02 Restructuring Rural Settlement

Building the Sustainable Region

Much like 21st Century Planning, Restructuring Rural Settlement is another position paper intended to set a rationale for our regional planning work.  First posted in November of 2008 on tsix.ca, the article was co-authored by Gian-Carlo Carra, a colleague and senior urban designer who worked on several occasions with T-Six Urbanists.  In pursuit of political aspirations (as of this writing), he continues to be a proponent or sustainable urbanism and sound urban design in Calgary.

The Alberta Situation

Since the end of WWII the fate of Alberta’s natural and working landscapes have been largely bound within the greater rural experience of North America.  However, there are important distinctions.  The legacy of Alberta’s Regional Planning Commissions (RPCs) combined with the oil, gas, and now bitumen-driven booms that power the Province’s economy have pitted regulation against demand in a way atypical of the majority of the continent’s regional economies.  For most of the postwar period, Alberta’s rural landscapes were “protected” by the RPCs in a system that attempted to ensure that growth was responsibly paid for by tax-base.  This system, establishing urban “haves” and rural “have-nots,” created tremendous hostility between the Province’s cities and their rural hinterlands.  This acrimony ultimately led to the decommissioning of the RPCs in the mid 1990’s.  But rather than correct the inequities of the system, the abandonment of the RPCs led to a decade-long regional planning vacuum and a stalemate between the so-called “rural” and “urban” that is only now being positively redressed.

The regional planning vacuum that ensued is a result of the development pressures on the rural municipalities that surround Alberta’s urban centers; these municipalities’ new ability to respond to pent-up demand for residential and industrial land uses, coupled with their increasing need for tax-base, has led to an explosion of rural growth.  This growth has only been tempered by a stalemate stemming from the urban municipalities’ last vestige of advantage from the RPC era: a monopoly on urban water and sewage services.  The result is a proliferation of extremely low-density development within urban-adjacent rural municipalities throughout Alberta – a physical result similar to the North America-wide situation, but driven more by servicing-based constraints than by the lesser degree of demand more typical elsewhere. However, rural Alberta shares with the rest of rural North America a deep-set belief in the importance of regionally distinct rural lifestyles, and a strong aversion to the type of growth that has characterized the postwar period.  This has led to locally-supported policy that disallows “urban” densities.  There is however growing consensus that these policies have achieved outcomes counter to their intent.  At the heart of any successful reconstruction of rural settlement in Alberta must be a completely different approach towards density and growth than that which has characterized the last 60 years.

Rediscovering the Urban and the Rural

There was a time when new development was met with a sense of excitement and progress, a time when towns and villages were built on time-tested principles that residents knew they could trust.  These were traditional principles of town building that resulted in attractive rural towns and hamlets with intimate main streets, narrow tree lined roads, the iconic country lane, and the solitary farm set against a breath-taking sweep of rural landscape.  Over the past 60 years, however, we changed the way we built our towns and cities, and became careless about how our human settlements related to our natural and agricultural hinterland.  We traded the traditional wisdom of creating human-scaled places for an experimental development pattern where nearly all daily trips require a car, main streets have become strip malls, streets are hostile to pedestrians, and expanses of homogenous housing developments march across the countryside.  In rural North America, suburban sprawl has taken on the form of country residential, a less-dense and much more land-consumptive settlement pattern than its urban counter-part. In large swaths it is clear that the country residential pattern destroys the very thing it was intended to protect – a rural lifestyle.

But beyond the growing dissatisfaction with the character of postwar growth, it has become increasingly clear that this experimental pattern of suburban sprawl is not sustainable into the future. The sad legacy of Alberta’s RPCs are that they failed at their two fundamental purposes.  In the first place, the nature of suburban growth is such that it does not establish a tax-base that can pay for itself – and at the lower densities of the country residential pattern, it is even less solvent.  Secondly, the suburban growth of the RPC era dissolved the functional differences between urban and rural; while “urbans” and “rurals” were politically and economically pitted against one another, the unique character and interdependent nature of the landscapes that each supposedly represents has been severely eroded.

The growing Province-wide appreciation of the fiscal imperative for denser settlement patterns offers hope as to the fate of our rural landscapes.  If accompanied by a renewed appreciation of truly urban and truly rural patterns, it represents our best hope of retaining and enhancing what we value most.  Further, in order to regain a societal appreciation for responsible growth as a partner of stewardship – as a march towards real prosperity as opposed to sacrificing quality of life for standard of living – we must rediscover the essential interdependence between the urban and the rural.  If refocused into distinct rural towns, villages, hamlets, and farms, and nestled into our spectacular working and natural landscapes, growth can be both a celebration of our past, and the heritage we bestow on future generations.

A Model for the Sustainable Region

Alberta is an incredibly young place by world, and even North American standards.  Barely more than a century old, our first fifty years of growth were shaped by an experience-base of European origin.  It was in this period that our basic settlement patterns were established and our most treasured built heritage was developed. In Europe, this settlement pattern remains intact, largely unravaged by the suburban patterns that have transformed North America.  To this day Europe consists of an incredibly productive and beautiful agricultural landscape laced with natural patches and corridors, interspersed with world-class industrial districts, and strung with charming hamlets, pristine villages, beautiful towns, and vibrant cities.  An example of particular relevance to Alberta is the Piedmont region of Northern Italy.

Piedmont literally means foothills, and in the “golden triangle” between Milan, Genoa, and Turin, the region economically functions as the Calgary-Edmonton corridor has been envisioned, with world-class, value-added industries supplying high-tech and specialty manufactured items to a global market (See Figure 1). This economic prosperity is generated out of a landscape that looks like a postcard, functions as highly productive farmland, and that houses and employs its population in compact, walkable rural villages such as Altavilla (See Figure 2).  Figure 3 depicts the Province of Allesandria, which consists of the City of Allesandria, its sister city to the north, Casale Monferrato, several major towns such as Valenza and Moncalvo, and countless hamlets and villages – most dating back to pre-Roman times.  These centers are nestled within a distinctly rural landscape of orchards, vineyards, fields, and (recently) special urban-adjacent industrial districts.  The astonishing thing about Figure 3 is the rectangular boarder depicted on the map; it is the current boarders of the City of Calgary overlaid onto the Province of Allesandria.

The fundamental lesson to be learned from this model is that sustainable regional planning is a long-term proposition. Frequently twenty to fifty year plans are derided as being unrealistic – how could we possibly anticipate what could happen within such a long period of time?  Against such derision, consider the ancient landscape of Piedmont.  Is there anything in that pattern of settlement that restricts what we value, enjoy, and aspire to in Alberta?  The reality is that even a hundred year plan is too short-sighted.  Responsible regional planning demands that we consider how we develop our landscape in terms of how it will contribute to a 500 and 1000-year history of Alberta.

Building the Sustainable Region

Successfully reconstructing rural settlement can only occur within the context of building the Sustainable Region.  At the same time, the Sustainable Region will only emerge out of the successful reconstruction of rural settlement.  This is a project that requires profound shifts in three interrelated areas.  First, we must establish a comprehensive design framework that is complementary across scales, from the super-regional – as in the entire Calgary-Edmonton-Fort McMurray Corridor, through the regional – as in the collections of urban and rural municipalities that are assembled along this corridor, down to the level of urban design within the distinct cities, towns, villages, and hamlets of each region.  At the same time, in order to achieve this pattern, we must engage in the collaborative processes that will build the enthusiasm and political will for such a project; from Provincial support, through forging mutually beneficial and innovative inter-municipal relationships, to engaging and empowering grassroots communities as partners in this vital heritage-building endeavor. Finally, we must ensure that the plans we develop come to pass as intended through regulation that is clear in intent, fair in administration, and economically, socially, and environmentally responsible to Albertans today, and far into our Province’s future.

While many of these shifts are currently being considered or are underway throughout the Province, the fate of this greater project is far from clear.  It could easily succumb to the powerful inertia of our current unsustainable growth trend, or like the RPCs it could solidify in a way that is fundamentally flawed.  The best chance we have at building the sustainable region will only emerge out of the collaboration of multiple partnerships involving an engaged citizenry and committed government.  It is imperative that individual municipalities, responding to the growth pressures that are bombarding them, develop responses that are intentionally compatible with the anticipated emergence of a larger regional framework.  This means reconstructing rural settlement on a municipality by municipality basis according to the following time-tested principles.

What Must be Done

We must reestablish the fundamental importance and clarity of rural and urban.  Rural must characterize our natural, agricultural, and other working landscapes.  Urban must characterize our settlement patterns at intensities greater than the individual working farm, from the hamlet, through the village and town, to the city.  The village must be recognized as the basic human-scaled building block of this regional settlement pattern.  A hamlet is a small village with a limited mix of uses.  A village consists of a compact collection of small properties assembled to form rich, walkable public spaces.  A mix of uses in a central area and a well defined edge complete the basic village pattern.  Assembled together, villages function as neighborhoods and form towns. Towns assembled together, in turn, create cities.  These patterns allow for a balanced and predictable relationship with the rural hinterland and are a time-tested means of protecting rural lifestyles and an agricultural economy.

While it is expected that some hamlets will grow into full villages, and circumstances may require the establishment of new towns and industrial districts, a fundamental difference between this approach and our current system is that agricultural land is valued not as a placeholder for future development, but as an essential ingredient of a complete region. Throughout Alberta, legal mechanisms to acknowledge the value of rural landscapes, such as Transfer of Development Credits (TDC) systems, are being carefully considered.  These approaches are absolutely dependent on strong public support and active participation in the market systems they create.  As appealing as the protection of farmland is in itself, these systems will only succeed if the denser settlement patterns they correspondingly produce can be shown to be financially viable to developers, demanded by consumers, and loved by Albertans.  As such, reconstructing rural settlement at the municipal-level is an essential step in the achievement of a sustainable, prosperous Alberta.

Re-Defining the Urban-Rural Edge

A major challenge to reconstructing rural settlement in Alberta is strategically re-defining the urban-rural edge so as to promote awareness of, and celebrate, urban-rural distinctions.  As discussed above, the basic building block of human settlement within a sustainable region is the village or neighborhood unit, which consists of a fine-scaled collection of richly mixed land uses, with a well defined centre and edge, assembled to create a walkable environment.  Unfortunately, postwar suburban sprawl patterns have abandoned all of the defining characteristics of this village/neighborhood ideal: land uses are not mixed – they are strictly segregated; the automobile is the primary transportation consideration with all other modes, including walking, an afterthought at best; from small town main streets to big city downtowns, centers have been eroded and, although some existing areas are making a comeback, new centers are not part of the greenfield development agenda; and, the prevalent edge condition throughout the region is the major road or expressway, which acts to separate single-use development pods, destroys pedestrian connectivity, affronts the distinction between the urban and the rural, and provokes the continued advance of sprawl across the landscape.

The ideal interface between urban and rural, and between centre and edge, is a gradual but visible transition in intensity of human settlement from the urban core, to the sub-urban fringe.  Within the constrained proportions of the village model, such a transition allows for residents of multi-family and town home dwellings in the center to access rural environments by walking, and allows acreages on the rural edge to enjoy the benefits of a street address, urban servicing, and a pleasant walk to most services in the center.  Further, clustering development into the village model allows for the rational development of transit stations, that when strung along corridors connecting villages and neighborhoods, establishes a framework for regional planning that reflects the best aspects of Alberta’s built heritage: the pattern of cities and towns connected by the railway; and, the pattern of urban neighborhoods connected by streetcar.  Such a “nodes and corridors” approach maximizes the effectiveness of expensive infrastructure, as well as allowing rural and urban landscapes to interpenetrate, celebrating their essential interdependence.

Throughout Alberta, there are countless examples of the essential distinction between the urban and the rural disordered by the advance of suburban sprawl into rural landscapes.  A critical challenge for municipalities committed to reconstructing rural settlement and building a sustainable region is re-defining the urban-rural edge with appropriate centre to edge transitions along distinct corridors.  The establishment and support of strategic projects that demonstrably achieve this will be critical in mobilizing market and political forces towards altering our Province’s current development status quo and achieving an approach to growth that will be celebrated for generations to come.

Geoff Dyer, M.E.Des. (Urban Design)

Gian-Carlo Carra, M.E.Des. (Urban Design)