Imagine Calgary
The City of Calgary is running a project called Imagine Calgary which, ``is a City led, community owned initiative to create a long term sustainability vision for Calgary,'' which allegedly, ``will result in a 100 year vision for Calgary and 30 year targets and strategies toward the vision.''
A grant vision. To that end, their biggest current activity seems to be to get people to answer 5 questions — bribing potential answerers with prizes. Although I honestly can't see the immediate connection most of these questions have to their apparent vision slash goal, I will bend them to my political will nonetheless:
1. What do you value about Calgary?
Its closeness to the mountains.
2. What is it like for you to live here?
I don't know; I have never lived anywhere else and so drawing any sort of comparison is obviously impossible. While I certainly enjoy the City, there are many things which deeply bother me about it; many of these problems are endemic (from my perspective) to the "modern way" of life and are therefore likely problems in many other places. Lacking experience living elsewhere, however, I cannot know this.
Generally, life for me in Calgary is pretty easy; I have a great job (and have never had problems finding one when I've needed), a relatively cheap place to live and easy access to the mountains — the visiting of which is certainly my most important activity. Most of my friends life here.
3. What changes would you most like to see?
This appears to be one of the "real" questions. In a very rough order of importance, the problems I think are most troubling right now for the people of Calgary — and presumably any other large "Western" city — are listed below. I expect these to get much, much worse over the next 100 years unless we do something about them.
A. Working Hours
If one thing alone can be said about our changes as a species since the mid-1500's, it's that we apparently desperately love working — although curiously also apparently love complaining about it; raw hours spent working have steadily increased for at least the last 500 years and this trend is only worsening. (Not surprisingly, extra work causes health problems.)
A mere 50 years ago, so-called "futureologists" were predicting a glut of free time in the heady days of the new millenium and indeed, if we had taken our increased effeciency and plowed it into less time spent working instead of the ability to consume more resources, this would be true. The sad fact is that we have made (implicitly or not) a decision to consume more instead of spent more time for non-work activities; discounting a brief blip during the Industrial Revolution, we now work more than we ever have. Author Robert Levine (excerpted by the New York Times, and also here) says it well in A Geography of Time: ``It is one of the great ironies of modern times that, with all of our time-saving creations, people have less time to themselves than ever before. Life in the Middle Ages is usually portrayed as bleak and dreary, but one commodity people had more of than their successors was leisure time. Until the Industrial Revolution, in fact, most evidence suggests that people showed little inclination to work. In Europe through the Middle Ages, the average number of holidays per year was around 115 days. It is interesting to note that still today, poorer countries take more holidays, on the average, than richer ones.''
He continues, ``On the average, studies show, women in less advanced economies work an average of 15 to 20 hours per week, and men put in about 15 hours. The shift to plow cultivation, which requires feeding and caring for draft animals, pushes the work week of men to 25 to 30 hours. It requires one day for a Dobe woman in Australia to gather enough food to feed her family for three days. The rest of the time is her own--to visit, entertain, work on her embroidery, or, as is often the case, to do nothing at all.''
Why are we doing the opposite of what we claim we want? Everyone I talk to complains in some fashion about their job and the pathetically few holidays we (typically [1] ) receive.
[1] -- In my only two professional jobs, I have made it a contractual point that I work only 75% time and enjoy approximately 3 months of holidays a year
While it's not immediately obvious that this is (or can be) a concern of a civic government (however, see point C below) I feel that the City should do anything and everything in their power to give citizens the ability — and desire — to use our drastically increased working efficiency for things other than consumption (namely: free time).
B. Urbanisation
Identified by many people long before this "imagineCALGARY" project, urban sprawl is a no-brainer: it has to be curbed. How to do this effectively isn't immediately obvious, although some cities are playing with the appealingly simple method of saying "no more land annexation", which is certainly a useful first step (e.g. one of the 30-year goals, perhaps).
However, as we continue to cram more and more people onto the Earth, despite increasing warnings about our destruction thereof [2] , it is apparent that we need to accomodate people in large clusters but do so in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion.
[2] -- For example, the United Nations recently concluded that every major natural system is in decline. This press release from 2000 says, ``Summary findings of a new report [..] reveal a widespread decline in the condition of the world's ecosystems''
To this end, I propose (again, see point C below) a more "village-like" approach instead of the current monolithically centralised version. Quickly and grossly stated, this means having people live much closer to their places of work and to have those places of work be distrubted throughout the city. One immediate consequence of this is the elimination of "downtown", where most of Calgary's workforce commutes to every single day — wasting an appalling amount of energy and time. The practicalities of this are not obvious and some care will need to be taken in the ultimate design of a decentralised community. However, since we're not doing even this studying yet, getting started is the first step. (Another good first step would be looking at how clusters of villages operate today and how they operated in the past.)
Redesigning Our City
At the city-block sort of level, I can imagine at least one design which would drastically increase the apparent amount of shared green space by eliminating the local roads to people's houses. Instead, a shared parking-area (ideally underground) could exist in one area of a typical "city block", with the houses ringing a central, shared green area. Aesthetic paths can weave their way to the front doors and areas could be set aside for vegetable gardening, with the possibility of including a greenhouse for shared use. Shared shop facilities, pools, playgrounds or other facilities could exist, if block residents wanted them. Here's a quick sketch (re-worked Google-maps satellite images):
The above, of course, is just a quick moving around of houses to open up green space (and I am not, obviously, an artist). Ideally, such designing would incorporate already-existing "architectural" features of the natural areas we typically bulldoze to "create" our living spaces; streams, lakes, hills, stands of trees can (and should) all be preserved. The above is just a quick idea of how we could (in the short-term; another 30-year goal) re-develop city-block-sized living spaces to be more appealing.
Such a grouping could be run as condominium buildings are run today, with decisions affecting the block (e.g. how much garden space to set aside, whether to build a greenhouse, where to plant trees) being made solely by the people living there. Leaving a flat, grassed area as a "road" would facilitate access by emergency vehicles and possibly also for moving equipment. Normal access from the parking areas would occur via pathways. One corner of the block could incorporate a courtyard-type condominium or apartment building for lower-cost living (e.g. for students or retirees); mixing old and young and rich and less-rich would seem to make inter-income-group relations better. As much decision-making power as feasible should be given to these local block-sized groupings (see Centralisation below).
This elimination of local roads would increase green-space immensely in an urban-heavy city like Calgary, give families far more "safe" space for their children to play, make neighbourhoods friendlier (by forcing more neighbourly interaction) and give people more power over their local living situation (see "Decentralisation" below). The pooling of resources for garage-space will reduce housing costs and the availability of more gardening space will increase the healthfulness of vegetables.
Thinking slightly bigger, groups of these "block"-sized areas could be collaboratively planned to ensure that the green-space is interconnected and, ideally, natural features like streams, marshes and small lakes can be preserved (or created), adding to the aesthetic appeal.
Transportation
Using ideas from CarFree.com, transit should be the preferred method of travel if it were more ubiquitous and efficient (efficient as in time-to-travel; CarFree's design allows a city of 3 million people to run totally on transit with a guaranteed travel time of less than 30 minutes between any two points. This should be a medium-term goal of our City.
Train lines work well when buried and "hiding" more of our movement infrastructure underground would also serve to increase green space. Remember that this is a 100-year vision: we could easily replace all transportation in Calgary with some form of public transport — if Calgary follows Canadian averages, there are more cars in the city than people; is the city thus built for them, or for us? The CAA estimates that the average cost of using a car is ~$7000/year (including the amortaization of purchasing it), which gives us over $7 billion dollars in just this city every year to fund transport activities (presuming we are "average" accross Canada; I suspect Calgarians spend more on their cars than the national average). Noting that the total cost of developing Calgary's LRT system is thus far only $548 million, we could re-build the LRT system nearly fourteen times over every single year with this money. At a cost of $35000 per meter to build below-ground LRT track, we could build 200km of underground track per year with these funds. Of course, an immediate switch from spending on cars to trains is not possible, but these figures illustrate what Canadians (on average) are willing to spend per year to fund transportation (and what we could buy with this if we weren't paying for cars).
It is also highly important to note that the government — i.e. taxpayers — are subsidising the car industry by building roads to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year; Calgary's portion of this could be better used for public transit rather than road infrastructure; the above estimates are for individual spending on cars alone and do not include government (i.e. taxpayer) spending on infrastructure to support driving. Neither do they include the ancillary costs of building things like gas stations, but since these typically operate at a profit, it doesn't make sense to count them (however, the people building and operating gas stations would be freed to do other work). The City claims to be planning to spend close to $1 billion on transit and road infrastructure from 2004-2010, or about $142 million per year (this includes provincial funding).
Needless to say, it is easy to imagine a pretty robust transit system being constructed with these funds (around $7 billion in private spending ant $142 million in public spending per year).
As we continue to improve communication systems, physical presence will become — for many workers — less important. A 100-year vision would be remiss if it didn't try to anticipate this with its urban design, and in the process give people a better quality of life. Our dwelling places should be somewhere we actually enjoy instead of a place we try to escape (an attitude which is usually a feature of any travel advertising).
C. Centralisation
This should maybe be point "A", but A and B are very related to this point: the central problem (so to speak) which I see with modern society is centralisation: we have put so much of our decision-making and life-living into centralised institutions on such an unmanagebly large scale that we're quickly losing control: of ourselves and of our future. This may sound a touch melodramatic, but consider, for example, something we like to think is a central feature of our modern times: "Democracy". What sort of meaningful discussion can anyone have with 40 million other people? What sort of "informedness" can anyone have when the number of potential issues (involving way more than 40 million people) are so astronomical? How many laws do we even have, anyway? Have any but a handful (if any) of us read them all? Considered their implications? Nevertheless, the basic core of what we call "Democracy" (Parliament) is nothing but a constant source of new laws, new rules and, ultimately, new things we give up any chance of deciding for ourselves.
...and this is supposed to be our core institution! The utopian ideals surrounding our popular concept of Democracy seem like great ideas, but we will never attain them unless we can take more control over our decisions. Central to this control-regaining is a decentralisation of power: disseminating it back away from our giant institutions and as close as possible to individuals. Of course, a total dissemination to individuals is merely a utpoian ideal which will probably never be realised, but any step in this direction is good.
This means trading locally in preference to far away (***transportation costs***); this means giving communities more powers (as opposed to City Hall); this means giving individuals more power (as opposed to communities); this means getting rid of laws, instead of constantly creating new ones; this means making physical infrastructure less centralised as well (which, I suspect, will happen automatically as we decentralise our other processes).
These are all things the City can get started with right away. Longer-term, negotiating for more power from the province and ultimately from the country will be important.
The two earlier points (A and B) are projects in un-centralising ourselves and so properly fit as a subset of this larger decentralisation project; decreasing working hours can be roughly viewed as giving the power to decide what to do back to individuals (i.e. away from large corporate structures, which is what controls what we do during most of our waking hours, which is to say "we work") and, obviously, the above solutions to urbanisation are a decentralisation of physical infrastruture.
Indeed, as Robert Levine (referenced earlier) says, ``After economic well-being, the single strongest predictor of differences in the tempo of places is population size. Studies have shown over and over again that, on the whole, people in bigger cities move faster than their counterparts from smaller places.'' He uses "tempo" to mean consumption, roughly, in this context.
D. Overconsumption
Implicit in point B is the fact that we're drastically over-consuming as a City, country and continent; estimates are that we'd need at least 4 Earths to support everyone at our consumption levels and pollution is becoming absolutely critical (we're currently "enjoying" the second-largest extinction event ever seen on Earth; the biggest was ~65 million years ago and wiped out all dinosaurs ). Calgary — as one of the most affluent cities in one of Earth's most affluent countries — has both the moral responsibility and the monetary ability to change this. Step one is to decrease working hours, but a close (even parallel) step is to reduce raw consumption of goods and services.
The City has started some minor initiatives in this direction (wind-powered transit) but has a very long way to go. Edmonton, for example, composts all their garbage. Most major cities have curb-side recycling pickup (Calgary only in private form). Most European cities charge a lot (up to $25) per bag of garbage. The City can both encourage people themselves to lower their consumption and can also be a role model by reducing its own consumption.
4. What are your hopes and dreams for Calgary in 100 years?
I hope Calgary becomes a world leader in showing people how to live fulfilling, enjoyable lives instead of showing people how to overconsume.
5. How could you help make this happen?
I am attempting to continue limiting my working hours (and hence consumption) and will also attempt to use higher-Quality alternatives (especially more-local ones) whenever possible. I will vigorously back any City initiative which I think is a step towards the goals outlined here.