Calgary 2019 Civic Census

[Rollerstud98]

Airdrie must be the largest city in the western hemisphere without a high rise (12 floors or more)... even Grand Prairie has a high rise

And no hospital.

 

[CBBarnett]

They just need to get an actual downtown going. Fill in the vacant lots in the commercial core.
But meh, to me Airdrie is Alberta's Mississauga. Complete with a downtown anchored by a shopping mall, just without all of the downtown towers...yet

The thing is though - Airdrie doesn't even have the mall, that's 7km out of town towards Calgary in an industrial park outside their city boundary.

Mississauga actually did have a big giant mall they eventually filled in around in the centre of their city. Plus they have major hospitals and just a ton more infrastructure of all types. Airdrie has no centre, there's not really a node to even build from.

Perhaps some of that stuff will come one day - fast boom-towns are often housing first, everything else later and Mississauga has had much more time and scale to build some of that stuff - but the gap in basic social and transportation infrastructure in Airdrie is growing huge.

 

[CalgaryTiger]

The thing is though - Airdrie doesn't even have the mall, that's 7km out of town towards Calgary in an industrial park outside their city boundary.

Mississauga actually did have a big giant mall they eventually filled in around in the centre of their city. Plus they have major hospitals and just a ton more infrastructure of all types. Airdrie has no centre, there's not really a node to even build from.

Perhaps some of that stuff will come one day - fast boom-towns are often housing first, everything else later and Mississauga has had much more time and scale to build some of that stuff - but the gap in basic social and transportation infrastructure in Airdrie is growing huge.

Airdrie has to be one of the worst offenders of relying on other municipalities for services outside of the basics.

 

[Mountain Man]

The thing is though - Airdrie doesn't even have the mall, that's 7km out of town towards Calgary in an industrial park outside their city boundary.

Mississauga actually did have a big giant mall they eventually filled in around in the centre of their city. Plus they have major hospitals and just a ton more infrastructure of all types. Airdrie has no centre, there's not really a node to even build from.

Perhaps some of that stuff will come one day - fast boom-towns are often housing first, everything else later and Mississauga has had much more time and scale to build some of that stuff - but the gap in basic social and transportation infrastructure in Airdrie is growing huge.

Airdrie has the Tower Lane Mall downtown. Kind of an ironic name given the lack of towers in Airdrie.

 

[Albertasaurus]

Airdrie has the Tower Lane Mall downtown. Kind of an ironic name given the lack of towers in Airdrie.

Probably a reference to the grain elevators that used to extend along the tracks in that part of town.

Unfortunately, even as its population approaches 100k Airdrie has shown very little interest in growing up as a city (not in terms of highrises, just in terms of basic amenities you'd expect in a city that size). There appears to be zero consideration of urban design. The redevelopment of Tower Lane Mall effectively turned it into a strip mall, the old hotel was demolished to make way for a multi building that never happened, and even civic investments like the new City Hall and library don't seem to have put a lot of thought into creating the feeling of anything resembling a city centre.

 

[CBBarnett]

Airdrie has the Tower Lane Mall downtown. Kind of an ironic name given the lack of towers in Airdrie.

Yeah but the scale is important here - that "mall" is a big box strip mall style of a hundred or two hundred thousand square feet. It's not a significant node - Airdrie has 2 or 3 power centres of similar magnitude, Calgary has about 200 of these.

Square One in Mississauga is 2.2 million square feet ( 2x the size of Cross Iron Mills, 60% bigger that Chinook). Probably tens of thousands of daily visitors. It's a big boring suburban mall for sure, but it's evolved over 50 years into a "destination" in Mississauga at a scale that is 1,000x more significant than Airdrie's busiest destination.

I actually think Mississauga is a poor comparator to Airdrie (as a city) overall. Airdrie has more in common with a Newmarket or Abbotsford (minus any historic main street/town centre at any scale), whereas Crossiron Mills/Rockyiew County north of the city definitely has a early starts to a Square One /GTA sprawl vibe.

I am curious if Airdrie keeps growing in the long-term the way it has - replication of sprawling, low amenity, no destination buildings - and how Rockyview evolves in the area If Rockyview eventually start allowing a more urban housing style of development along this corridor, the lines between all three jurisdictions will start blurring and become less obvious.

 

[trtcttc]

Another major difference is that Mississauga has Oakville to the West, where there's regular commutes between there and Toronto. Mississauga was sort of the industrial area between the city centre and a residential area. CrossIron actually has an almost identical mall in Vaughan, called Vaughn Mills. I think that's a far better comparison for Airdrie. The main node of the area, Vaughan "Metropolitan" Centre saw some major offices once the subway extended out there. It also has some warehouses/industrial areas between it and Toronto but now has seen residential development with the subway extension.

 

[Surrealplaces]

To me Airdrie feels a bit like another section of subdivision that's not attached directly to Calgary. Kind of like someone copied the area from Whitehorn to SaddleRidge and pasted it north of the city, but unlike the Whitehorn-SaddleRidge section, Airdrie does have the potential to create a main street and centre of gravity. Hopefully that'll happen someday.

 

[kora]

Why didn't they just call it Airdry or Dryair

 

[Mountain Man]

Have to Airdrie your Balzac!