Why are Calgarians so fond of our city’s blandness?
Decades-old planning documents have some clues.
Walking under the dense tree canopy of la Condesa, a vibrant Mexico City neighbourhood, makes me wonder what makes this area so appealing to ‘expats’, as two of the most prominent features of this area — a mix of uses and activities in a moderately dense environment — go against the outdated city planning principles Calgary homeowners continue to protect.
In Condesa, ‘middle housing’ didn’t go missing. It thrived.
Apartment buildings not only come in a variety of architectural styles and heights, they also stand adjacent to single family homes, many of which have been repurposed to function as apartments, boutique hotels, co-working spaces, restaurants, clothing stores, yoga studios. You get the idea.
The reason for this diversity isn’t that there are no zoning bylaws to regulate uses, nor urban design guidelines to ensure aesthetic harmony, but that flexibility is built into the city’s regulations, allowing for functional and aesthetic variety as of right — and dispelling the deep-rooted fears of Calgary NIMBYs.
Allowing for more than detached homes won’t trigger neighbourhood’s demise. Density won’t drive people to crime. And, more importantly, allowing for both functional and aesthetic diversity won’t cause property values to plummet.
So, why do these worries continue to bring neighbours together in opposing anything that disrupts homogeneity, or Calgary’s status quo?
While Calgary planners have come to recognize the mistakes past practitioners made by creating policies that favour car dependency and low densities, their legacy continues to resonate in the meeting rooms of community halls across our city’s established neighbourhoods, where residents voice concerns related to parking, traffic, privacy, shadows, vegetation, and community character.
What yesterday’s planners once thought of as objective measures to prevent blight, crime, and unhealthful conditions, turned out to be little more than a veil to conceal the classist and racist beliefs permeating Canadian society — including city planners.
A study produced by the City of Calgary in 1964 shows planners haven’t been immune social prejudices.
“Several sections of the population seem suited for apartment living,” the document reads. “They include newly married couples, single and highly mobile individuals, the elderly, the financially insecure and the house-hater.”
A faint, hand scribbled note adds “the sophisticated” to the list, but the recommendations of the document remain focused on regulating built form as a way to guarantee Calgary homeowners an adequate living environment, devoid of the maladies brought about by density, namely poverty and social disorder.
“…one of the prime functions of The Zoning Bylaw is to protect established property owners from the possibility of having the value of their investment depreciated by subsequent development in their neighbourhood. It may be argued that such depreciation may be caused not only by the wrong type of use locating nearby, but an ugly or shoddy building housing a ‘right’ type of use.”
A decade earlier, the urban renewal movement stressed the importance of enacting strict controls over urban form to curb the spread of social disorder, as if poverty were some sort of communicable disease.
“One of the chief characteristics of [slum dwellers] is an income that is neither great nor steady and mere necessity of furnishing the accommodation provided may well prove to be an insuperable obstacle, nor is the habitation of new quarters in itself sufficient to redeem them,” explains a CMHC document compiled in the late ‘50s, which points at the important role city planners played in “rehabilitating” this segment of the population.
“They have to learn a new type of social relationship and they have to deal with new elements of social life and many years will likely elapse before the new terms of reference become natural to them.”
Go figure.
In this context, it’s hardly surprising that homogeneity and low density became a signifier of beauty and desirability across our city’s neighbourhoods, but also a class marker.
One could argue that both city planners and Calgarians know better today, but letting go of our deeply rooted fears, even if debunked, isn’t an easy feat.
If seeing neighbourhoods elsewhere thrive not despite, but because functional and aesthetic diversity isn’t enough to change people’s minds, what is?
Reluctantly yours,
Ximena
“Why did it take her so long to write this?!” you might be thinking. Let me explain.
Because i write these posts when i find free time between paid work, or when i’m procrastinating on another story (as is the current case, lol), each time i return to a draft, i find myself in a different headspace. This means that the longer i sit with an essay in progress, the more time i have to change my mind. For example, a previous iteration of this piece pointed at the role community associations have played in perpetuating the aforementioned beliefs — but that idea left my brain and i couldn’t find the groove again, so you ended up reading a different rambling. As the number of paid subscribers grows, i expect my capacity to focus and write something decent in one go will increase. In the meantime, expect delays!
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