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What is the guide

What is the Guide?

Learn more about what the Guide does and does not do.

The Guide does:

  • Give citizens a stronger voice to the kinds of growth and where growth goes in their communities
  • Provide the language and options for how a community can grow through working with citizens during the local area planning process
  • Give certainty and predictability for redevelopment to go in the right places
  • Allow for a community to create a vision that reflects its unique sense of place
  • Provide tools to preserve heritage assets
  • Help develop investment opportunities for community improvements
  • Include single-detached homes among housing choices available to everyone
  • Support housing and mobility choices for people
  • Provide tools to protect and grow community parks, natural areas and outdoor recreation
  • Include pro-active policies to address climate change at the community and development scale

 

The Guide does not:

  • Eliminate single-detached homes
  • Promote a one-size-fits-all approach for communities
  • Change the zoning of your land when it and a local area plan is approved in your community
  • Take away the ability to choose how we get around the city
  • Change the existing land use redesignation or development permit process
  • Take away a resident’s voice or meaningful say in the vision for their community

 

 

Applying the Guide in real life

The Guide is a tool in the local area planning process

The Guide is the key tool used by citizens, stakeholders and City planners to create community local area plans. It was used by citizens to develop the draft North Hill Communities Local Area Plan, and it’s currently being used to develop the Westbrook and Heritage​ Communities Local Area Plans.

Citizens and stakeholders work with City planners to determine the type of growth that’s appropriate for the different areas in a community. This growth is based on people and their activities in a community. The “Urban Form” categories and “scales” in Chapter 2 are customized for each local area plan, so future growth respects and builds on a community’s unique conditions and environments. If appropriate, the local area planning process can also augment the Guide’s policies to better reflect a community’s context.

Developers and industry will also use the Guide to develop sites. It provides them consistent policies and community design elements (built form) to keep the community’s long-term best interests in mind.

Further studies

  • Guide myths:

    Common myths and facts

    You can read about common myths and facts to help inform you more on the Guide and its role with community growth in Calgary.

  • The Guide works with Local Area Plans:

    Case study of the guide

    Review the draft North Hill Communities Local Area Plan, Calgary’s first local area plan to use the Guide.

Read the guide

Guidebook for Great Communities

This version of the Guide is DRAFT and was published in January 2021. The current changes under review by Council have not been approved and therefore have not been included in this version. Once Council approves the changes, we will update and publish the final, approved, version of the Guide.

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Contact us

Contact Planning & Development

Robyn Jamieson, Senior Planner
Robyn.Jamieson@calgary.ca​
403-268-5864

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For media enquiries

Please call us at:
403-828-2954

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This information has no legal status and cannot be used as an official interpretation of the various bylaws, codes and regulations currently in effect. The City of Calgary accepts no responsibility to persons relying solely on this information. Web pages are updated periodically. ​

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