Mayor Nenshi's vision for Calgary neighbourhoods

Over the course of 100 days in late 2011 and early 2012, the Calgary Herald produced Project Calgary--a great, well-researched look at our neighbourhoods. If you haven't had a chance to read some of the articles in this series, we recommend you do.

To launch Project Calgary, Mayor Nenshi wrote a column about the challenge of making our neighbourhoods better. As the project learned, our neighbourhoods are great, but there's much more that can be done. 

To mark the conclusion of Project Calgary, Mayor Nenshi joined with other prominent Calgarians to share his brief vision of Calgary neighbourhoods 30 years in the future. Here is his response in full:

Over the last few months, we've learned so much about Calgary neighbourhoods—what works and what could work better—as a result of the Project Calgary series.

My hope is that, a generation from now, Calgary will be a city of sustainable, walkable, livable, lovable, complete communities. When we speak with Calgarians about the kind of neighbourhoods that they want to live in, the answers are very similar. It doesn't matter whether they live in the inner-city or the suburbs or if they are young or old—people want to live in neighbourhoods where they can walk to the store, where kids can walk to school, where young families and seniors can both be comfortable, where that second or third car is really a choice for families and not an absolute necessity.

Neighbourhoods will have great recreational facilities nearby where people can play soccer or hockey without being up at the crack of dawn or driving all over the city. Arts and cultural activities will flourish, and people will know their neighbours, meeting in libraries and community centres.

Sound utopian? Maybe. But we have to try. Building neighbourhoods like this is the best way for our city to survive—for us to be socially, financially, and ecologically sustainable.

Focusing on the three Ds of great cities—density, diversity, and a sense of discovery—as we build new neighbourhoods and revitalize old ones gives us the roadmap we need to get to that better Calgary we're all dreaming of.

You can read all of the responses here.


- Daorcey from Mayor Nenshi's team