extended to the east and west to better connect with adjacent areas.
Responding to a disastrous flood in 2013, we've taken to installing flood mitigation barriers on the banks of our river in high-risk areas. We took this opportunity to redesign the Bow River Pathway into high-quality public space. Enabling both comfortable, convenient mobility choices, and social gathering. This highly-successful transformation is expanding further down the riverbank, and across, to the Northern side, helping more inner-city communities interface with each other, and our river!
In the most-recent budget cycle, we committed 50 million dollars to expanding on the success of our cycling network. Our city is making small and transformative improvements to mobility infrastructure in local communities on a continuous basis. Several "Main Street" projects are ongoing, with a notable one slightly outside our downtown area called "Marda Loop" using pavers for a pedestrian-oriented section of the commercial district.
Construction is starting this spring on the Downtown section of 8 St SW, widening sidewalks and providing protected cycling lanes. Promoting walkability on a currently unassuming corridor. This connects high-intensity residential, commercial, institutional uses in our urban core with the aforementioned Bow River Pathway, and will eventually extend down to meet the Elbow River too!
For 20 years, Calgary has produced an Infrastructure Status Report every three or four years. This is a good report, but it rarely bears good news.
The headline-grabbing number from the report is the Current Replacement Cost of all of the city’s infrastructure. Between 2004 and 2020, the Current Replacement Cost grew from $23 million (CDN) to $93.9 million (CDN).
According the Bank of Canada, $23 million in 2004 would be worth almost $30 million in 2020. In other words, the cost to replace everything that belongs to the city has grown from ~$25,000/person in 2004 (~$33,000/person in 2020 dollars) to ~$70,000/person in 2020.
The second prominent number from the report is the predicted Infrastructure Gap, which is the difference between the ongoing investment in assets required to meet service levels, including preventative maintenance, and the financial resources presently available to address those needs. In 2020, Calgary’s Infrastructure Gap — the value of Calgary’s unfunded infrastructure investment needs over the next 10 years — was $7.7 billion (CDN).
The next Infrastructure Status Report should be released in March 2025.
Despite the valuable information in these reports, in 2019, the city council funded a few large projects:
It's fantastic that all of these investments are publicly available, though there’s clearly work to be done to actually spend within our means, refocus our investments toward fiscal sustainability, and implement real solutions to our looming insolvency crisis.
Calgary has an incredibly active urban advocacy and activist community, with several organizations working together to improve their beloved city through political and direct means.
We have a very successful Critical Mass movement, whose ridership peaked last summer shortly after the untimely death of a former Calgary Flames player Johnny Gaudreau. Johnny was hit by an impaired driver while cycling at a family gathering in New Jersey. Over 250 cyclists brought their bikes to the streets of Calgary to protest preventable traffic deaths like Johnny’s, taking up entire lanes of our streets Downtown to enable the safe and comfortable mobility of the group.
Sustainable Calgary is an organization that works together with the City, stakeholders such as Community Associations, and sometimes students of universities or grade schools, to redesign and implement minor improvements to pedestrian safety and dignity.
ActivateYYC is a similar organization, created by the City in 2017. It offers community groups small grants and assistance to design and implement these safety improvements, and other “tactical urbanism” or “placemaking” initiatives that help people form more meaningful and comfortable bonds with each other, and their environment.
One of our Local Conversation board members worked with his Community Association to purchase a few dozen movable plastic lawn chairs, to enable more community members to make use of the area’s extensive pathway system, and interact with their neighbours while doing so. The project “SECAChairs” was an instant success in the community, and has returned every summer since to acclaim.
Communication between elected officials and residents tends to be direct or through City staff.
All statutory planning documents are required not only to have a Public Hearing, but public engagement processes in their creation, wherein stakeholder organizations and individuals interact directly with the urban planning team.
These City-led engagement projects are maintained on the City’s website for things as minor as a street redesign, even when responses are not being collected. This is a double-edged sword. This helps citizens participate, and build a fuller understanding of what our City is working on at any given time, and our plans for the future – but also provides politicians with the ability to cherry-pick the most cynical responses, which serve to maintain the status-quo of endless suburban expansion.
Community Associations, which can be used to support or hinder our journey to a financially strong and resilient city, can provide a venue for direct communication between elected officials and residents. As volunteer-led groups, they can amplify the voices of those who have time and energy to participate. Through Community Associations, individual residents can make personal connections with elected officials.
Communication was especially important when creating the East Calgary International Avenue Communities Local Area Plan. Recognizing that this area is more culturally diverse than areas with previously approved Local Area Plans, this Plan included a cultural lens to its engagement. The City co-hosted sessions with seven different cultural groups, including members of the Vietnamese, Filipino, South Sudanese and Indigenous communities, Ethiopian and Eritrean business owners, Alex Community Food Centre and Eastview Basketball Association.
In other parts of Calgary, some residents complain about not being heard, especially about Local Area Plans and their concerns regarding allowing the next increment of development everywhere. That may be true.
