Urban sprawl

I recently read a blog post by Ryan at the New Resilient which got me interested in a film called Radiant City, filmed right here in Calgary about urban sprawl.

Some of the facts were astonishing. The average suburban home is now 2200 square feet. Over 90% of kids are now driven to school. Suburbanites are, on average, 6 pounds heavier than their inner city counterparts.

Some of the attitudes in the film were depressing, mostly because they really reflect how some people in this city view life. The two most recent examples are a Calgary Herald article about the 62 new officers assigned to the downtown beat to help "clean the core" as the chief said and a CBC story about attainable housing. This is an actual quote from the Herald article:

"Lisa Millican squeals with delight as she sees us approach her convoy of strollers.

In fact, Millican and friends Chantel Bradley and Carley Loder, all toting carriages with sleeping babies, are here precisely because of the new police presence.

'We live in the deep south, but heard on TV that there was a police foot patrol starting today,' says the 26-year-old. 'They make us feel it's OK to leave the suburbs. We love these guys.'"

I can't even begin to talk about what is wrong with that. What has happened to our society that people are too scared to venture out of their gated suburban communities. Does suburbia have us so compartmentalized that we have forgotten how to interact with other people? It makes me wonder where these people were raised and how they have been so entirely insulated their whole life.

The CBC story on the six o'clock news tonight showed one woman who didn't want the sites to be used for attainable housing because of "the people who come with that kind of housing. It's not that they're all bad I guess but some of them are."

One of the experts in the film talked about how suburbs propagate monocultures. The big mansions are in a cluster here, the houses in a cluster here, the town homes here. It has created a new breed of discrimination. Incomism. We don't want to hang out with people who don't make what we make, live like we live and buy into the same ideals we do.

The more I hear people saying the kind of things in these news stories the less faith I have in Calgary, as a city and as a meaningful community. It makes me afraid for the future of initiatives like Plan It, a great idea that is long overdue, but in jeopardy, especially since the home builders are already busy spinning the facts to their advantage.

Can Calgary have a future that doesn't exclude public transit, walking and biking. Or are we wedded to a future of giant homes in pod-like communities with no sense of community? I don't want to believe it, but it seems more and more likely.