CARDUS

Home | Media Coverage | Building a City

Building a City

June 1, 2008

Building a city is easy enough for most people to understand in terms of physical infrastructure - concrete and steel, in other words.Most everyone can appreciate the need for offices, factories, shops, apartments, houses, hospitals and roads, buses, airports and trains to connect people and move them from one place to another. And they understand that playing fields and hockey rinks and gymnasia and libraries all play a part, too. They even recognize that parks are nice for relaxing and breaking up the monotony of endless expansion.But talk to them in terms too esoteric and you will lose them when you venture into the more ethereal realms of architecture, beauty, art and the importance of establishing an identifiable civic aesthetic. Not everyone wants to go there. Not everyone can. The meaning of life, after all, can be summarized for many as the contentment that comes from a warm fire, cold beer and the company of trusted companions. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.Undaunted, however, many groups in Calgary are attempting to bridge that communications gap and ensure that the city doesn’t miss the opportunity that prosperity has brought to its door. Arts groups, particularly, are interested in the development of cores of civic beauty, plazas of genuine personal interconnection and so on. At issue for most of them is the fact that as society evolved over the past 50 years, many civic centres became little more than the hole in a suburban doughnut, filled only during work hours by people buzzing back and forth to their homes, gardens and soccer fields in the suburbs.Back in the pre-suburban era, it was easier to recognize the cores of cities – even those in decay – because they were designed around churches and the plazas and marketplaces surrounding them. Today, in many North American cities, these centres have been replaced by new cathedrals - football and baseball stadiums and hockey and basketball arenas. Yet even they fill up and empty in a matter of hours. People come and people go. The same can be said for theatre districts and arts centres, although they do tend to hold the crowds a little longer.The point is that no single one of these genres is enough to allow a city of genuine intimacy and surprise to emerge and flourish. The churches, the theatres, the arenas and the civic centres all need to be engaged or, in the case of churches (which still provide homes for athletes and artists) they need to be re-engaged. Yes, their power may have waned, but their influence in people’s lives is still remarkable. Even if, for instance, only one in five Calgarians attends a place of worship on a once a week basis, there are still at least 220,000 of them who dependably gather for a specific, common purpose every week. To put this in perspective, the Calgary Flames would have to fill up the Saddledome 11 times each week with 11 completely different crowds in order to display the same drawing power. A study released in March by a Canadian Think Tank, the Work Research Foundation, pointed to this quite clearly. The report, Toronto the Good, used statistics compiled by University of Lethbridge sociologist Dr. Reg Bibby, Project Canada and Statscan to support the need for truly inclusive civic engagement. Bibby’s data illustrates adherence to cohesive social values which some would see as a strong argument in favour of engaging the spiritual side of our citizens and putting it to work. When asked to rate which virtues they consider very important, theists and atheists rated some of them (the full report is at www.wrf.ca/pdfs/sgu/Toronto.the.Good.pdf) as follows, with the theists’ ratings first: Honesty, 94% & 89%; Kindness 88% & 75%; Family life 88% & 65%; Being loved 84% & 70%; Concern for others 82% & 63%; Forgiveness 84% & 52%; Patience 72% & 39%; and Generosity 67% & 37%.The point here isn’t to indicate that the church people are better than other people because they aren’t. But it does show that while they may have fallen out of fashion, they can bring it when it comes to building a city that cares about purpose, art, beauty and aspiration to cohesive social values.Calgary will be a unique city if it can break down the barriers between the visible and the invisible worlds, release the power of all the segments of its society and put its engineers, artists, poets, pastors, bricklayers and bishops equally to work. That, after all, is how the builders of the world’s greatest cities achieved their ambitions. All we have to do is remember what they knew.