Civic Camp hosted a meeting at Broken City (perfect name for the current state of our city) last night. On Monday (September 28), City Council is going to be making a decision on whether to move Plan It Calgary forward.

Noel Keough, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design, was the keynote speaker. “Plan It is about who controls how we build our city. For the last 34 years that control has been given over to the development industry by and large,” said Keough. Later on Keough added that, “The developers have been given the authority to control the development of the city and they are shaping and developing it for little else than profit.” In the words of Keough, we need to “wrest control back to the public government and make sure that citizens have a stronger and more meaningful say.”

What is at stake is a model of building houses that hasn’t changed much over the last 80 years. Perhaps more importantly developers have purchased land around our city with the hopes of cashing in big time. The hope is that the City continues to build outwards so that developers can develop that land to create more suburbs (buy low, sell high). If the City chooses not to continue to build outward, developers will see a big loss on their speculative investment, one that has been a cash cow for generations.

What kind of Calgary is Plan It advocating for? In today’s Calgary Herald, Naheed Nenshi said that, “I've written before that Plan It arose from incredible amounts of engagement with the public. Tens of thousands of people participated, and most used the same kind of language to describe what they wanted: neighbourhoods where you can walk to the grocery store, where people of different backgrounds mix freely, where seniors can stay in their own homes, where kids can walk to school, where everyone can feel safe and welcomed, and where using a car is a choice, not a necessity.”

How can we make sure that these kind of neighbourhoods are created? Keough went on to say that, “Ironically I think it is the economic argument that we have the strongest case to make here. On Monday, if the fiscal conservatives vote against Plan It they should be doing it with bags over their heads. It is totally unsupportable from an economic point of view to vote against Plan It. James Schwinn, really laid out that issue (in a recent Calgary Herald editorial). Are we really going to continue to subsidize suburban infrastructure for the next 60 years? Or are we going to find better ways to spend or save that money ($11.2 billion)?”

Developers are doing everything they can to thwart Plan It. Despite hundreds of supporters who came to the City Council debate on Plan It in June, developers have been lobbying hard and the Plan It document has been watered down. Naheed Nenshi noted that, “One of the changes in particular is deeply troubling - the density targets for new communities have been changed to include density of not just people, but also jobs. The net impact of this change is to build neighbourhoods that could in fact be less dense than the ones being built today - which could lead one to ask why we're even bothering with a new plan. (By some calculations, the current plan for the land around Macleod Trail south of Highway 22X is about one-third more dense than what this amendment would specify).”

To ensure that Calgary is built in a more sustainable way - economically, socially, and environmentally - please contact the following three swing vote city councillors before Monday:

-Dale Hodges: 268-2445 dale.hodges@calgary.ca

- John Mar: 268-1627 john.mar@calgary.ca

- Linda Fox-Mellway: 268-2430 linda.fox-mellway@calgary.ca

Civic Campers of Calgary unite to create the Calgary we want to live in!