City trying to push Stadium Shopping Centre plan
Appropriate, properly planned densification is a broadly supported municipal policy goal. However, the extraordinary level of densification that the City of Calgary administration and a major developer are trying to impose on the residents of University Heights should deeply concern many of Calgary’s other established communities. Residents in those communities should ask: who is next? They should also be very alarmed about the blatant lack of information sharing, public consultation and responsiveness to community concerns that has characterized the process used by the City and the developer.
These issues involve questions of substance and process: What will be regarded as appropriate densification on a particular site and how will the goal of densification actually be planned and implemented. One densification issue is whether the City’s existing policy commitments to widespread grassroots consultation will in fact be satisfied. Another is the nature and implications of the very close relationship that City planners have with major developers. A third issue closely related to the second is whether the local community hosting, and most directly affected by a specific densification project, will be properly consulted or allowed to play a meaningful role in the planning process.
The University Heights experience to date is that, despite the reassuring language of City Plans and City planners, obtaining a community-sensitive resolution of these pivotal governance issues requires a sustained grassroots effort by the local communities affected.
Otherwise, there is a real threat that the goal of densification will be used as a rationale for locally inappropriate levels and forms of densification that benefit developers but whose traffic and parking impacts can significantly detract from the quality of life of the affected community.
University Heights is unique in being totally surrounded by several high density “Major Activity Centres” such as Foothills Hospital, West Campus, U of C and McMahon Stadium, which generate a huge amount of traffic into already congested University Heights streets and intersections. Planned redevelopment at all these major activity centres will bring tens of thousands of new jobs and people to the periphery of University Heights that will congest the community’s streets still further. Stadium Shopping Centre is a 2.48 hectare parcel located within University Heights, with 64,000 sq. feet of small independent retail units and restaurants. University Heights has no community hall and the Stadium Shopping Centre serves as the cherished “heart” of the community. Although University Heights already has higher density than 125 of the 150 “established communities” in Calgary, University Heights residents support a denser mixed-use revitalization of the Stadium Shopping Centre. We have repeatedly offered Garrison Woods as the preferred type of development constituting a balance among the needs of both our community and surrounding major activity centres.
Our residents merely ask that densification comply with the Municipal Development Plan (MDP) — that it be modest in scale, primarily “residential,” “compatible with the character of the surrounding community,” and designed through a “collaborative planning process” including the affected community. Instead, we face something dramatically different than what City policy calls for and residents support. The proposed Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) for Stadium Shopping Centre went to city council on Monday and continues today and paves the way for an 800,000 sq. foot development (12 times larger than the current development!) that is overwhelmingly commercial (ie. ma- jor activity centre-oriented medical clinics, offices and hotel), and silent on the extent of the residential component.
Moreover, as documented by 1,400 pages of City-developer correspondence we obtained through Freedom of Information requests, the ARP was developed in a closed-door process designed to provide “certainty” largely to the developer and jointly manage concerned communities, primarily through a “by invitation only” consultation process with multiple stakeholders that would peripheralize the host community of University Heights.
For all communities the lesson is clear: be alert and get involved!