Calgary's northeast: A unique urban sense of place demands unique urban zoning

This column is an opinion by Richard White, who has served on the Calgary Planning Commission (Citizen at Large), the Calgary Tourism Board, the Calgary Public Art Board and the Tourism Calgary Board. He has also written extensively about urban development. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

I've often thought the potential for urban redevelopment in Calgary's northeast quadrant goes unnoticed by developers and city hall planners. The focus is almost always on how to improve the downtown and inner-city with mega-revitalization projects like Currie, the East Village, Stampede Park, The Bridges and the University District, or suburban projects like SETON, Quarry Park and the West District. 

How much effort has the city put into encouraging transit-oriented development around the northeast LRT stations versus Sunnyside, Bridgeland or Stampede stations? Are planners clinging to what might be an outdated European main-street model for city building? Does the ethnic diversity of the northeast call for a unique set of planning policies and urban design principles?

Recently, I decided to be a flaneur in the northeast quadrant. And when I say "northeast," I mean north of Memorial Drive and east of Deerfoot Trail. After checking Google Maps for a cluster of interesting places within walking distance and finding none, I had to resort to "flaneuring by car."

First stop was on 36th Street S.E., at Marlborough Mall, which back when it was built in the 1970s was the marquee mall in its quadrant and became an LRT destination — much like Chinook Centre in the southwest after it was built in the 1960s. But unlike Chinook Centre, Marlborough Mall hasn't changed much in 50 years.

Next stop was just north of there and across the street at the flagship T&T Supermarket in Pacific Place, with its live fish market — a definite reminder I wasn't in a grocery store in my own northwest neighbourhood.

Then it was off to the "Thrift Store District," around 32nd Street N.E. and 32nd Avenue N.E. Arriving at the Salvation Army, I noticed a lady loading 20-plus heads of cabbage into her van. Turns out the nearby H&W Produce store had a good deal. I poked my head in to find a small fresh fruit and vegetables farmers' market. The northeast has small urban food stores like this scattered everywhere.

Now hungry, I hopped in the car again, driving past a bowling alley, an engineering office, a carpet and tile store and a couple of colleges I had never heard of before arriving at Village Pita Bakery, located in a small food retail centre that included Lola's Filipino Kitchen, Safari Grill, Jaja Café and Lloyd's Patty Plus — no chain stores here! 

Flaneuring in the northeast is definitely not like in the Beltline, Bridgeland, Inglewood, Kensington or Mission, all spots where you can park once and walk for several hours. 

Calgary's northeast quadrant doesn't have any real main streets — that is, places where you can walk along the sidewalk with shops, cafes and restaurants at street level and offices and residences above.

In 2015, the City of Calgary undertook a major main street research program, identifying 24 existing or potential main streets in Calgary. 

Only two were east of Deerfoot Trail: 36th Street N.E. (from Memorial Drive to 16th Avenue N.E.) and 32nd Avenue (from 12th Street to Barlow Trail). Unfortunately, both are major roads, with 36th Street also having LRT tracks down the middle. Converting them to pedestrian-oriented main streets would require ripping up everything and starting again. 

The reason there are no main streets in the northeast is because it was built post-1960s, a time when urban planners focused on the automobile as the primary mode of mobility, not walking or transit. Today, that trend continues in the northeast, with several new communities being built north of the airport, but none have a walkable main street or town centre like you see in Seton, Quarry Park, the University District or the West District. They continue the late 20th century tradition of power centres with commercial buildings surrounded by surface parking and no connecting sidewalks.

Too Eurocentric?

I have often wondered if the obsession with creating linear main streets is because our planning schools continue to see old European cities as the ideal model for city building today. Every new urban revitalization master plan looks the same — a main street with shops, cafes and restaurants with residential above and a central park/plaza surrounded by more residential and some professional offices.

Shouldn't we be looking at 21st century models for city building that move beyond a Eurocentric focus? Especially in the northeast, where more recent waves of immigrants from around the world have settled — including from the city's biggest diaspora groups, Chinese, South Asian and Filipino.

In Ward 10, south of the airport, for example, 58 per cent of the population belongs to a visible minority — including from the South Asian, Filipino and Chinese diasporas, according to the City of Calgary Ward 10 profile. And in Ward 5, north of the airport, 81 per cent of the population belongs to a visible minority, according to the city — a whopping half of South Asian heritage and one in 10 of Filipino heritage.

When searching Google Maps for interesting things to see, I was surprised at how diverse the northeast's non-residential blocks are. There are craft breweries next to auto shops, next to small bakeries, beside small colleges. 

It's an eclectic mix, with hundreds of small businesses scattered in modest commercial developments, like a modern bazaar — the kind of marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops found in Asian cities. These blocks could easily become walkable urban nodes with the addition of residential development.

City could diversify and densify underutilized non-residential land

Currently, the city is focused on adding density into existing residential neighbourhoods. But what if the city changed the zoning to allow landowners to build residential above the single-storey non-residential in the northeast's older developments near the LRT stations? By changing the zoning, the city could be the catalyst for diversifying and densifying the grossly underutilized non-residential land. 

Why have the northwest LRT stations at Dalhousie, Brentwood, Banff Trail and Lions Park all had major residential developments, but not the northeast stations? Whitehorn Station, for example, on 36th Street and 37th Avenue N.E., is ideal for redevelopment with a Safeway and the Peter Lougheed Centre within walking distance. The city's Whitehorn Multi-Services Centre next to the station would be an ideal place for the city to partner with a developer to create a model transit-oriented development. It would be the perfect site for a mix of affordable and market housing. 

Rather than trying to convert the northeast's major roads into European main streets based on contemporary urban planning dogma, we need a different model. We need to embrace the non-residential blocks, with their unique mix of stores, boutiques, grocers, breweries and colleges, and allow them to evolve into mixed-use nodes, by allowing the integration of residential development. 

Let's convert the northeast into a unique collection of 21st-century bazaar villages — mixed-use urban nodes. 

Last word

The more I pondered what makes the northeast tick, the more I realized it has an eclectic mix of communities with a diversity of small independent businesses and entrepreneurs that is under-valued. These newer waves of immigrants, like the pioneers who came to Calgary in the late 19th and early 20th century, are going to play a key role in creating Calgary's future. It is no coincidence Calgary's last two mayors grew up in the northeast.

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