Originally Posted by Drybrain
Others are definitely hit and miss too, but let me try and explain my feelings on this a little more. Apologies for the long post:
I think if the list under discussion is cities #4 through #6 for street life/vibrancy, Calgary probably will be on the list in a few years, probably at the expense of Ottawa. Huge transformations have happened in Calgary and more are underway now, which is why I think the city is going to change more over the next five years than it did in the last five.
But in terms of activity on the street, Calgary can feel incredibly vibrant in the right areas at the right times, but then in the past year I've also been walking down 17th Avenue on a beautiful afternoon and been one of the only people on an entire city block. The entire core just feels like it operates at a quieter baseline energy level.
Not to be a homer, but I do think Halifax is unusually strong in this regard. It and Calgary are the two Canadian cities I know best, besides Toronto, and I think comparing them is instructive as to why (to me) Halifax feels like it has more going on at street level, over a more continuously connected area.
If you take the area in Calgary between 14th Street and the Bow River, from 26th Avenue in Mission up to the top of Sunnyside, and then over to 1st Ave in Bridgeland, you're looking at the main focal point for street life in the city. (Inglewood is indeed kind of an island on its own.) That's about 9 square kilometres. If you take the most central 9 sq. km. in Halifax you're going from about the rail cut in the South End to Duffus Street in the North End, from the waterfront to Robie, out to Connaught below Chebucto. (You're leaving out another island, central Dartmouth, which is really more like a full small-town core.)
That area in Calgary has the densely built up office district, and a number of mixed-use main streets: Stephen Ave, 17th, 4th, 1st St and 1st Ave, Kensington Ave/10th St). It also has a larger population than the Halifax area. However, there is more stuff in that part of Halifax, which leads to more visitation from across the metro area: universities, hospitals, basically all of the sports and performing-arts venues, museums. There's also Spring Garden Road, which I think is probably the most heavily pedestrian-trafficked street in either city. Obviously central Calgary has a lot of stuff too, but there is also more dispersion of amenities and people-magnets throughout the city. This is even evident in little things. Stuff like the Telus Spark science centre, or multiplex movie theatres, or even a public pool, are not located within this central area. There are roughly half as many schools. Those kinds of things draw people, but they're not going to the core to reach them--and people who live in the core are leaving to reach them.
But the biggest difference is downtown, not the nearby neighbourhoods: Calgary's CBD is much larger, and creates a big area with almost nothing but offices. Halifax's CBD is much smaller and integrated with a lot of other downtown elements: several kilometres of extremely active waterfront with multiple mixed-use building complexes, a nightlife/bar district, and a generally more cheek-by-jowl quality to the built environment. So all that is to say, central Halifax feels (to me) more complete as a metropolitan core, whereas Calgary's core feels more like a collection of great neighbourhoods, focused on distinct commercial corridors, orbiting the CBD. So it's not really a question of which is better; I think there's just historical inertia in terms of the nature of the built environment, and where things are located. Again, I think that Calgary's sheer mass of people is going to keep pushing that city in a continously more vibrant direction. It can't not, really.
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, I live nearby, and it's rarely ever quiet these days, but there are days when normally busy areas can be quiet.
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