There's a lot of people who couldn't possibly run a full marathon, but you're not going to find out about them if you only interview people as they cross the finishing line. It seems weird that you'd only accept an opinion on whether the cultural scene in Calgary is welcoming to newcomers by only asking people who have invested in that scene for decades and been successful in engaging in it. Not to mention that there are many cultural scenes; they interact, but Calgary has stronger and weaker scenes -- even within one dimension, it's not uniform; I think Calgary has a pretty great culinary scene overall, but while we're top notch in (say) coffee, we're still pretty poor on Latin American food; not too many years removed from being the largest city in North America where you couldn't get a decent taco. The writer of the piece is into writing and fashion; I don't know how good those scenes (or the subscenes she's interested in) are in Calgary, but having a good music scene isn't necessarily all that relevant.
I agree with this.
That said, the experience of someone who goes to university in a city while living in their parents' suburban home is a limited one (especially with the last couple of years involving a lot of distance learning). I don't think it's the definitive statement on Calgary's cultural scene, just one data point amongst thousands.
Where you live and how you interact with cultures and communities around you is a personal choice. People who make choices that don't make them fulfilled or connected to the communities they seek are unhappy. Sometimes they write articles.
But critically important - a person's personal choice is always limited by the conditions they find themselves in. These limiting conditions are both individual (e.g. wealth, family stability and background, education, social context, language etc.) and collective (e.g. how we build our city). Individuals have much less control over these limiting conditions and their personal choice can only go so far to overcome limiting conditions. Sometimes it's not possible.
I see this article reflects a bunch of personal choices that could have been made better, but those choices were also limited by individual and collective conditions.
This whole discussion is about this interaction between personal choice and limiting factors:
- I can't take transit if we don't build any.
- I can't live next to the university if I can't afford it. Even if I can afford it, if everyone else doesn't live next to the university at a high enough density, I can only get so much of a student culture easily accessible in my community.
- I might want to live in a 24/7 nightlife district, but if there's not enough other people nearby who want the same thing and the city isn't big enough, it might not be economic for any nightlife at all.
The good news is that most of these collective issues are being actively or passively (i.e. just become a bigger, denser city) being resolved but it takes time - like generations. That will be too long for some people to wait, especially new comers that have more limiting conditions by not knowing the city and the nuances of our cultures to give a head start.
Then there's the counter-point comments, which is my pet peeve - "the problem isn't the collective at all, it's just the individual! We are all good as a city and there's nothing to worry about! Stop trying to change us. You (newcomer) are the problem for just not trying to fit in enough." It's frustrating because obviously reality is something in the middle of individual choice and collective limitations.
An individual can't choose what doesn't exist, is unlikely to choose something they would have to get lucky to stumble upon to even know about, and is unlikely to choose something that is super difficult and costly to access. It's their choices, but the table was stacked against what they might have chose if we provided more options/access.
