Quote:
Originally Posted by logan5
There are some street grid neighbourhoods in Calgary to build walk-able neighbourhoods around. The neighbourhoods flanking Centre St. N looks like a good place to start. Mid rise on the arterial road, stepping down to low rise, then row-house further away from the arterial street. That's what I would be pushing for, but overall maybe there's just not enough demand for this type of housing, and that's why you don't see more density.
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This is all about the size of the city as has been mentioned before, up until fairly recently in Calgary you could commute to and from downtown in 15-20 minutes, even in rush hour, so there hasn't been demand for more urban type developments. With the city proper over 1.2m people now, that is starting to change and traffic is getting really bad, so there is now a push for urban living on a couple fronts, young people looking to avoid the commute and the city looking to avoid spending $billions on upgrading the road network. So what is going to start happening is large tracts of empty land in the inner city are getting bought up and built to have higher densities (Currie Barracks is a prime example
http://www.calgary.ca/PDA/pd/Pages/C...curriebarracks )as are other TOD innitiatives and ongoing intensification in areas like Sunnyside and Bridgeland. We aren't at a similar densidy to inner city Vancouver, but I bet we will get there in the next 10 - 20 years. The suburbs will continue to sprawl, but pockets of density will become more common like they are in the GVR, though I doubt we will see metrotown type densities for a long time as there is no need for 40 storey towers outside downtown or the Beltline.
So long story short, this city definitely sprawls, but there are positives happening now and there is a major change in built form coming for this city, that doesn't mean SFH type development will stop, but that there will be a better mix of housing types in the future to mitigate sprawl to an extent.