Plan It Calgary Proposes Sustainable, Affordable Future

Plan It Calgary is one way The City of Calgary is implementing the vision for long-term, sustainable growth that was outlined in The imagineCALGARY Plan for Long Range Urban Sustainability. The Plan It Calgary project recommendations have been more than three years in the making, and like imagineCALGARY, reflect the input of thousands of Calgarians.

The goal of Plan It Calgary is to establish a direction for the city to thrive and develop over the next 60 years by taking an integrated approach to land use and transportation planning. During this time, the city’s population will more than double. An estimated 1.3 million additional residents will move to Calgary, and Plan It was created to ensure this growth happens in a sustainable way that enhances Calgarians’ quality of life.

First drafts of the Plan It documents were released in March, including versions of the Municipal Development Plan and the Calgary Transportation Plan. More recently, an overview of the estimated $11 billion in cost savings that would result from the Plan It strategies was announced. This 58-page document, The Implications of Alternative Growth Patterns on Infrastructure Costs, details the specific costs associated with the growth the city is expected to undergo in coming years.

Calgarians who participated in the Plan It process over the past three years were asked to consider different growth patterns for Calgary. Their preference – a balance between suburban expansion on the city’s edges and higher density development in existing areas of the city – provides the foundation for Plan It’s recommendations. This approach will save the city more than $11 billion in public infrastructure costs over the long run, in addition to reducing operating expenses. “Plan It Calgary’s approach is expected to be 33 per cent less expensive than the cost of growth with Calgary’s existing growth patterns,” says Don Mulligan, Director of Transportation Planning for The City of Calgary.

Part of the Plan It focus has been on efforts to reduce urban sprawl, which presents high costs, particularly in terms of infrastructure expenses. “The goal of Plan It is to slowly change Calgary’s development pattern so that, over 30 years, about one-third of the new citizens can be accommodated in developed parts of the city, instead of only on the outer edges, as happens now,” says Pat Gordon, Project Manager for the Plan it Calgary Project. “Change will happen gradually, and most areas of the city will experience very little change in the near future,” Pat says.

In addition to the cost savings, the Plan It Calgary recommendations would significantly reduce Calgary’s ecological footprint, which is now the largest in the country.

The initial Plan It drafts have been made available for Calgarians to review and comment on until April 17th. Once citizen input has been incorporated, the Plan It drafts will be presented to the Calgary Planning Commission for review in May. On June 16th, Calgary City Council will hold a Public Hearing to consider Plan It’s key elements.

You can learn more about the Plan It process, approach and anticipated cost savings on The City of Calgary’s website at www.calgary.ca/planit. An interesting Calgary Herald op-ed article on the impact of public planning, urban sprawl and sustainable growth – Don’t Crucify Public Planning – is also available online here.