News   Apr 03, 2020
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General Construction Updates

I want to believe this will turn out well, but it often is very status quo.

What I feel confident is that in the ASP there is a lot on land use planning language with “buildings SHOULD be street oriented”, and not “SHALL be street oriented”, and will produce what we have along the Green Line, with buildings facing away from 52St, in mahogany and auburn bay, again. Read: commercial frontages that orient away from a Main Street. I presume this will turn out looking like every “master planned” community built in new Calgary suburbs that has huge vehicle oriented ROWs and doesn’t orient buildings towards them. I hope to see something different though.
I searched for the ASP in the CoC website and couldn’t find it. That search engine is so not user friendly. I rarely find what I’m looking for. Does anyone have the link to this ASP?
 
Looks good for a new suburban neighbourhood. My biggest gripe with new suburban neighborhoods is the way they connect to surround neighborhoods, otherwise the neighborhood's design itself isn't too bad.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alpine-park-breaks-ground-1.5669302

Looks like a new community broke ground in the SW, and judging from the renders it looks like it may turn out pretty nice. I do find it ridiculous that that are comparing a suburb in the deep southwest to the distillery district in TO though. Hopefully things can turn out just like planned and i'm optimistic they will.

The community will provide
- 20 000 jobs over the next 15 years
-1750 new jobs per year
- residences for ~15 000 people

Looks like at first it will be just home being built then as density and population increase it will move to more commercial/ Mixed use developments throughout the planned 15 years. Its nice to see developers planning communities in Calgary that are more than just suburban sprawl. Once complete I'm hoping this will have a lot of character to it.
 
Overall, the neighborhood itself looks fine. If you took like this and transplanted it into an inner city area like Victoria Park (with some density increases), it would instantly be desirable little village.
My design studio worked with DREAM on part of the approval process a few years ago. While obviously still in a suburban location, the master planning that I saw definitely looked to be a big upgrade the typical Calgary suburb, with interesting housing choices and a concerted effort to build a mix-use neighborhood with character. I can't speak to how things will turn out in reality, but at the time I got the vibe that it was for people who loved the energy and mix of the urban experience, but were now in that phase of life where they needed more space for kids etc. Not everyone can afford to be a latte-sipper in Hillhurst or Mission after all. Hopefully reality matches, or at least comes close to, the vision. Good design in the suburbs is just as, if not more, important than in the inner city.
 
Everything in the plan looks good. It reminds me of how Bridgeland is turning out with the various types of housing and densities. The challenge as someone mentioned is the way the new neighborhoods integrate with the rest of the city, but that's a whole other situation. Nothing the developer or architect can fix on their own, it's the overall way suburbs in general are developed.
I led the master planning of that community in Providence - I left the company about a year ago.

Designed by Calthorpe, it’ll have similarities to Stapleton in Denver, if you want a comparison. However, it is more dense and mixed use. If you want a decent analog to at least the lower density housing product, including blocks of “greencourts” whereby housing interior to blocks front open space rather than the street.

Landscape Architecture by Civitas our of Denver who did St Patrick’s Island and Th r Central Park in University District.

Lots of really good design in there and should be a model for good urbanism in the suburbs. 90% rear lane product from starter to the highest end stuff. The town centre will be a really walkable and interesting place. Company is very committed to the concept, and the builders were very excited for something like this.

The challenge of course is things like connectivity to the city and stuff like that. In the short term, there are bus routes in Evergreen/Bridlewood that will be easily extended across the ring road to serve these communities. Medium term, there is a dedicated bus transit way on 162nd Ave that will go in and connect over to the LRT. Right of ways and bridge over the Ring Road are already there, so it’s a cheap line to build. It is in the levy, so there are funding sources available to build it.
 
The old IBM Campus:
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E2584093-6376-4539-ACC1-7EC7DD9E0D00.jpeg
87D4E1CA-FD6E-416A-AD73-FB52D755DEC6.jpeg
 

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