Calgary’s lack of innovative and diverse options led me to search elsewhere for the city life I wanted

[CBBarnett]

There are people with worse takes, but I find myself doing a lot of eye rolls whenever I read something of his.
I don’t have anything against him personally, but CBC and Herald need to get off their lazy stale asses and find somebody fresh.

Not all entirely urban development related, but a real opinion piece on Calgary's opportunity and challenges - from a better writer and importantly not the same tired voice of "Calgary's fine and we have nothing to learn from good cities elsewhere".

It's an opinion piece - so feel free to disagree - but thought it's appropriate to share on this topic. It's very on-the-nose about how voices like White's help propagate a mainstream Calgary culture that many don't connect with:

Calgary’s lack of innovative and diverse options led me to search elsewhere for the city life I wanted​

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opi...ovative-and-diverse-options-led-me-to-search/

 

[Disraeli]

Not all entirely urban development related, but a real opinion piece on Calgary's opportunity and challenges - from a better writer and importantly not the same tired voice of "Calgary's fine and we have nothing to learn from good cities elsewhere".

It's an opinion piece - so feel free to disagree - but thought it's appropriate to share on this topic. It's very on-the-nose about how voices like White's help propagate a mainstream Calgary culture that many don't connect with:

Calgary’s lack of innovative and diverse options led me to search elsewhere for the city life I wanted​

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opi...ovative-and-diverse-options-led-me-to-search/

Yes, an opinion piece about Calgary's culture from a person who lived "20-to-30-minute drive from downtown" and who only connected with "artistic people" after deciding to move because of a purported lack of culture and innovation.

 

[YourBoy007]

Not all entirely urban development related, but a real opinion piece on Calgary's opportunity and challenges - from a better writer and importantly not the same tired voice of "Calgary's fine and we have nothing to learn from good cities elsewhere".

It's an opinion piece - so feel free to disagree - but thought it's appropriate to share on this topic. It's very on-the-nose about how voices like White's help propagate a mainstream Calgary culture that many don't connect with:

Calgary’s lack of innovative and diverse options led me to search elsewhere for the city life I wanted​

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opi...ovative-and-diverse-options-led-me-to-search/

The piece is focused too much on race and kumbayaism. But to her main point, she is right. We are divided and the only thing that keeps us together is the core. Though it's not even a great core. Things to blame: Too much immigration too fast, we allow too many people who aren't fluent in English to migrate here, lack of original cultural identity; and of course, not enough density to force us together. Diversity can be good for certain things absolutely, but to say it's our strength and that we can all hold hands and get along is laughable and downright naive. Feel free to disagree, or just, you know, walk outside and see for yourself.

 

[darwink]

Yes, an opinion piece about Calgary's culture from a person who lived "20-to-30-minute drive from downtown" and who only connected with "artistic people" after deciding to move because of a purported lack of culture and innovation.

Lots of stuff in the piece.

Yeah, we don't market well enough the 'you know, even if you grew up in Calgary, you and your friends should all move downtown when you're in your early 20s and sell/mostly park your cars'. We don't have a solution to the ecosystem access problem—part of the solution when moving into the core of a new urban area is forcing yourself to make new friends. I can say I knew about way more cool things in Toronto that friends whose majority of their friend network continued on from their high school. If they had moved to Calgary around that time they'd have likely immersed themselves more in Calgary.

I think the mention of the green line comes from the author attending MRU while having a car. Classic suburban alienation.

Our 'city building' investments focus on bourgeois amenities, not on supporting ecosystems that happen naturally in much larger cities (adding a net theatre space or two for Arts Commons ain't gonna change that). Could we buy our way into more ecosystem? Doesn't seem to be much appetite for it even if the relative cost would be low (give me $10 million a year to spend on subsidies to artists and musicians and Calgary would seem a very different place after 10 years).

There is also at that age in life it costs about the same to move across the city as it does to move across the country, or across the globe. And that scale has a quality all its own, and Calgary is barely large enough to have 1 of everything, let alone have 10 options (that can seem unlimited in cities with 500k living in the urban core rather than 50k). Paris within the ring road which defines the 'urban core' is 2.1 million of 14.7 million in the metro. I doubt the author lived in the equivalent urban '14%' in Calgary.

In the end we're (us and the author) comparing ourselves to cities that are much larger. We're smaller, and our culture is much more monolithic because our economy is. Imagine how different New York City would feel if 2 million people worked in finance instead of 200,000. Calgary is basically the former, but with oil and gas.

Where did Sarah move? Paris. What career does she appear to be exploring? Fashion journalism with a bunch of freelance writing. It is great to be following ones dream but quite frankly I think that disclosing that would take a whole lot of 'force' out of her piece.

 

[CBBarnett]

The debate also kind of illustrates a key point I think. Our public dialogue - not the esoteric urban nerd sub-culture of all you smart folks with your well thought-out commentary - but the Richard White style v. anything else in the Herald or CBC about Calgary as a city is pretty amateurish:

The Richard White (RW) style articles, summarized as:

• Everything is fine.
  • If it isn't fine - the problem is inferred to be you, not the city ("Transit sucks? Well Calgary's a driving city so buy a car! Man what a great city to drive in - we really are the best!" etc.)
• We don't have anything to learn from any other city.
• Calgary is the best, look at these surface level examples.

The other article we get occasionally is like the opinion piece, typically from a viewpoint that isn't the dominant main stream as a standard RW Herald booster article:

• Everything is not fine, here's some examples.
• Some people don't feel included in the way we build our city (Calgary not being as inclusive as boosters think it is, Calgary not being cool, Calgary losing young people etc.)
• Other cities do some stuff better, especially on stuff that Richard White style boosterism ignores (non-mainstream cultures, minority issues, inclusion etc.)

The reality is obviously somewhere in between, but we don't have sophistication or effective, ongoing public dialogue about it in the media. Boring booster articles and a controversial, occasional dunks disagreeing.

Of course the truth is in between - Calgary is great at some things, Calgary totally sucks at others. Lots of the good and bad is empirically measurable (we are measurable good or bad at some things); some of it is up to the perception of an individual that lives here.

Personally I think the RW articles (and the culture that creates them) about generic boosterism and lazy analysis is a barrier to how people think about the city and how people see the city changing. Calgary will change no matter what - so better at least try to make changes for the better. "everything is fine" articles don't help and only calcify the discourse into a shallow, unhelpful blandness.

This line from @darwink I really liked:

Yeah, we don't market well enough the 'you know, even if you grew up in Calgary, you and your friends should all move downtown when you're in your early 20s and sell/mostly park your cars'.

Yeah no kidding - if you googled anything about Calgary as a city and it's urban culture in the past 20 years you'd get Stampede ads and RW articles. Remember, according to him it's all good everywhere - our new burbs are great an vibrant! It's like bicycling in Copenhagen everywhere!

With the way Calgary portrays itself in the loudest media by the loudest voices, it's no wonder many people who come here fail to stumble into our subcultures and our best things and decide to leave a few years later!

 

[outoftheice]

To me, the article highlights what I have long believed... Calgary is a tale of 2 cities. For those who live in the central area that I would roughly define as being between Glenmore Trail in the south, Crowchild in the west, McKnight in the north and Barlow in the east, Calgary is a vibrant urban city with lots of great attributes that are a quick bike, scoot, Uber or Ctrain ride away from residents. Outside this zone, Calgary is a suburban paradise with affordable houses, great community parks and big box stores galore.

There is a type of person who loves the urban Calgary and a type of person who loves the suburban Calgary. If you have the soul of the urban Calgarian living in the suburban or vice versa, you will not enjoy life in this city. Unlike many other large metropolitan centres, we have not made it easy to bridge the divide between the two Calgarys. It's hard for someone living in Silverado to spontaneously pop down to Inglewood to catch a live show just as it's hard for someone living in Kensington without a car to head down to Mahogany for a backyard BBQ with friends.

We need to continue to invest in further density within existing central communities so that life for someone who desires the urban Calgary experience doesn't become out of reach simply because of affordability. Similarly, we have to continue to invest transit and alternative transportation options that make it easy for urban Calgarians to explore what the burbs have to offer while making sure we don't sprawl our city indefinitely.

Last but not least, I think we need to work on investing in community building events that draw people between the two Calgarys so they are exposed to all the things this city has to offer and consider how a childhood in the 'burbs can lead to your 20s downtown and your 30s back in the 'burbs without having to give up too much of what you love about your Calgary lifestyle. I also think we as citizens have to lean into the things that make our city unique even if they don't reflect our typical worldview. The person who loves folk fest probably can't stand the Stampede and vice versa. Yet both have the ability to make Calgary a city known for live music if only we can leverage and celebrate the strengths of both. Sadly we typically don't and the 'tale of two Calgarys' tends to exist culturally and not just geographically in our city.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

The piece is focused too much on race and kumbayaism. But to her main point, she is right. We are divided and the only thing that keeps us together is the core. Though it's not even a great core. Things to blame: Too much immigration too fast, we allow too many people who aren't fluent in English to migrate here, lack of original cultural identity; and of course, not enough density to force us together. Diversity can be good for certain things absolutely, but to say it's our strength and that we can all hold hands and get along is laughable and downright naive. Feel free to disagree, or just, you know, walk outside and see for yourself.

You know, when I take your advice to "just walk outside and see" people, I can't see who has immigrated here too recently, or who isn't as fluent in English as some would like. I can only see what people look like on the outside, not who "to blame" as you put it.

I wonder where the writer of the have could ever have reached the conclusion there are people in Calgary judging her for her skin colour.

 

[Mountain Man]

I think Calgary needs to work on adding more urban nodes far away from the city centre. This was the idea of Seton originally, but I have no idea how successful it is. The developers that make our city have no interest in this though, they want their cul-de-sacs and power centres and any suggestion they change is met with fierce resistance. Unfortunately I think the majority of our suburbs are just too new to have built the kind of culture some people are looking for.

 

[Patrick.1980]

I read the article yesterday but waited to think it over before responding as I didn't want to seem like an offended Calgarian writing my response while in a huff. Thinking about it today, nothing has changed. The article seems mostly pointless and misguided. It is mostly about racism - something we know unfortunately exists here, but don't go painting Calgary or all Calgarians as racist.I'm a visible minority and I've dealt with racism here in Calgary, but I've dealt with it everywhere I've been in North America, and I don't usually think of Calgary as a racist place. FWIW, the worst places I experience racism were probably in NYC and Montreal, cities supposedly more urban and cultural city than Calgary.

 

[Surrealplaces]

As a Caucasian person it's hard for me to say to what level of racism we have in Calgary. It's a subject that's not easy to quantify, as not everyone is open about it.

I have no evidence of this, but I feel like Calgary is probably more overtly racist than say Toronto or Montreal, but not necessarily more racist or at least not much more. I had spent a fair amount of time working in Toronto a few years back, and one thing I noticed when I was in a small group with only white people or alone with another white person, often people would feel out your stance on race by dropping semi-racist comments here and there and would gage your reaction. I've seen that here too, but not as much, and maybe because some or more overt about it, I don't know. I'm of the belief that the percentage of Caucasians in Toronto who are racist might not actually be much less than Calgary. I do think it's more subtle.

 

[adamyyc]

I think part of the challenge is to create opportunities for diversity to flourish throughout the City. Calgary may be the third most diverse city in Canada, but that diversity is concentrated, to the point that the most diverse communities are really actually homogenous (see NE quadrant). This isn’t unique to Calgary but it’s certainly pronounced here. This concentrated diversity is of course a byproduct of human nature, as well as affordable homes/rent, and a desire/need to be close to others who speak your language and share your culture. Increasing affordable housing and creating inclusive (and safe) spaces throughout the City will help.

 

[jhappy77]

That's funny, because we've been bringing in millions of immigrants ever since we existed as a country. It's disappointing to hear that you think bringing in immigrants 'taints' our culture; for me at least, some of my favorite cultural experiences in Canada have involved meeting people from diverse walks of life and expanding my horizons. Meanwhile Japanese society has stagnated for the past 30 years, they are not a good model to follow.

 

[YourBoy007]

That's funny, because we've been bringing in millions of immigrants ever since we existed as a country. It's disappointing to hear that you think bringing in immigrants 'taints' our culture; for me at least, some of my favorite cultural experiences in Canada have involved meeting people from diverse walks of life and expanding my horizons. Meanwhile Japanese society has stagnated for the past 30 years, they are not a good model to follow.

Those immigrants were mostly of European descent and had time to assimilate. Their culture and society wasn't so different from ours.
And I don't think it taints our culture. I know it does. So do the Japanese. Their country is a lot better than this shithole no question. You're mad cause we made our bed, now we have to sleep in it. lol.

 

[UrbanRED]

Those immigrants were mostly of European descent and had time to assimilate. Their culture and society wasn't so different from ours.
And I don't think it taints our culture. I know it does. So do the Japanese. Their country is a lot better than this shithole no question. You're mad cause we made our bed, now we have to sleep in it. lol.

Talk about proving the article's point...

 

[October]

This is the exact type of rambling I hear from the "Freedom" protestors downtown as I try to walk to work on the weekend.

Your comments are incredibly tone deaf, not to mention that any person who is not of indigenous decent is essentially an immigrant to this country, as well as the fact that over 20% of the country is within a reach of a first generation immigrant. This forum isn't the place for you to ramble on about how immigrants are "tainting our culture".