A blueprint to help guide Calgary through its millennium growing pains is being sent to more than 400 community groups and businesses this week to help map out a plan for the city’s future.

The timing is right, says Georgine Ulmer, president and CEO of Calgary Inc., which promotes sustainable economic development for Calgary through marketing and a network of business partnerships.

“If you look at the rate of change that globalization has brought, and the fact that we are a very progressive city, we wanted to make sure we had the right environment to continue to have the city prosper the way it has been prospering over the years,” says Ulmer.

Called the Community Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity, the report is part of a five-year plan by Calgary Inc. and its partners to keep the city healthy and competitive in a exploding, knowledge-based global economy.

The strategy has three main aims: connecting Calgary to the world, connecting city businesses to each other, and keeping citizens connected to each other and their communities.

A series of public consultation meetings over the past year persuaded Ulmer that many Calgarians fear their quality of life may be negatively affected as the city gallops toward the one-million population mark predicted for 2007.

“There was a concern that as we grew and changed as a community, we were losing some of the connections that we had,” she says. “We’ll be a million people shortly — what does that do to us as a community? And how do we respond?”

The feedback at the meetings showed Calgarians want eight “community values” protected and strengthened in the future, including:

* Having a robust, diverse economy that produces a wide range of job opportunities;
* Maintaining clean water and a healthy environment;
* Fostering a strong sense of community spirit, with civic participation through volunteerism, team spirit and neighborliness;
* Safety in terms of a low crime rate and financial security;
* Living in a city of integrity, by increasing basic standards of living for all, with corporate, environmental and social responsibility;
* Being progressive by fostering innovation, creativity and risk-taking;
* Having fun, and offering accessible and affordable opportunities for all;
* Keeping our relationship with the land and our western roots strong.

“We’ve grown so rapidly, in the last five years particularly, and we wanted to make sure the city that was being created as a result of this growth also was able to hold on to the strong quality of life that we all enjoy,” says Ulmer.

The costs of such a project have to extend through all levels of government to successfully move beyond a simple marketing strategy. “They have to be part of the solution, there’s absolutely no question,” Ulmer says, adding one of the biggest costs will be time.

A primary goal of the action plan is to develop more industry clusters, geographic concentrations of inter-connected companies. The report notes that Calgary’s oil-and-gas community is a significant cluster which has helped spawn the city’s thriving high-tech sector.

The plan also envisions possible clusters in the health and wellness, tourism, arts and culture and biotechnology fields.

“Growth from within the community is strategically important,” notes John Masters, president and CEO of Calgary Technologies Inc. “It is much more beneficial to try to grow a cluster from within your community than to try to attract significant investment from outside.”

Masters adds most companies believe it is advantageous to collaborate within such clusters — with interlinked supplier, distribution and customer relationships — rather than simply following the old competition model.

Calgary is attracting attention for its wireless sector, he says, which causes other companies to look at moving parts of their business operations here to take advantage of the technological infrastructure and skilled workforce.

The Community Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity will be rolled out over the next several weeks to interested groups so they can respond with their own suggestions. Partners such as the Calgary Convention Centre Authority, the Calgary Convention and Visitors Bureau and Calgary Technologies Inc. are also working on how to implement the strategy.