Space & Culture

I just got back from the University of Calgary where I presented a paper on theories of mobility at the What is a City? conference. These days Calgary is all abuzz at the prospect of getting a real Norman Foster skyscraper thanks to fossil-fuel juggernaut EnCana. Calgary, Alberta’s most populated city, is flush with cash these days thanks to reinvigorated investment in the oil sands in Northern Alberta. The pace of growth in both Calgary and Edmonton (Alberta’s capital) is quite astonishing. Rents and house prices are sky high, “now hiring” signs mark the doors of most establishments, the labour force is stretched, and Alberta is leading Canadian provinces in greenhouse gas output. The environmental costs of this economic boom — greenhouse gases, tailings ponds, etc. — might be an alarming enough effect, but its impact on the fabric of Alberta’s cities is equally astonishing — particularly since both Calgary and Edmonton seem content to allow road construction and suburban-sprawl to be the order of the day.

The hotel in which I stayed during the conference was located in a sort of hotel-village a kilometre from the University of Calgary (the hotel was located on Crowchild Trail, at the bottom of this Google map). Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I decided on the first morning of the conference to walk to campus. How bad could it be? Surely, the 6-lane, highspeed arterial road dividing me from the campus wouldn’t make walking there unpleasant, would it? (Calgary’s arterial roads from the sprawling-suburbs can be viewed here.)

Things were looking workable as I left the Best Western. There was, for instance, a sidewalk. My good luck, however, was short-lived. The sidewalk ended where the generous Best Western contractor’s jurisdiction came to an end: after about 15 steps. From there it was parking lots, desire lines cleaved in dirt, concrete overpasses, grassy knolls, chain-link fences and unpaved boulevards.

That some cities are more car-friendly than others is not new. However, the irony of my being in Calgary for a conference on what makes cities great, while at the same time having to face the horror of trying to get to the proceedings on foot, was certainly apparent. Odd too was the fact that this hotel-village that caters to U of C visitors leaves visitors to the campus trapped, essentially, behind steel and concrete barriers most easily navigable on four wheels.

Calgary functions like a sort of extreme, mechanical lung, sucking people into the centre during the workday, and expelling them back to their homes at night. Takes your breath away…. The degree to which cars are enabled here astonishes. And the cars! More monster SUVs and pickups than you can count (certainly more than in France, where I spent much of last year).

The ubiquity of the automobile is experienced by the out-of-province pedestrian (or cyclist) as a quite particular Albertan form of 4-wheeled aggression. Much impatience is generated, for example, when I dare cross a street in front of someone keen to make a right-hand-turn-on-a-red. Monster trucks: bad on gas, good at intimidation. It’s as if these beasts don’t know what to make of these fleshy bi-peds with which they sometimes must interact. The Calgary pedestrian: not as well catered to as the Calgary car driver.

Edmonton, of course, is similarly enthralled with auto-affection. The first thing one sees when driving (of course) into Edmonton from the South is an IKEA (part of Canada’s biggest “power centre”), followed by about 70 more “blocks” of big box stores (symbols of urban success, one is left to assume). In the past 6 weeks in Edmonton we have been witness to three car accidents. I have never seen an accident in Paris, London, Florence, Shanghai, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. It’s as though the excessive expansion in Alberta’s biggest cities is forcing people into proximities they never had to deal with before (Edmonton, after all, has one of North America’s lowest population densities: PDF). In the face of this densification new relationships with space (and other drivers) need to be established and developed so they can stay out of each other’s way.

As someone who gets around Edmonton on a bike this burgeoning situation is fraught with fear and danger. It’s as though we cyclists are from another planet in the land of 4×4s. Especially noxious are the monster diesel pickups with their right-curving exhaust pipes that, without fail, squeel away from stoplights leaving us poor cyclists gasping for diesel-free air.

The urban expansion being pursued in Alberta is one that might appear to work for the time being. It is an expansion predicated upon certain assumptions: tall buildings = important city; fast growth = good growth; single-family homes in suburbs = happiness; and oil booms = forever. Sadly, the last assumption — the one that drives all the others — is not the case. It is not only Alberta’s oil that is unsustainable. So too is the urban infrastructure. Indeed, the demise of one will be the demise of the other, compounding an inevitable and imminent reality on this road to nowhere.

This entry was posted Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 3:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.