March 2020: Great Communities, for Everyone
In 2010, I was elected with the mandate to achieve the mission I had offered to Ward 9 residents, one of Great Neighbourhoods as the pathway to our Ward and City’s best future. Based on the simple truth that Great Neighbourhoods make a great city, it has provided a five-point transformation that I have been relentlessly pursuing throughout my time in office.
Read More: Great Neighhourhoods Platform
Instead of just expecting or hoping it’ll happen as a side effect of ‘business as usual’, the first of these points prioritizes the planning and delivery of Great Neighbourhoods as one of its principal objectives.
As such, I’m very pleased to report that March and April of 2020 are a huge turning point for delivering on our first objective! It’s taken almost ten years of leadership, but the Guidebook for Great Communities will arrive at Council on April 27! There are several things that need to be understood about what the Guidebook truly is, the linch-pin role it plays as a machine for Great Neighbourhoods, the tortured path it took to get here, and the nature of concerns regarding and opposition to this legitimately transformative work.
Before becoming Ward 9’s Councillor, I spent ten years working with Inglewood and the communities of Greater Forest Lawn on citizen-lead Design Initiatives. The design initiative model sought to empower residents, businesses and institutional actors within East Calgary to envision a best future for their neighbourhoods. We packaged these visions into compelling, award-winning reports and made the case to City Hall that we needed a better planning system and significant public investments or these visionary community aspirations would never be achieved. I sought election to the City Council when it became clear that without dedicated political leadership, a transformation of our planning system and investment priorities would also not be achieved.
The 2011 Mission Road Main Street Council Innovation Fund Project constituted our first run at a Great Neighbourhoods-community-involved, forward-looking, revamp of our planning system. At the time, our planning department was not motivated to change their status quo,but two outcomes resulted from this project that moved us forward anyways.
First, Council was inspired to transform planning and went to market in search of a new General Manager of Planning to lead this project. The second was in the form of our General Manager of Transportation, Mac Logan, becoming inspired by the process. As the South East Transit Way evolved into the GreenLine, he provided the leadership to transform it from just a transit project into a city-shaping continuation of the Mission Road model.
The GreenLine’s focus on city-shaping, station-area neighbourhood transformations has led to a number of our Ward 9 communities - Inglewood, Ramsay, Millican-Ogden, and Tuxedo Park - becoming the piloting grounds for scaling these efforts into a city-wide approach. After a few years of pushing against the status quo, Station Area Plans scaled upwards to Area Redevelopment Plans, and then to the Multi-Community Local Area Plans that are guided by the Guidebook for Great Communities.
On the other side of the struggle, ‘Transforming Planning’ morphed into NextCITY, which recognized the role of Transportation, Real Estate, Engineering, Parks, Parking, and several other business units and informed the move to the One City service delivery model - all of which is integral to Great Neighbourhoods. Under the leadership of our third GM of Planning, Stuart Dalgleish, we prioritized the focus on local area planning to deliver Great Neighbourhoods and that led to two important decisions: First, the creation of ~40 multi-community Local Area Plans for every corner of Calgary, and second, having every Local Area Plan be steered through a Guidebook, and then utilizing these tools to meet the unique needs of every community in a sensible way. Thus, the Guidebook for Great Communities for Everyone was conceived, and through a difficult, multi-year pregnancy, is about to be born this April.
The Guidebook is really five important transformational elements in one, sitting at a lynchpin position in our new planning system:
First, it is a living repository of policy tools for creating Great Neighbourhoods (or as the City is calling them in an attempt to not be subsumed by my work: Great Communities for Everyone).
Second, it enables new generations of local area planning that, over the next several years, will create citizen-involved, forward looking plans over every square inch of Calgary - we’ll finally be focusing on the delivery of Great Neighborhoods.
Third, it is a rationalization and refinement of our ground-breaking Municipal Development Plan at its mandatory ten-year anniversary review.
Fourth, it is the chassis of our next land use bylaw, which we’ll deliver over the next two years - after decades of what we’d like to see in our communities (the policy) and what we’re allowed to do in our communities (the land use bylaw) having nothing to do with one another, we’re finally going to bring them together.
Fifth, now that we’ll know what we want every part of Calgary to be when it grows up, the Guidebook sits at the heart of a new kind of apples-to-apples decision-making regarding where we spend precious tax dollars to get the most financial, environmental, and social bang for our buck.
In the lead-up to March 3, it appeared that there were two groups in opposition, emerging who are deeply concerned about the Great Neighbourhoods transformations the Guidebook represents. The first are concerned with what the Guidebook is. To those who fear change I always say the same thing: the only thing that can be guaranteed is that your community is changing; we can sit back, relax, and see what change happens; we can engage in the fool’s errand of trying to prevent change; or we can sit down with our neighbours, talk about where we’ve come from, where we’re at, and where we want to go. When building our best future, it’s great to have a great toolbox - don’t fear the guidebook, it’s our toolbox. And I’m happy to report that it’s really, really good.
The second group is concerned with what the Guidebook is not. To them, I say that the Guidebook is a living document. Every Local Area Plan we bring to Council in the years ahead will be accompanied by refinements to the Guidebook as required. Most importantly, the two big pieces that are currently missing from the Guidebook: 1) a robust set of heritage policies and tools to protect what we cherish about our communities and strike a thoughtful balance with change, and 2) a dedicated infrastructure investment system to make our streets and parks and mobility options better and better to reward us for welcoming change, are both fully in development on parallel tracks and will be integrated into the Guidebook when it arrives at Council for final decision on April 27.
With that being said, I hope to see and/or hear from you on April 27 at the Public Hearing of Council.
Please consider all of these amazing tools now at our disposal for building Great Neighbourhoods.
Ask yourself, “Are there any refinements we need to make right now, and are there other refinements that we can make in the months and years ahead?”
Please, share your thoughts and, with regard to building a great city of Great Neighbourhoods,
Onward!!!