Calgarians are no strangers to long-range thinking and urban sprawl – they have been a fact of life for most of the past century, according to two University of Calgary researchers.

And almost from the start, the city has spread tentacles along certain growth arteries.

Beverly Sandalack, an associate professor and co-ordinator of urban design in the U of C’s environmental design faculty, and research associate Andrei Nicolai have been examining the ways that Calgary has evolved and how its neighbourhoods have taken shape.

“It’s a history of the evolution of Calgary as a place to live,” Sandalack said in a recent interview.



Their three-dimensional computer model, pictured above right, includes areas from the Beltline north through downtown to the Bow River, as well as Cliff Bungalow and Mission.

This kind of research doesn’t draw the traditional grants that go to scientific and medical studies. But Enmax Power has funded their work on Calgary’s evolution and publication of a forthcoming book on the topic. “Enmax Power has been very good to us,” said Sandalack.

A 1924 air photo map in Sandalack’s office shows Calgary at almost 50 years old. Air photo technology was new in those days, and the whole province was flown over that year.

The city’s central core is clearly defined – and there is also evident growth up Centre Street North and on part of 16th Avenue. Other colour-coded drawings show the city’s spread at different dates, not evenly but along particular paths.

Calgary’s core is constrained by escarpments north and south of the Bow River. The resulting pattern has resulted in low-density suburbs with people working elsewhere, she said.

Nicolai said they concentrated on the development of the urban form and how the city has evolved. They have also taken snapshots of Calgary at key moments in its life. Those moments are the early city in 1914, the established city of 1946, the city in 1963 after the post-Second-World-War boom and the urban renewal demonstrated in Calgary by 1988.

Looking at those moments and the shape of Calgary now, they can see how the city has evolved in streetscapes, urban commercial areas and residential neighbourhoods. The snapshots of history include literal photographs. One panel has three mounted photos showing the change in suburban streets from the First-World-War era to the 1950s and the 1980s.

Sandalack said they also looked at how the public realm has evolved – streets, parks, squares and plazas. In other words, public open spaces are where all citizens have the right to congregate.

Nicolai pointed to an example of Calgary’s natural forward-looking tendency. A 1912 map shows planned subdivisions for a city bigger than the Calgary that actually existed in 1946.

“It’s always been a Calgary habit to think big,” he said. The Hyde Park and Hiawatha communities on the map haven’t occurred, but Windsor Park is there.

Sandalack said that instead of asking what are the limits to growth, Calgarians have continued to build low-density suburbs.

“No one has ever proven that building more interchanges and wider roads solves traffic problems. In fact, the opposite is true,” she said, adding upgraded roads attract more cars.

“You need a certain density or intensity to have the quality of urban form that makes living in cities worthwhile,” she said, adding a combination of commercial and residential buildings works better in higher density.

She called Calgary a great city with tremendous beauty in its site. It is near great agricultural and amenity lands that can’t be built over in high density.

“Good urbanism is good environmentalism,” added Sandalack.

HOUSE BUILDERS HOT

Residential construction investment continued to sizzle across Canada in the third quarter, Statistics Canada reports.

The federal statistical agency said that investment in residential construction totalled $17.6 billion in the third quarter, up 11.1 per cent from the $15.8 billion invested in the third quarter of 2002. All three components of residential construction – new housing, renovations and acquisition costs – increased.

Since the start of 2003, the value of investment in the housing sector has reached $45.3 billion, up 11.2 per cent from the first three quarters of 2002.

StatsCan said that low mortgage rates, high employment and consumer confidence, and the small number of available homes have contributed to the rise. Calgary builders were also kept on the run by demand for new housing. “It’s extremely busy, but it’s more of a normalized market,” said Allan Klassen, president of the Calgary Region Home Builders Association and CEO of Albi Homes.

Builders are busy on both the single-family and multi-family sides of the industry, but they’re behind the pace of last year. To the end of November, they had started 7,800 single-family and 4,500 multi-family units in the Calgary area, he said.

Another StatsCan report said that building permits were ahead of last year’s figures across the nation for the first 10 months, despite a decline in October.

The value of building permits for October was $4.3 billion, down 4.9 per cent from September. Housing permits fell 3.3 per cent from September’s record level to $2.8 billion, with declines in both single- and multi-family dwellings. The value of non-residential permits declined 7.7 per cent to $1.5 billion, their lowest level since March. This was a result of decreases for industrial and institutional projects, said StatsCan. For the first 10 months, intentions were up 8.9 per from the same period in 2002 to $42.6 billion.

GENESIS MOVES AHEAD

A Calgary development company has won rezoning of 247 acres near Balzac for commercial development. Genesis Land Development Corp. bought the property in November 2001. The Municipal District of Rocky View has rezoned the area, now called the North Calgary Commercial Campus, to direct control. It can be used for light industrial, office, retail, research and commercial development. The property is located on Highway 2, two minutes from the city limits and 10 minutes from the airport.

Development is expected to commence next spring, and will eventually build out to include a business park with more than 3,000 employees. The 247 acres should produce more than two million square feet of site coverage, the company said.