Students see the future

JOEL MESSNER METRO CALGARY

June 25th, 2009

Two university students are capitalizing on their chance to help shape Calgary for the future.

Both Andrew Sedor and Derek Pomreinke presented their ideas to council on Tuesday during the Plan It Calgary hearing.

Sedor , 20, is going into his fourth year of the University of Calgary’s urban studies program, while Pomreinke, 23, has just graduated from the same program.

“I thought it was very important that people my age, and the younger generation who aren’t typically known for being very proactive in stuff like city governance, to point out that there are people from my generation that do care,” said Pomreinke.

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Sundays without cars? A rising trend in North America

June 25th, The Toronto’s Star:

New York and San Francisco call it Sunday Streets, and Portland residents know the concept as Sunday Parkways.

Now Vancouver is joining the growing number of North American cities declaring car-free Sundays. Its new Summer Spaces program will close off four neighbourhoods to cars to create 20 car-free routes on Sundays in July and August.

The idea of reinventing street space for pedestrians and bikes is an offshoot of the original Ciclovia, which started in Bogota, Colombia, in the 1980s.

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What do you think? Could this work in Calgary? And if so, where should be implemented?

Proposed Developments – Riverside Video CMLC

Watch the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation video about the Riverside Project

 

We reccomend using Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome to watch the video properly. Alternatively, the video can be found at the CMLC website.

What do Calgarians think about Plan It?

The letters sent in by Calgarians about Plan are now available to the public. There were 585 letters sent to the city either in support or not in support of Plan It. After reading a portion of the letters it looks like some of the main opposition to Plan It involve the River Crossings, the Airport Tunnel or people from within the development industry.

We encourage you to check out the submissions for yourself.

Public Submissions 1-26

Public Submissions 27-52

Are we facing the Connelly-gate?

Last week, the Calgary Herald published an article regarding the difficulties which Aldermen were facing to fundraise in times of economical crisis. The article focused on Ald. Joe Connelly, who specifically addressed the Urban Development Institute for donations. It is well known that most aldermen accept donations from developers and specific-interest groups. However, limiting the funding sources to a certain lobby group while facing the Plan It Calgary Public Hearing on June 23rd rises some issues. While not being an illegal move, his financial strategy casts a shadow of suspicion on his position towards Plan It:

Will his vote be influenced by the donations received?

Should he recuse himself from the vote to avoid a conflict of interests?

Is it healthy for our City Council to accept donations from the industry?

The Connelly situation finally rises a bigger issue: aldermen funding. A funding system that accepts donations from any source, without a balanced origin and, in some cases, with dubious purposes, will keep casting doubts on the objectivity of our City Council.

Finally, a nice quote from a related article by Naheed Nenshi in the Calgary Herald:

What ruined by mood, though, was the story around Ald. Joe Connelly. As reported in the Herald over the last week, Connelly, like all aldermen (me, too, when I ran for Council in 2004), accepts donations from the development industry. Where he went further is that he asked the umbrella group for the industry–the Urban Development Institute– to advertise a fund-raising event for him.

They did so. Indeed, the head of UDI, Mike Flynn, implied that some of his members would no longer support all aldermen, as they had done in the past.

“It will definitely lead to a larger discussion down the road, whether we want to look at who’s been supportive of our positions and who hasn’t,” he said.

Guillermo Guglietti

 

Planning for a resilient city – Byron Miller’s opinion piece on Plan It

June 18th, 2009. Byron Miller’s opinion piece at the Calgary Herald:

When it comes to planning cities, we frequently act as if the future will simply be “deja vu all over again,” to borrow a phrase from the great social analyst Yogi Berra. In many ways it would be nice if it were so. The future would be clear and we could keep doing the same old things that worked pretty well in the past.

But, as Berra also insightfully observed, “the future ain’t what it used to be.” Turn the clock back 60 years and the future was large families with lots of kids, fuelling the growth of the suburbs.

By contrast, today the average Calgary household has about two-and-a-half people and that number is dropping. Six decades ago marked the beginning of our largest demographic cohort, the baby boom generation. Now baby boomers are nearing retirement and looking to downsize their housing.

Sixty years ago we didn’t think about the environmental effects of our lifestyles. Now we know our greenhouse gas emissions threaten the integrity of the planet’s life-support systems. And sixty years ago we thought cheap fossil fuel would go on forever. Now we know expensive energy is right around the corner. No, the future is not what it used to be.

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Ottawa – Live in the past or plan for the future

Jeffrey Simpson’s editorial for the Globe and Mail.

A decision will be made in the chambers of Ottawa City Council that speaks to whether tomorrow’s city will look like yesterday’s. Cities across Canada make decisions like this all the time. Too many have made the wrong one, as Ottawa might do tomorrow.

At issue is urban sprawl, or the spreading suburbia of single-family housing.

Cities of yesterday planned for and encouraged sprawl.

Developers liked sprawl, because they made more money on single-family dwellings. Families liked sprawl, because it provided space for kids.

Municipal councils liked sprawl, because councillors believed in letting market forces prevail and market forces (developers and consumers) wanted sprawl.

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UrbanCSA endorsement to Plan It

The City of Calgary is facing in the next few days one of the most important decisions in the last decade: the Plan It Calgary initiative. UrbanCSA endorses the proposed transportation and development plan, regarding it an important step towards the shaping of a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable city.

We do wish, however, for our tax dollars to subsidize spaces that can accommodate a multiplicity of uses and varying densities. We want higher levels of transit service, and communities where all citizens can walk or ride to the basic services, empowering the public’s ability to subsist through sustainable means. These ideals can exist in healthy, natural environments which stimulate active communities and dynamic public spaces.

It is our opinion that Plan It can steer growth in Calgary towards meeting these objectives. It is also our belief that Plan It is being threatened by the voices of special interest groups who stand to profit from further development on the fringes of the city. These special interest groups do not have our mandate, nor do they represent our interests.

Fragment of the Official UrbanCSA Position

On June 10th, UrbanCSA presented the official endorsement for the consideration of the City Council. The letter can be found in the Opinion Section of the website.

Tour de Nuit – A voice for the commuter cycling in Calgary

Bicycles as viable commuting system in Copenhagen. Calgary counts with one of the most extensive recreational bike paths in North America. However, daily commuting cycling in Calgary remains an utopian ideal. Cities like Portland, Paris, Freiburg and Copenhagen, have developed dedicated infrastructure, allowing their citizens to effectively use their bicycles as their main medium of transportation.

Calgary tour de nuit Society constitutes a newly formed organization in Calgary, which focuses in getting more people cycling more often. As stated in their website:

The Calgary tour de nuit Society is employing a community-based social marketing approach for its program to develop sustainable and active transportation options in Calgary through on-street, closed-road bicycle rides that offer a glimpse of what dedicated bicycle commuting infrastructure can achieve, offering citizens real alternatives to single occupant automobile commuting.

We encourage all those interested in cycling in Calgary to visit their website and, from UrbanCSA, we extend our support to Calgary Tour de Nuit.

Guillermo Guglietti