Imagining a 100 Years of Calgary

Anyone's who's been following the news in the last few years know about the Alberta economy.

The province, flush with oil wealth, is dealing with an economic up-swell unparalleled since its pioneer days. On the heels of a 2006 growth rate of seven per cent, the province's economy has been the highest in the country for the last three years. And fuelled by resource sector inflation, the demand for labour, housing and services of all kinds seems unending.

In this milieu, talk of the tar sands often overshadows any specific discussion of growth in the urban areas of Alberta. And yet, as of the last census, the big cities of our eastern neighbour have changed drastically.

Calgary's population increase was a dozen percentage points big - over twice that of Vancouver, and higher still if you factor in its sprawling suburban communities. To the north, Edmonton saw a population growth of over 10 percent. And in smaller cities, like Red Deer, the increase has been upwards of 20-plus percent. To people who haven't visited Alberta's urban environs in a few years, the province's cityscapes have radically transformed themselves.

Until recently the appetite for expansion - in both the province and its key cities - was treated as a given. But missing in much of the talk of present wealth and fiscal finesse was a sense of the future. Indeed, in a world where "peak oil" and "limits to growth" have now become a household turns-of-phrase, it almost seemed like many people in Alberta were afraid to jinx the good times by looking too far down the road.

Or perhaps that was the case until a few years ago, when the City of Calgary decided to undertake an ambitious, city-wide community visioning process called Imagine Calgary as inspired by Dream Vancouver conference facilitator Bliss Browne and her work with Imagine Chicago.

In itself, Imagine Calgary was forward thinking, as most visioning exercises are. But then the city and its community partners decided to really push the envelope a little. The result was a community plan considered on a 100-year time frame.

The Century Ahead

Imagine Calgary's Community Sustainability Leader John Lewis says the long time frame wasn't initially seen as being all that revolutionary.

"We had signed on as a community with the Plus Network [an international network of communities working towards long-term urban sustainability]," says Lewis "This meant looking at a 50 year time-frame. Given what we wanted to do, it didn't seem such a leap to double that."

Not only that, but the figure accorded nicely with the city's centennial anniversary. Call it the poetics of sustainability.

The visioning process got under way in January of 2005. Much of the input gathered was obtained through a simple-framework of five open-ended questions that asked residents to outline their hopes and dreams for the future of Calgary.

According to Lewis, keeping the questions open-ended meant that everyone, young and old, immigrant and old-timer could be included.

"The process allowed for long-time residents to draw on their lived history, community organizations to talk about the issues they work with and newcomers to reflect on what life in the city meant to them," says Lewis. "In other words, they were questions that anyone could answer based on their experiences of Calgary and regardless of how long they had been there."

In addition, there were several large community meetings, workshops in schools, and regional planning exercises that gave the community Sim-City style the opportunity to model various possibilities in order to see the effect they would have over the long term.

In the process, researchers gathered input from 18,000 residents - making it, according to Evans, the largest public process of its kind in the world.

The result, released in 2006, was a tightly written programme of a dozen or so pages. The document outlines a range of goals as well as 114 targets related to the five key systems that gird the city and its quality of life: the built environment and infrastructure, the economy, governance, the natural environment, and the social system.

Most of the targets look ahead somewhere between 10 and 30 years, which allows the overarching 100-year time frame to be subdivided in to manageable pieces. It also allows the Imagine Calgary process to be iterative in nature - that is, subject to review and amendment down the road.

Bridging City and Community

There are a number of difficulties that come with long-range planning. Among these is funding. Gathering input, holding community meetings and developing implementation plans can take a lot of time and money. It is important to note the Imagine Calgary project had the benefit of a substantial budget, a 10-person project team and a budget of $2 million.

If it seems like a lot of money, it is. But then, it would be a mistake to write this off as solely an example of largess. The time frame on which the project is built, along with the comprehensive nature of the goals and targets, suggests that it may well be a nominal investment over the long-run.

As an additional benefit to the dollars and cents of it all, the value of the project - underwritten by the local government - meant that it was very literally a project in which the city was heavily invested. And that can act to bolster accountability down the road.

The financial commitment the city made was matched by an equally strong commitment to share the Imagine Calgary process with community. Lewis underscores the project steering team's overt attempt to make this a city-led, community-owned process.

"Cities, unlike most community organizations, have the power and pull to bring a wide range of sometimes opposing views to the table," said Lewis. "Having the municipality as a key driver made a tremendous impact... but they are also one player, and the plan is not just about the city government, it's also about everyone who lives there."

Moving From Plan to Action

Now the goals and targets have been set, part of Lewis' work involves ensuring the Imagine Calgary process enjoys a greater degree of community ownership. Community partnerships are being established with various agencies and businesses, as well as with a number of provincial government ministries.

The intergovernmental edge is especially intriguing. When asked about the sometimes sticky world of intergovernmental relationships, Lewis offers the following advice:

"The first rule is, don't let it stop you," says Lewis. "If you're doing a project like this, you've simply got to move ahead and work to bring the different levels of government on board down the road."

"One of the best ways we found to do this is to show them the many levels of collaboration that are taking place in the community," says Lewis. "If you can show you're working collaboratively, then the incentive for provincial or federal participation is that much higher."

To date, 46 organizations signed on as official community partners. Under the program, community partners are responsible for implementing projects, both within their organization or in the community at large, that adhere to the overall values and recommendations coming out of the Imagine Calgary report. Community organizations are also contributing numerous in-kind resources to help get the implementation process off the ground.

It's this bridging work that has been equal parts challenge and reward.

When asked how the role-out has taken place, Lewis admits more work could have been done communicating the subsequent work undertaken by Imagine Calgary.

"After the Imagine Calgary document was released there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work that we were doing so people wondered if the project had ended up on the shelf," says Lewis. "We didn't do as a good job as we could have of communicating our work and sustaining the public's awareness of the project."

And yet, despite the lack of newsletters and website, a whole lot of foundation pouring was being done.

"Most of the work that's been happening in the last year was and is at the structural level," says Lewis. "Following the release of the report we set up a transition team to help us implement the goals and targets and for the last year this team has worked to set up an organizational structure with working groups, plans of action and so on. It is not the most compelling stuff for the media, but critical for our future success."

Employing a transition team and taking the time to create a solid organizational structure has been critical.

"We've been laying the base on which future implementation work will take place," says Lewis. "This has the advantage of really developing the core elements needed to launch a process of this scale."

In addition to the launch of an annual community conference, the transition team also established a new steering committee and a working group dealing with communication and awareness-raising, and a second group that will focus on fostering collaborative action within the community.

Lewis notes there has been an interesting discussion within the community agencies about the structure of Imagine Calgary. There was a push, initially, to see Imagine Calgary become a non-profit with an executive director and a board of directors. This was ultimately resisted, he says, because such an entity could potentially end up competing with other partners for funding and other resources.

Flexible Thinking, For a 100 Years

The need for flexibility and the ability to adapt to the various learnings that have arisen throughout the last two-and-a-half years has been ever-present. Lewis cites this as the most essential lesson he's learned while on the job.

"There are always opportunities to learn, and to adapt behaviour - these have to be acted upon," says Lewis. "It's the ‘how' questions, not the ‘what' questions that most bring this out. In a way, anyone can set targets and goals... but to get there, you have to be prepared to be flexible."

"The lesson from our lack of communication was taken to heart... and we've worked to change that," says Lewis. "You need to ensure responsiveness is built into the process... something that is both challenging and necessary - particularly at the municipal level."

"Things are complex," says Lewis. "Without a sense of adaptability, it's a challenge to do community planning for next week, let alone the next century."