From the Calgary Herald – July 2, 2009

I spent most of last week hanging out at City Hall, participating in, and observing, the hearings on Plan It, the city’s proposed 60-year plan.

While I have written in the past about my reasons for largely supporting the plan, what I was most interested in last week was the remarkable level of citizen engagement. Everyday people took time off from school and work and summer vacation, to take their five minutes in front of city council to talk about the kind of city they want.

While the majority of ordinary citizens spoke in favour of Plan-It, or in general favour with a couple of changes (mostly about adding the Airport Trail tunnel or removing the proposed river crossings), there were all kinds of perspectives. There were students from high school and university, and even a pair of 75 year olds, one on each side of the issue.

I thought back to this past winter, when I went to see Chris Turner give a presentation based on his book, The Geography of Hope, (a finalist for the Governor General’s Award last year.) The presentation was inspiring, discussing

real things communities around the world are doing to become more sustainable. When I got my book autographed, Turner signed it, “Let get on with it.”

A few weeks later, along with other attendees of the talk, I received an e-mail invitation to a meeting at a coffee shop to talk about how to get Calgarians more engaged in building the kind of city they want for their kids. And CivicCamp was born.

Three weeks after that coffee shop meeting, 160 citizens met in the basement of a church-I believe that many good things start in church basements -to talk about the Calgary they dream of.

These folks were from all political philosophies and all walks of life-parents, teachers, professionals, small business owners.

As I took notes on their discussions, two things became clear-there was a remarkable unanimity in the kinds of things they were saying, and their vision of the city was remarkably different from the one that I was used to hearing in the media and amongst certain members of city council.

This probably should not have surprised me as much as it did–in my work on cities, I have found that people tend to value the same sorts of things. The concepts of “left” and “right” are almost completely irrelevant at the municipal level.

Folks want neighbourhoods where they can walk to the store.

They want to live close to where they work, and they

want a variety of people –young and old–to feel welcome in the community.

They want comfortable, safe, convenient public transit–even if they are drivers, they see a benefit in taking other cars off the road.

No one wants urban sprawl.

Those of a more conservative bent see it as waste that always leads to higher taxes, while those on the other side of the political spectrum see it as unsustainable.

Both are right.

Which is why the current split on council is so baffling. Don Braid, in a must-read column in last Saturday’s Herald, calls it a divide between “aldermen who yearn for a great city and others who favour a cheap one.”

Even the Chamber of Commerce, long a thoughtful ally for those interested in a better city, seemingly repudiated its stance last week and threw its lot in with a bunch of special-interest groups focused on things like not reducing the use of plastic bags in the city.

Aldermen who support the vision the chamber laid out in its Renaissance Calgary strategy were docked grades in its report card, while those who voted to delay or defeat Plan-It were rewarded, despite the chamber’s own guarded support for the plan.

This is why the work of CivicCamp and other citizen groups is so important.

For too long, we’ve let groups with vested interests– be they developers, business groups, or single-issue community organizations– act as though they are the only ones who matter.

They can pay people to attend council and committees, they can make donations, they can make meetings and lobby.

But the real stakeholder is the citizen, and council would do well to remember that.

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount royal college’s Bissett school of Business. www.Bettercalgary.ca

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