In my girlfriends apartment there are a bunch of issues of the Walrus lying around. I saw that there was one called “the cities issue” that examined the history of Calgary. It was one of the best articles I have read about the city’s past. The article really made me hopeful for Calgary’s future. It is a bit of a lengthy read, but it is not very often where you really get a sense of why Calgary is the way it is and where it is going (hopefully).
Calgary: The Events Leading Up To Sir Norman Foster
A British architect, oil barons, an urban vision, and creeping liberalism: what is the future for Cowtown?
By: Don Gilmore
In 1970, the year I moved to Calgary, the oil boom was just beginning to flower. Our house was in a new development at the northwestern edge of the city, and I walked past horses on my way to school, and past an isolated shack that stood on a few bare acres, waiting for a developer to raze it. The small house contained a large family of porridge-eating hillbillies, to use the phrase of a friend who was one of them. Their father was one of those handsome, hard-drinking, capable, wild-haired western archetypes who wore one pant leg inside his cowboy boot and the other outside. On good days, my friend and his father rode horses in the foothills adjoining the rented property, among the evergreens and stands of poplar that have long since become suburbs and malls. On bad days, of which there was no shortage, there was alcohol and violence.
During a particularly savage winter, a jerry-rigged addition to their house fell off when the cinder blocks it was propped up on split and collapsed in the cold of a 56°C night. The bedroom containing several children separated from the main house, leaving the father standing at the opening, wondering what forces had brought him to this. He eventually went blind, and on those occasions when he was in an alcoholic rage, intent on strangling their mother, the children piled on him like bluetick hounds on a grizzly as he flailed in his darkness. During the 1970s, the house was razed and the clan dispersed.
I think of them when I think of the oil boom of those years, a boom that brought an undeniable energy to the city, and a consuming blindness to certain notions of civic responsibility. What buoyed and defeated us was the same curse every lottery winner carries: sudden possibility. Newly rich, the city thrashed around, defining itself in a drunken spree as the Jed Clampett of urbanism.
In 1973, the Calgary Tower (formerly the Husky Tower), a Jetsonian spike that sits in the centre of the city, was still the tallest building in town. Its revolving restaurant was frequented by tourists, and by university students on lsd who watched their untouched steak sandwiches turn to carrion and observed the city passing below in a sluggish panorama. It would be an exaggeration to say that the landscape changed from one revolution to the next, but not much of one. The price of oil jumped from $3 a barrel to $17 that year due to the opec embargo, and during the height of the ensuing boom 600 old buildings were torn down annually in Calgary, and roughly $1 billion in building permits were issued each year. What we saw from the vantage point of the Calgary Tower was the residue of the 1947 boom, when oil was discovered at Leduc. There were office buildings that were ten or so storeys, a few skyscrapers (Calgary’s first skyscraper, the Elveden Centre, was built in 1960), and some graceful older structures, such as the Burns Building, the Lougheed Building, and the Palliser. Most of the original sandstone buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had already been torn down. The residential streets that bordered downtown featured modest postwar homes, and the odd Eaton’s bungalow, sold through catalogue by the department store in the 1920s, delivered by train in pieces, and assembled by the owner. Most prominent, though, were wrecking crews and construction cranes, poised in clusters: the beginning of another swift transformation.
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municipalities in the world to establish growth targets linked to infrastructure development and environmental carrying capacity when it adopted a Municipal Development Plan. They called this innovative initiative the ‘legacy plan’. Okotoks has successfully integrated Canadian energy efficient technologies with a renewable, unlimited energy source. Did anybody guess what that source is? I know you all did, it’s the Sun. The main idea behind the functionality of this community are the principles surrounding the district heating system. This is designed to store abundant solar energy underground during the summer months and re-distribute this energy to homes in the community for space heating needs during the winter months. Ultimately, this requires less dependance on finite fossil fuels to provide the community with heat. For those that did not attend the tour, there is a vast amount of information regarding the numbers and feasibility of such an ambitious endeavor and I encourage you to find out more about this community. Alright, details. 
