Calgary occupies more space per capita–700 square kilometres for about 1 million people–than any other city in North America. I’ve only been there oncce, and spent the weekend downtown, but apparently it’s the victim of vast urban sprawl.
Andrea People who live in Calgary actually use the downtown as a short-cut to other quadrants of the city. If they don’t change their suburban focus, I suspect they’ll end up with a decaying urban core. The city is really built around cars — perhaps because oil is so important. Still, the C-train is cool.
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gwendolyn Since there are no natural borders to Calgary, it’s been very easy for the city to ooze out in all four directions. Unfortunately, this had led to a city where more and more of the population are on the outer fringes with all the big-box stores and malls. The two school boards can’t build new schools fast enough to accommodate students in the suburbs, which end up having to be bused past other schools to find ones with vacancies. Meanwhile, those facilities downtown have been forced to close because there are no longer enough students to warrant keeping them open.
Incidentally, the city keeps applying to add land from the outlying regional districts….
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Calgary is out of control. Sprawling is definitely the term to use. If you look at recent sat-images of Alberta, you can see that the city occupies a significant percentage of the province already.
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