Calgary Comparison
January 17, 2012
Speaking of Alberta (below), the Calgary Herald ran a piece a couple of days ago, asking prominent Calgarians to envision their city 30 years into the future.
The Mayor, Naheed Nenshi, provided the uplifting boilerplate – “Calgary will be a city of sustainable, walkable, livable, lovable, complete communities” – along with remarks from other politicians, professors and community leaders. But what caught my eye was the viewpoint of Adam Legge, the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce.
Now before reading on, anticipate, if you will, the remarks of a CEO, someone from a Chamber of Commerce – especially from Calgary! Now proceed:
I think three factors will shape neighbourhood life in 30 years: price of fuel; technology; and moving away from privacy and over-protection.In 30 years it is likely that the price of traditional transportation fuels will be so high that people will look to live closer to work/school and will take different forms of transport. Our neighbourhoods will be more complete and offer more to do within the immediate area.Technology offers huge opportunity to bring virtualization, and web access along every step of the street. Imagine interactive community boards in parks, along sidewalks — it offers some very interesting experiences and opportunities to create and share.Finally, I think the public realm will open again. We will find a finite point of engaging in relationships in a digital space and will recognize that we are over-protective of our children. I hope we will find more people being neighbourly in neighbourhoods, more children riding their bikes, and having adventures.Our city is a safe one and the statistics prove it, so let’s start trusting that and living like it is a safe city.
And then compare that with the American Right, as described in this piece in Grist:
In December, Tea Party Republicans in the House zeroed out Poticha’s budget (Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities) in a 2012 appropriations bill. If they’d had their way, it wouldn’t have stopped there. The house bill would have banned HUD from spending money to support “ill-defined rubrics, such as ‘sustainability,’ ‘livability,’ ‘inclusivity,’ and ‘equity.’”
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I like a lot what Adam Legge has to say, because it is much more forward thinking than what we are used to hear here (“people will be growing wheat between the restored streetcar track” or the like)
The return form an “over protective” society: that resonates pretty European with wide spread adoption of road sharing (woonerf) principle
Vancouver at once was at the forefront of this trend with Granville island, but the experience has stay orphan, and instead now with people unable to think beyond bike helmet and Councilors explicitly calling for a ban of cyclist on city streets, …Vancouver is going backward
but what is the more interesting is the thinking on role and integration of digital media/socialization in the tomorrow public space…thought I didn’t put emphasis on it, it is something I have also came across here
when I have written my post : http://voony.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/an-avenue-in-neuilly/
That makes the Adam legge vision very forward thinking. It is something we definitely miss in Vancouver those day.