| The City of Calgary is moving forward on the creation of a comprehensive new plan for the downtown and Beltline areas that city planners are promising will be "exciting and bold."
The new Centre City Plan will encompass all of downtown and the Beltline, including the communities of Eau Claire, Chinatown, the East Village, Victoria Park and Connaught. The last time the city created a comprehensive downtown plan was in 1966 and it didn’t include the Beltline.
The city made a public presentation on July 5 outlining how the plan will be put together. Project manager Brent Toderian says the city is looking for ideas from all Calgarians and he’s asking people to be "bold" in their vision for the future.
"A lot of the things we take for granted as the best aspects of our centre city were at one point considered radical ideas," he says. "For example, the idea that we could have high-density mixed neighbourhoods right in our downtown was a crazy idea at the time because it was felt the market wouldn’t necessarily support this kind of thing. It’s certainly an idea whose time has come…. The Stephen Avenue Walk is another example of a bold idea implemented over time with its heritage preservation and its fantastic pedestrian public realm."
Toderian says there are many positive projects underway that will contribute to downtown revitalization, including new private condo projects, the Calgary Stampede’s expansion plans in Victoria Park and the city’s plans to redevelop the East Village.
But Toderian says there are also challenges that need to be addressed, including promoting caring and safe communities, keeping up with infrastructure demands such as a viable transit system and ensuring there’s "more activity, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week downtown."
Ald. Druh Farrell says until recently she felt Calgary was "on the cusp" of change, but now it’s truly happening.
"We’re experiencing a renaissance and I think if you compare this to the last boom in the ’80s, we had interest in building, but we didn’t have the self-confidence, I believe, to build excellence. Now we have self-confidence and we’re ready for this next boom. We’re going to demand excellence," she says.
Ald. Madeleine King says creating "a great place to live, work and play" is the key.
"Ours is an incredibly successful downtown because it has given us such a wonderful head office city, but it doesn’t have life on the weekends and in the evenings to the extent that we would want…. We know that what’s important is to have more people living in the area so that we really do get the live, work and the play," says King.
Both the draft Beltline Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) and the approved East Village ARP emphasis increased density.
King says she also wants to see focused development along the entire length of 9th Avenue South, where the railroad tracks cut off the downtown from the Beltline.
"When you go to a city like Chicago you don’t even notice that there are major rail lines running all the way through it. We really can link the whole of centre city and it will all be much more vibrant and much more exciting for all of us if we can do it successfully," says King.
To find out more about the new plan, go to www.calgary.ca/centrecity, call the city’s ideas hotline at 268-2828 or send an e-mail to centrecityideas@calgary.ca. |
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