Changing ideas of home design will transform Calgary’s established neighbourhoods.John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
As Calgary's pace of densification begins to pick up speed, a picture is beginning to form of how growth will reshape the city.
Current redevelopment efforts have been centred on inner-city historic neighbourhoods such as the Mission, Bridgeland and Kensington. But the next wave of densification will break on the postwar neighbourhoods further from the centre, areas where single-family homes predominate and where changing ideas of home and home design will transform established neighbourhoods.
According to the associate dean of environmental design at the University of Calgary, John Brown, residential housing redevelopment was taking place in three or four neighbourhoods 10 or 15 years ago. Now, the 1970s housing stock is seeing greater changes.
Ten years ago, Calgary was losing 5 per cent of its population every year to new suburban communities. The city now aims to reverse that trend, emphasizing density. But that density will not be monolithic.
The city's planning guidelines state that within the next 60 years at least half of its growth will be accommodated within current boundaries. Existing communities will begin to absorb the millions of people expected to move to the city over the next few decades.
Critics tend to see the push for housing density as a cruel binary: peaceful groupings of single-family homes assaulted by an onslaught of condo towers, traffic and noise. But redevelopment trends in Calgary suggest a nuanced outcome is unfolding.
Indeed, the whole idea of a home is changing, says Mr. Brown. He says the home, a "crystallization of the good life," is taking on a new character. Along with transforming trends in society, homes are losing their functional compartmentalization, he says.
Once, the "good life" home was split into functional elements: sleeping area; food preparation area, eating area, covering little more than 1,000 square feet.
By the 1970s, the formality of separated functions in the home was breaking down, just as cultural shifts changed family mechanics. The kitchen and family room were becoming one large room. Rules about where the knife and fork were placed or whether elbows were allowed on the table were fading, and meals consumed in front of the TV were becoming commonplace.
The houses themselves were getting bigger; starter homes expanded to 1,400 or 1,800 sq. ft. Cheap suburban land meant bigger houses, with great rooms, entertainment rooms, large finished basements, maybe even a bonus room above the garage. Gourmet kitchens ballooned, becoming the key gathering place in the home.
Societal trends are now changing the designs of new infill homes, compounded by the rapidly rising cost of land.
The formula for land to house construction cost has had to change, Mr. Brown says. The traditional 2/3 cost for land and 1/3 cost for house doesn't get much of a home on a $700,000 piece of land. Mr. Brown says these costs induce a clientele with "financial flexibility" bundled with high expectations.
Along with catering to changing societal tastes, Calgary's redevelopment is driven by the city's land-use bylaw and local-area plans providing development policy direction for neighbourhoods.
The land-use bylaw has dictated lot coverage, housing size and volume to help ensure the financially flexible homes are sensitive to their neighbours.
Local-area plans direct the development to sustain neighbourhood character and to be sensitive to local history through the use of building materials. They also dictate how existing communities are to redevelop, where density should be concentrated, where and how best to augment a neighbourhood to advance public transit and to encourage pedestrian getting about.
Another driver, Mr. Brown says, is Calgary's "vibrant redevelopment history." It's "stylistically adventuresome with less land-value price constraint than Vancouver, for example." There's also a "global culture in Calgary," a global client culture each bringing their sense of what the good life is. With international taste comes local application of those tastes.
These drivers have outputs. Redevelopment tends to push up property values and therefore decrease affordability. Approaches to ensure a broader economic class can live where these pressures are unfolding concern city planners and architects, Mr. Brown says.
Secondary suites, which still have yet to receive blanket approval across residential areas by city council, is one approach. Another is laneway housing, which is having mixed success in Vancouver and has yet to be applied in its contemporary form in Calgary.
Increasing housing density is an act of sustainability as well . It also ensures providing public transit and local retail is more economically viable as their residential catchment increases. These offer an opportunity to not be condemned to automobile-based mobility. However, Mr. Brown cautions, sustainability can become just "environmental bling" – not wholly unnecessary but shiny stuff to stand out among neighbourhood peers – such as employing solar panels.
They're not as shiny, but better housing environmental performance can come from more efficient windows or furnace or orienting the house to use the sun for heating and employing louvers for when the sun's rays are better kept at bay, Mr. Brown says.
Where's the future in Calgary's redevelopment? In two places, according to Mr. Brown. We're reminded that most redevelopment was taking place in Calgary's inner-city historic neighbourhoods, replacing housing stock from the 1910s and '20s with the contemporary conception of the good life.
Brown sees one future moving out toward the 1960s and '70s neighbourhoods, though some of this redevelopment will be to simply "change the function of the home, rather than to increase density," as these areas remain zoned for single detached homes. This change in function rather than strictly increasing residential density is where Mr. Brown sees the second future.
One of Mr. Brown's current research pursuits is investigating how a house can adapt over the course of a family's life. How can house design mirror the stages in life we go through? We have the "idea of the good life and then lives change." How can the house change with us?
Calgary's existing neighbourhoods will absorb population growth, and the result will be both a different neighbourhood composition and homes. The housing stock will continue to evolve, as will the functions within the home. Like the fabric of a city adapting to population growth, the home itself will adapt to its occupant's journey.
Steven Snell is a city planner with a master's in urban planning.
Special to The Globe and Mail