That is true about the land use policy, but the amount of NIMBYism here is literally fucking shocking. Every single development over 3 storeys outside of the Downtown/Beltline/Mission/Kensington/Bridgeland inner-inner city area gets appealed, and our city government has no balls to tell them to shut up and get used to living in a major city. It's infuriating at times.
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Originally Posted by goodgrowth
What's impresses me about Calgary's skyline is not just how large it is relative to it's overall population...but also how large it is considering how much of the population is suburban. How much more impressive would it look if urban living became more favourable there like in the other larger cities? It would be shooting way over it's weight then.
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But in order to have an adequate comparison it has to be proportional. Calgary's 4 km2 core (that's the five downtown neighbourhoods plus the Beltline) is nearing 50 000 people (might be past it as of the upcoming municipal census results), with the Beltline alone being over 25 000. One can't compare a city of 1.5 million to a city of 2.5 million, 4 million, or 7 million in Canada. The big three can be reasonably compared to each other due to the fact that they've been big and important cities for virtually their whole histories, with enormous working-class populations leading to higher core densities from the get-go. Calgary's unfortunately about as white collar as it comes, so we didn't get much of the dense old stock that the big three and Ottawa got, and most of what we did get was razed, and whatever survived is now like frickin law offices or some shit
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Anywho, Calgary can only be reasonably compared to Edmonton, Ottawa, and maybe Winnipeg for the purposes of core population density in the Canadian context. In that comparison though, our core population blows those 3 out of the water, so going by a North American sense, we're fairly close to Portland in central population density (~11000/km2). If we're going by entire inner city, Ottawa comes pretty close, though I only got 4 hours sleep last night and am much too tired to run the numbers.
If anyone is gonna run the numbers, make sure you do them proportional to geographic area. (meaning if you're gonna compare Downtown Edmonton and Downtown Calgary, remember the fact that Downtown Edmonton is 2.2 km2 with ~15,000 people, and Downtown Calgary is 1.8 km2 with ~20,000 people)
Once our 2019 civic census numbers come out (hopefully next week), I'll be able to do a full rundown of our inner city by population, density, and geographic area. Though I do know that last year our entire inner city recorded their all-time population highs.
Here's last year's results if anyone wants :
https://www.calgary.ca/CA/city-clerks/Do...8/Civic_Census_-_at_a_glance_booklet.PDF
Phew! *wipes sweat off brow* Now time for bed
Also, I agree with your original statement, it would be extremely impressive if we had the density of Vancouver, Montreal, or Toronto in our core along with the insane density of modern office skyscrapers. Though I think all things considered, we are reeeeally lucky for a city our size to have all of what we have, and to be in a recession but literally have billions of dollars of infrastructure/parks/roads/sidewalks/bike paths revitalization underway at the moment in the core alone.
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