It is truly wonderful how many beautiful and great places there are in North America. Calgary, Alberta sits an hour from the Rockies and enjoys spectacular mountain views. Calgary is a little like Dallas, after having morphed into Houston. It started as a cow town (and I had a fantastic shell steak during my visit) and became an oil and gas city – the fourth largest city in Canada with a population of well over a million. It has eight buildings of over 40 stories in the downtown. The city was very much built around the car – with numerous parking structures in the center. You can drive downtown from the suburbs, park downtown and as a result of the extensive skyway system (called locally the “+15”), your feet never have to touch the ground in getting to and from your office.

My visit was sponsored by the downtown business improvement area (BIA), Calgary Downtown Association (CDA), as part of an exercise to revitalize Stephen Avenue, one of the city’s principal shopping streets. Several blocks of Stephen Avenue have been pedestrianized and are mostly made up of low-rise late 19^th and early 20^th century buildings. The street is shadowed by the surrounding office towers – which, at present, have in excess of a 30% office vacancy rate. The street abruptly “Ts” smack into the superblock containing City Hall.

During my walks around the downtown on a weekday, I ran into few other pedestrians – even in the +15 system. Most surprisingly, a skating pond in Olympic Plaza abutting Stephen Avenue and City Hall was empty the first time I walked by and had only one skater when I visited later in the day. There was much talk while I was in town of the impact of a more than 50% decrease in the price of oil and the resulting recession in the local economy; and fussing about what to do next. The rather automatic local reaction appeared to be to spend capital dollars on a significant expansion of  the conference/event facility and a new arena on the Calgary Stampede grounds, on a new light rail line and on a fancy new library. The local poo-bahs seemed to be looking for other projects to build their way out of a depressed downtown and the large amount of empty office space.

The CDA has had the good sense to bring in the San Francisco office of Jan Gehl, New York City’s James Lima and the local Stantec office to lead the thinking about how to revive downtown. They are supporting the conversation and the panel on which I participated leaned heavily toward conversation about increasing the intensity and variety of programming on Stephen Avenue and the downtown in order to increase the level of pedestrian activity. Calgary clearly already has a significant inventory of social capital which it only needs to leverage to highlight the downtown’s potential for a high quality of urban life for the “creative class”. It is a great location to demonstrate that the best way to do economic development is to create a great place where people want to be.

The overbuilding of commercial space isn’t a fundamental economic problem for Calgary. But, because the City taxes real estate based on commercial space occupancy, the empty space has created a tax policy problem – with the tax burden being shifted to residential real estate. The oil boom essentially induced international real estate investors to overbuild relative to the actual local economic needs – and the problem remains that of the developers and investors rather than of local residents and operating businesses. The area has only a 6% unemployment rate (which when I took macroeconomics in college was called “full employment”). There remains plenty of economic activity and local wealth. 

It is important to note that the current property tax scheme dis-serves Calgary and its future. In a system where property taxes are pegged to space occupancy, the City becomes an owner/developer’s involuntary partner in projects — sharing in the downside risk, without any say in how an asset is managed. By allowing taxes to be adjusted downwards to account for commercial vacancies discourages best-practices property management and leasing. The system exposes city government to large fluctuations in tax receipts — decreasing revenue from commercial properties during economic downtowns — when other city revenue streams are also shrinking.  Either property taxes should be set to not decrease, or decreases in the tax base need to be calculated on multi-year rolling averages to smooth out the effects of the business cycle.  This is especially true where a local economy is based on highly volatile commodity price extraction industries. 

Calgary needs to diversify its substantial economy beyond oil and gas by attracting a population with a wider range of professional skills and training. It can do this by using its fabulous natural assets and substantial cultural resources to attract that population. It needs to energize its existing public spaces, like Stephen Avenue and Olympic Plaza and should avoid spending billions of dollars on new mega-projects or in attempting to attract large new employers and events.  A place-based development program would likely take three to five years to make an impact, but it will leave the City much, much more resilient for decades into the future by relying on organic, rather than imposed and/or artificially stimulated growth. 

For Stephen Avenue, that means making more of its vitality visible from the outside – both on the street and in the +15 system. The downtown already has a wide range of restaurants, bars and shops – they need to spill out into the public spaces with movable chairs and tables, pop-up stores and kiosks on sidewalks and skyways. Retail needs to become less inward facing and project to the street. The existing public spaces need to be animated with commercial and other programmed activity. Olympic Plaza was empty because it is devoid of programmed activity. Even the little skate kiosk was closed during my visit. The Plaza needs stands selling hot chocolate and sandwiches, in additional to skate rentals and organized skating activity. The Plaza and the Avenue needs a farmer’s and/or holiday/night market. Space heaters should be everywhere to support the tables and chairs. Most likely, some of this commercial activity will not be self-sustaining, at least in the short to medium term, because of insufficient foot traffic at the outset, and will need to be supported by the BIA or the City. But over time, that foot traffic will build. 

Other suggested improvements include more dramatic and inventive lighting – going beyond the holiday season; perhaps skating at both ends of the pedestrian mall; subsidized artist activity in empty ground floor and other spaces; and more outdoor seating everywhere. Landlords have to get their minds wrapped around the idea that the market rent where there is a 30% commercial vacancy rate is essentially zero dollars (which is the same in either US or Canadian dollars!). They need to encourage high quality activity wherever they can stimulate it – whether by subsidizing it or charging minimal rent in the short run in order to generate the critical mass of pedestrian presence required to get the downtown to be perceived to be active and interesting. The key is to understand that the goal isn’t tenant attraction – but people attraction. That also means prioritizing pedestrians over vehicles at every opportunity.

An understanding of the principle that good uses drive out bad uses underlies the programming of downtown. A perception of a lack of safety and the presence of anti-social practices aren’t eliminated through enforcement or “environmental design,” but by programming and encouraging positive activity.  Providing outreach and high-quality services tailored to the needs of unsheltered individuals is a far superior and more effective approach than a punitive one. 

Calgary has overly encouraged high rise residential and commercial development ought to move to lower and mid-rise structures – including ground floor retail and other commercial tenants – with as many usable doors to the street as possible. Promoting a continuous street wall with uninterrupted ground floor uses is also essential to creating lively street life. Stores set back from the street with parking in front discourages walking. Adaptively reusing empty commercial space as residential units can also be an effective way of re-animating the downtown, especially for older structures that incorporate high quality vernacular architecture. Encouraging more people to live near center city, and more particularly near Stephen Avenue, would be a key ingredient to increasing pedestrian life.  

The city is fortunate to have an established, professional and ably led downtown management organization (BIA) in the CDA – which has an essential role to play in leading the revitalization of downtown. Apparently, to date, the CDA has not had the kind of resources required to fully serve the downtown. The downtown stakeholders need to step up and fully fund its operations. The BIA, if given adequate resources, can provide a stable, sustainable flow of revenue that can support placemaking work. CDA must provide both thought leadership and capacitation to downtown improvement. Providing capacity includes a range of services – from managing public programming and activation, to the standard “clean and safe” departments, to assisting arts endeavors with insurance, logistic and financial support. The CDA might consider subsidizing desired uses – by providing money for tenant improvements (particularly for restaurants in underused locations), upgrading façade design and implementation, as well as putting out movable chairs and tables and other imaginative street and sidewalk amenities. The BIA might underwrite space heaters. All of these efforts involve possibly subsidizing initially uneconomic businesses in public spaces.

The CDA can play a particularly catalytic role in bringing together Calgary’s many downtown arts organizations to animate the streets and public spaces: from bringing performances outdoors, to expanding institutional outreach to under-served communities. A high priority ought to be to activate the Glenbow Museum’s façade (with banners or projections) and using its resources and key location to engage Stephen Avenue more directly. The current impact of its Brutalist structure is a deadening one. Similarly, the users of the high quality, right-sized, ideally located Telus Convention Center should more directly spill out onto the street. 

A good example of the opposite of how major institutions should related to the street is the striking new high-design Snøhetta Central Library building. The entrance to the library is up several steep flights of dull concrete stairs, perpendicular to the street and in a dark, forbidding breezeway located under the building. The library is also cut off from Olympic Plaza, Stephen Avenue and the rest of the downtown by the hulking mirrored mass of City Hall across the street – which is up another flight of stairs. The situation could not be more destructive of adjacent street life. I simply cannot imagine what the architects were thinking. Institutional uses should contribute to and interact directly with the street and adjacent sidewalks in order to animate them and contribute to and encourage a rewarding pedestrian experience. 

But that being said, Calgary is a spectacular place – and not simply because of its natural setting. It has a compact downtown and an extensive transit system. Stephen Avenue has the potential to be a fantastic pedestrian experience, with low scaled adjacent buildings and already existing restaurants, bars, hotels and stores – as well as a well-run Brookfield owned mall. It has quite a few established cultural institutions, including the otherwise high functioning new library building. What downtown Calgary needs right now is a nudge in the right direction from its City government, an adequately funded BIA and civic leaders towards public space activation and programming.