While the largest and longest public hearing was still underway next door at City Hall, Avenue readers gathered on April 30 at the University of Calgary’s City Building Design Lab to hear speakers’ thoughts on the future of downtown development and why we are so emotionally connected to the question of housing density.
To live up to Avenue’s mission to bring Calgarians together to celebrate the city’s distinct cultures, spark discovery and excitement and ignite conversations that advance the future of Calgary, the Future of the City Festival gathered a diverse and interested group of readers and speakers.
“The possibilities for our city’s future are endless and will require insight and ingenuity from experts, creative thinkers, city-builders and engaged citizens across all four quadrants of Calgary,” Shelley Arnusch, Avenue’s Editor in Chief, told the audience while introducing the event.
The Future of the City Festival included two panel discussions. The first focused on downtown development and what we need from downtown in the future as the city and the nature of work changes. Panelists Maxim Olshevsky, CEO of Astra Group and Peoplefirst Developments, Darshan Tailor, Urban Planner with the City of Calgary, and Deeter Schurig, CEO of cSPACE, each brought a different perspective on the question.
The second panel focused on housing density and why it continues to incite such a strong emotional response from Calgarians. Panelists Latosia Campbell-Walters, owner of Sparks Planning Group, and Srimal Ranasinghe, managing partner of Hive Developments, discussed how and why we need to consider our emotional needs in the discussion of changing neighbourhoods and dealing with the housing crisis. This discussion grew out of a story featured in Avenue’s March/April issue (“Density Doldrums: Why Does Adding Homes to Established Communities Stir Up Emotions?”).
Calgary is a young and vibrant city and always ranks highly in the lists of most livable in the world. This makes it a very attractive place for immigrants both internationally and nationally — last year Alberta saw the highest gain in interprovincial migration since Statistics Canada started keeping track of that data in the 1970s.
As Kate Koplovich, Director, Strategy Marketing & Communications, Strategy and Strategic Alliances at Calgary Economic Development noted, “The momentum our city is experiencing is unprecedented – we’re the cool kids now!”
But population growth isn’t the only change that the city faces and the panels also talked about social, economic and environmental changes affecting the future of the city. The Future of the City Festival aims to explore the questions of what do we hope our city becomes and what work do we need to do to get there.
The Festival was generously supported by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, Calgary Economic Development, Astra Group, Peoplefirst Developments and the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.
