Agreed with Oddball on basically every point. Calgary is a fantastic place to live; the only knocks on this city are the lack of cultural institutions. I wouldn't make excuses that we aren't an old city so we don't have cultural institutions (we've knocked down our fair share of heritage buildings here). To me, culture is something that gets developed when people are focused on it. We need to invest in better entertainment and cultural institutions (museums, music centres, universities, etc.), but also focus on allowing for better urban development to allow for organic cultural institutions to pop up.
There is likely a common story as Calgary (and any "new" city) ages. Many people attracted for work during our booming 1950 - 2010 growth phase (from 130,000 people to 1.1 million) weren't expecting much more than a place for opportunity and to live. For comparison, Montreal's growth between these population values occurred from 1860 to 1930 and Toronto's occurred between 1890 to 1945.
Inevitably with more people comes job/interest diversification, children who grow up in a new place with different values than their parents who emigrated, and cultural services being increasingly in demand as people decide to stay for family/connections, rather than employment only. It's why we have people fighting for better pathways, or public art or better design. Boom towns don't have that, they are truly temporary as no critical mass can develop that wants to stay past the basic need for employment.
Size is critical too. Subcultures require people to function and generate cultural output. You need a large population (and mainstream) to create enough people that reject the mainstream and try to form something different. If a city is too small it's easier for the individual to migrate to established centres to get the culture they want than start a cool new project where only 10 people will show up and have it not be sustainable. It's much easier to get 10,000 people (and their spending power to sustain it) to a random street festival in Calgary in 2018 than it was in 1958.
Big "heavy" institutions like universities, central libraries and arenas are key anchors for the growth of culture. But subtler factors are equally important; density/accessibility to make interactions possible, affordable spaces that are attractive for diverse interests outside the mainstream, including housing choices (affordable dive bars, quirky alley retail, artist studios, performance spaces, affordable housing in areas attractive to young/creative types etc.) Calgary is on a good trajectory, but has to work off an excess of boring, normative, single-use environments hogging many key areas (downtown core, low-density inner suburbs, areas around universities etc.) which are holding back more organic cultural growth in some cases, at least more so than other cities.
