West Village Concept Plan
 

Nice. It will be interesting to see more information on this, including the boundaries of the CRL area and what public improvements may be in store. This "land bridge" sounds intriguing.

Awesome to see that this area will be primed for redevelopment.

Interesting. The East village should give us an idea what we can expect. I very much look forward to the commercial desert that is the CBD surrounded by walkable mixed use neighbourhoods.

I have a concern, let me know if I am completely off my rocker here.

Are we spreading ourselves to thin with all of these new "villages"?

East Village, West Village, TOD's. We are still only a city of just over a million people, can we really support all of these giant neighbourhoods?

I'd rather see the focus on the East Village first, and let that develop and strengthen the Beltline as a result. Once we have achieved critical mass move onto the next area. Because if all of these projects go ahead simultaneously I don't think we will achieve the desired vision for all these neighbourhoods. Now dump an extra 500,000 people into our population right now and I think my concern would be less.

Thoughts?

^I see your line of thinking. However, on the flip side I was of the opinion that I didn't want to see East Village build out over too short a time. If there is another upswing in the market, I could have seen it being built out in 5-10 years which is incredibly fast for that area. I think having multiple sites for urban development can draw the growth of any one of them out a little longer. This helps the community to grow a little more organically and also for infrastructure upgrades to be staged over a longer time so it is more manageable.

As for the scale of the city, the fact remains that despite the downturn of the last year or so, people continue to move here in droves, compared to the rest of the country.

I'd like to see a different word than "village" though. East Village makes sense, but there is also Westbrook Village and now West Village as well. This is more of a minor quibble though.

I share some of your concerns. Was just in Edmonton this weekend staying in a hotel on Whyte, and of course that's one urban street (well actually a few streets) that's pretty well developed. Lots of small commercial development creating a large number of shops per block, cool historic buildings, and of course a captive audience being the U of A down the street. Now one might argue that Edm has only Whyte, and that Jasper and the terribly named "124th Street Area" districts aren't particularly interesting and they may be right. Calgary however I find that although it has more cool districts, none of them can hold a candle to Whyte, and I believe it's because we lack the population to fill them. We have 17th Ave, 4th St, 1st St, Stephen Ave, Kensington, Marda loop, the redeveloping Vic park, eventually Ramsay Exchange, eventually East Village, and now the West Village etc.. I fear it will take 3 million people to really get these areas hopping, and do wonder if we should be focusing exclusively on the 'low hanging fruit' so to speak.

One thing I'm curious about as far as the West Village (I think we need a new name), is the mention of a future location of an ACAD campus. Since this will be a village built from scratch, right adjacent to downtown, I'm curious if the housing and commercial establishments can be of an appropriate cost level for a captive population of 'starving art students'.

I had come across these some time ago in the Sunalta ARP on the West LRT website and believe it is speaking to the same lands as the newly coined "West Village":

Bing Thom Architects, Sunalta 2035: Community Planning and Urban Design Study - Final Report July 2009

Part 1: Pages 1-23 (2.5MB)

Part 2: Pages 24-39 (6MB)

Part 3: Pages 40-61 (2.2MB)

Part 4: Pages 62-93 (3MB)

Part 5: Pages 94-164 (5.2MB)

I like the concept of using a CRL to spur revitalization. Hopefully, the East Village land sales go through in early 2010, when the LRT is completed in December 2012, likely East Village will already have some plans underway and starting execution. Once the SunAlta LRT station is built, it'll be a lot easier to increase the walkability and density from it's current low-rise commercial use. I think the city should make sure there is going to be ample inventory and land supply for increasing density as proposed in Plan It. I view increasing the location choices available for urban developers to go at larger scale developments as a good thing (increases creativity of designs, and affordability as developers can execute projects that they believe will deliver the best returns instead of being limited by smaller land supply).

More information located here:

http://www.westlrt.ca/stationareas/sunalta_arp.cfm

The earliest I see anything happening in West Village is 10 years. There has to be a lot of planning and public consultation involved if they are going to move any infrastructure, and we all know how long that can take in this city. I think the East Village should really get going in the next 5 years as our economy picks up. There are still about 20 000 people moving here every year, so I doubt it will take too long before the market tightens up again, unless everyone gets greedy again, then who knows.

I'd say another significant difference with the East Village that could really delay this plan is the structure of land ownership in the two areas. The city owns a great deal of land in the East Village and it is mostly all vacant. Which means it is ripe for development and the city can exert a great deal of influence. I'm curious as to how well the city can really push for change in an area with private land owners that are actually utilizing it for something other than parking.

I'm really wondering about the ACAD campus as well. Is this just the city throwing ideas around or is there some level of actual planning being put into ACAD relocating to this area. I'd have thought that if something like that was being worked out we'd hear about independently of a throwaway line in an article like this. I had favoured the old Molson Brewery site and some of the vacant lots along 9th Ave in Inglewood myself. Like DizzyEdge I;m not sure how well it would fit in a yuppy dominated condo development like this is bound to become.

When I read the article, it said they can front load the money for up to 20 years. I figured it was 10+ years away. Could ACAD wait that long? I'd prefer to see it in the East Village to help create traffic/density.

Exactly. Lot's of private land owners and some existing businesses, not to mention a significant environmental remediation problem. East Village has a huge head start.

Here's some screen captures from the CTV news story:

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/frinkprof/wc1.jpg

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/frinkprof/wc2.jpg

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/frinkprof/wc3.jpg

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/frinkprof/wc4.jpg

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y54/frinkprof/wc5.jpg

Link

Wait 20 years (absolute maximum) and you'll have your 500,000 people. If even 10% of those people choose to live inner city, I think that'd be more than enough to fill in these areas. The comment on Global tonight was that the city envisions 12,000 or so in the West Village. Obviously the Beltline can take several multiples of that, but still... the WV just isn't *that* large a parcel of land to make things too spread out.

I dunno, 20 years doesn't sound too far out to really mature the core areas. Sure it'd be great to see it overnight, but I just don't see it happening short of halting all suburban development immediately.

A lot of this depends on Calgary's future growth compared to today. I suspect today's plans are lined up for a lot higher growth, or a lot further down the road (5-10 years before shovels in ground). I do sometimes wonder what things would be like if we actually saw a sustained boom here - you know, one not destroyed by a global economic meltdown. Imagine 5 or even 10 years of the insanity of 2005-7.

I remember a few of us having this conversation quite some time ago. Using a TIF to fund development in this area. But I agree with Bigtime. We seem to be spending a lot of money creating these new "urban villages" but we seem to be neglecting existing areas that can handle a significant amount of increased density with nowhere near the infrastructure costs. Redesigning 1st street, or 8th Street, or 10th Avenue is a fraction of the cost of rerouting Bow Trail.

Speaking of rerouting Bow Trail, do you think that Bow Trail will be rerouted concurrent with the WestLRT construction? And if so, that'll require the Greyhound Depot to relocate, which, as stated in the West Village Plan referenced by Radley, above, is to the LRT station in order to create a Transit Hub. I assume that the Transit Hub being referenced is Sunalta Station?

^Bow Trail will not be rerouted/realigned as part of West LRT, and likely not concurrently. It is being realigned further west as part of the West LRT project though.

The LRT station being referenced is indeed Sunalta Station.

I would imagine that Bow Trail would be rerouted as per Bing Thom's Sunalta Plan (ARP?). Probably reroute it so that both east and west lanes are closer to the river and modified into a boulevard-type street. The 14th street intersection would also have to be redone, which I think is long overdue.

Is that a fancy new foreign pedestrian bridge I see? I better not be paying for that!

Also, why has ACAD become the prison bitch of Calgary development? It's used and passed around to justify half the new neighborhoods in he city it seems....all without any firm basis in reality. Having gone there, I still think the current location is fantastic, but if SAIT really needs the location badly (they've been saying this for decades now), I would prefer to see it built into the actual hillside, in stepped form. As a student, Riley Park and Kensington provide plenty of action.....way more than the East Village could for decades.

Wow, this sounds promising! I think these kinds of plans go well with the plans for making Calgary a potential home to global finance operations. Also, I think it would be a good location for that footy park Innersoul and I dream about!



This is a great question Bigtime! Like others have said, the timeline for this Village compared to others' are rather different. If the West Village has to wait as long as for a Master Plan as the EV did, it might not even start before most of the EV is built out. However, if it doesn't take as long I think it will help provide opportunities for small development companies. If the whole Urban Village concept catches on with local developers, smaller development companies might get pushed out if we have too few Villages to develop. With the City taking a proactive role and really jumping on the bandwagon, I think they are forming a path for organic growth to be fueled by a variety of developers.



I believe that brown and greyfield development on larger and open plots like the EV and WV are more appealing to developers; they are much easier and less risky to develop. The way I see it is that this is how the City is selling infill development to developers. It may be more expensive than piecemeal development in the Beltline but if this is how we are going to get developers buy into the 'it doesn't have to be all about greenfield development' mentality, so be it. I think we can all admit that any high-quality brownfield development is better than no brownfield development.