For many Calgarians, driving a car to work every day isn’t their ideal way to travel, but they don’t feel they have a choice, and with good reason.

For decades the city, deemed the Heart of the New West, has been expanding rapidly, and as a result many neighbourhoods have been built around the freeways, with citizens forced to rely on vehicles to get to and from, well, anywhere.

But if the key directions in Plan It Calgary are approved by city council at the end of this year, commuters could be faced with a lot more choice—not only about how they get to work each day, but where they live and which kind of community they are part of.

In the next five to six decades, the population of Calgary is forecast to grow by another 1.3 million people and 600,000 jobs.

Managing where that growth is going to occur is absolutely critical to ensure Calgary becomes the sustainable city many are hoping for. If implemented, Plan It Calgary will allow the city to take a huge step towards a more vibrant, sustainable metropolis with healthier, happier and more successful citizens.

“What our research describes as big city influences—in other words how cities change as they go from one to two million people—we believe we’re going to see a lot more redevelopment occurring in the established neighbourhoods. It’s a good thing,” says Mary Axworthy, director of Land Use and Planning Policy with the City of Calgary and one of the individuals involved in Plan It Calgary.

The plan will be an integrated land use and mobility strategy developed under 11 sustainability principles for land use and transportation which were adopted by council in January 2007.The principles propose a wider range of housing types, walkable, distinctive, attractive communities, preserving open space, critical environmental areas, and a variety of transportation choices.

According to the Smart Growth Network, communities built with these features are healthier, have a stronger sense of community because of the mixed housing and the ability to work, live and play in the same area and leave less of an impact on the environment.

Achieving a better balance of growth between newer suburbs built far away from the core and established areas is one key direction for land use outlined by Plan It Calgary. And according to a survey done for the project, many believe that Calgary is currently allowing too much growth to happen around the outer edges of the city, and not enough on the inside.

One key idea—and one that has transformed other cities into vibrant centres—is that communities need a wide range of housing types to support diversity.

“Certainly in Calgary we’re primarily known for our single family homes in new communities, and we believe we’re going to see a shift to provide more of a mix in housing in different locations in the built up area,” Axworthy says.

There are a few neighbourhoods that are already catalysts to the kind of sustainable growth the City is seeking, including The Bridges in Bridgeland-Riverside, just northeast of downtown. The Bridges is built with a focus on transit, walkable areas and a vast mix of housing, retail and office space. Another is Garrison Woods, planned with mixed housing as well as retail, commercial, historic preservation and plenty of recreation, all within walking distance.

Plan It Calgary focuses on balancing growth by integrating transportation and land use. One direction it suggests is to lay more bike paths close to major arteries in the city, creating multi-modal roads, as well as encouraging greater growth around the C-Train system with higher density housing and business around stations. This is known as Transit Oriented Development. The goal is to create a situation where commuters could still drive if they wanted, but they would have a choice to either take transit, bike or walk.

While it’s just beginning to be looked at seriously by the City, the concept of Transit Oriented Development, mixed housing, and pedestrian friendly areas isn’t new to some Calgary groups.

Sustainable Calgary has been advocating for this type of change for a long time, and senior researcher Noel Keough is glad the city is finally taking steps toward a more sustainable future.

“The survey done a while back demonstrated that Calgarians are ready for this—they prefer not to live in suburban areas, but to live in established communities where there is transportation, schools and a mix of housing,” he says.

It’s clear in the initial survey, plus the results of ImagineCalgary—a project that involved tens of thousands of Calgarians’ input on what they would like to see long term in the city—that Calgarians say they are ready. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges.

“The challenges are that a lot of people are concerned about change. But the fact is, we need to do something rapidly. Sprawl is costing us billions of dollars, making people unhealthy and making people who don’t have a lot of money have less money. They have to spend money on vehicles to live in most of the city,” Keough says.

He also says that Sustainable Calgary strongly believes more input from the social development sector needs to be included in such a project as Plan It Calgary.

“There’s been a lot of consultation for certain sectors—namely the development sector—but there are stakeholders missing. Sustainable Calgary wants the social development sectors to be more involved,” he says, adding the group has set up consultation meetings through United Way with social groups, and hopes the city will take the results into consideration when implementing the final plan.

The issue of how the city will grow is not just a matter of adding more bike paths, creating mixed housing, or Transit Oriented Development—it’s really about harmonizing all those things, and prioritizing.

Transit needs to be a main issue in the planning process, and if done correctly, could alleviate the need for affordable housing in the city, Keough says.

“If we can build a transit oriented city, it will leave a lot more money in people’s pockets to afford housing,” Keough says. He’s been doing research on how transit affects homeless populations and affordable housing and plans to strengthen his focus on that immediately, with the recent news that he will receive a grant from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to continue with his research.

While Plan It Calgary is seen as a big step for the city, the hope is that it will be implemented, rather than left on the shelf, so to speak, as some groups believe past plans like this have been. One such plan is the Calgary Plan.

“The original Calgary Plan had some good things in it, but still, politics, and perhaps the unwillingness of communities to change, means not a lot is happening,” Keough says.

The Plan It Calgary project is seen, in a way, as an extension to ImagineCalgary, which “imagined” what Calgary should look like in 100 years.

“ImagineCalgary involved tens of thousands of people, and the message from it was pretty clear—Calgarians wanted change, they wanted transit oriented development, mix of housing, and choice. Plan It Calgary is now attempting to make that more solid,” Keough says.

The huge response to ImagineCalgary and now Plan It Calgary, is critical to the city’s future, and aside from the obvious benefits—sustainability, healthier cities, and stronger communities—it represents a whole new way of thinking for municipalities.

“This is not only a watershed in how we continue to build our city, but a watershed for the democratization of the city planning process. It’s an attempt to improve and widen citizen engagement,” Keough adds.

The next step for Plan It Calgary is to engage citizens and organizations on a set of eight key directions for land use and transportation. These can be found at the City’s website www.calgary.ca/planit. The Plan It Calgary project will report to council again in October 2008 and in early 2009, and then if approved, begin implementation.

Calgarians can get involved by reviewing the Plan It Calgary website, getting familiar with the issues and the proposed direction, and letting their opinions be known to their alderman responsible for the ward they live in.