When Naheed Nenshi was elected to lead the city of Calgary in October, headlines hailed him as Canada’s first Muslim mayor. Mr. Nenshi, 39, is an Ismaili Muslim, born of parents of South Asian descent who immigrated to Canada from Tanzania.
But what makes him really interesting is not his religious background or the colour of his skin. It is his challenge to the way Canadians build their cities.
Mr. Nenshi has been thinking about cities and how they work for most of his adult life. As a well-travelled, Harvard-trained management consultant, he learned to love great world cities like Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro, London and New York. His favourite is Melbourne, Australia.
He can talk your ear off about the success of Curitiba, Brazil, with dedicated bus-ways for carrying commuters. He can explain how a “tax increment finance regime” can help pay for urban infrastructure. His 3-Ds urban philosophy calls for cities with density, diversity and a sense of discovery.
Seldom has a Canadian mayor come to office with such a deep understanding of urban issues. Now, after years on the outside as a business professor, activist and newspaper columnist, he suddenly has a chance to put those ideas into action.
But can he get Calgary to buy in? To an outsider, at least, sprawling, car-dependent Calgary seems like an unlikely place to realize Mr. Nenshi’s Jane Jacobs-inspired ideas about livable cities.
In a 2002 report called Building Up: Making Canada's Cities Magnets for Talent and Engines of Development, he argued that the successful city of the future will be a place in which “people live where they work and play. Density is high. Public transit is a preferred choice. Young people can afford to live downtown. Classes and socio-economic backgrounds are mixed...”
Calgary seems to violate every one of those principles. With no natural barriers – no lake like Toronto’s, no mountains and sea as in Vancouver – Canada’s fourth biggest city sprawls north, south, east and west across the rolling brown foothills of southern Alberta.
Density is low. With the same sized footprint as the five boroughs of New York City, Calgary has one-tenth the population.
Though its C-Train light-rail network provides swift service to downtown, 67.6 per cent Calgarians commute by car and just 16.8 per cent by transit, according to the last census.
Some young people can afford to live downtown, but not many do. The proliferation of high-rise condominiums that has transformed downtown Toronto and Vancouver has only just begun in Calgary. More than 95 per cent of real estate development is in the suburbs, where vast new subdivisions with names like Tuscany and Mahogany stretch into the distance.
As for mixing, Mr. Nenshi says that in his own immigrant neighbourhood of Coral Springs in the city’s northeast, the proportion of non-white residents has soared to 82 per cent from 50 per cent a few years ago, while in the southern half of Calgary he says all but eight per cent are white.
Yet none of this discourages the effervescent new mayor, an unlikely come-from-behind winner in October’s Calgary election. He insists that Calgary can, and must, change and he is determined to lead Canada’s fastest growing city into a more sustainable, more truly urban future.
In his high-ceilinged office in Calgary’s old city hall building, he lays out a three-point plan.
First, develop unused downtown lands. Calgary has a bustling downtown with thickets of office towers, including the rising Norman Foster-designed skyscraper, the Bow. But there is a lot of barren, underused space in between. Mr. Nenshi has high hopes for the East Village, a once-sketchy area that is to be revived with a new music centre and housing projects.
