OKay, some more Calgary, from my trip home for the holidays. This is all brand-new, and you can multiply it by thousands of houses and dozenséhundreds of new streets, every year, ringing the city in its totality.
It's just this endless landscape of grey and beige all around the edge of the city. If the city has a housing bust due to the oil-and-gas slowdown, that's a very, very good thing, to my mind. The city needs some much smarter planning. Every city has ugly suburbs, but Calgary's are completely coming to dominate the built form in every direction outside of downtown and a handful of inner neighbourhoods. And the density isn't even that low--the lots are usually smallish, and interspersed with mid-rises and occasional highrises. But the road networks, with their 500-metre blocks and massive thoroughfares lined with noise barriers and loops and cul-de-sacs, are still entirely designed around cars. Walking is almost impossible.