I ask the guys if they’ve ever seen movies from the Resident Evil cinematic universe, featuring the all-powerful fictional Umbrella Corporation. In the first film–the only one worth watching unless you’re into Milla Jovovich fan service vehicles–Milla and the others visit the sprawling underground Umbrella headquarters, a kind of ant farm for humans, but with fairly bland offices and sterile cloning labs. Of course being on the second floor the Plus 15 thankfully has a good amount of natural light, but it likewise has the warmth of a cloning lab. It’s remarkable for just how uninspiring it is.
Take the choice of building materials, something I find most people pay no attention to (unless you work in construction or happen to be renovating). The flooring is usually a very generic tile, or an extremely inoffensive carpet. Walls are painted neutral tones, as if the building were about to be put up for sale tomorrow. Elevator lobbies are austere in the extreme, and art choices are conservative, uncontroversial ones.
We reach the western edge of downtown. Beyond 5th Street W, it’s always been a little quieter, farther away from the hydrocarbon giants of Suncor and Encana, in their shiny new buildings near Centre Street. Empty storefronts sit all around and many buildings are completely gutted, being renovated or converted to residences (spurred on by generous tax dollars).
Jon suggests a detour to “High Park”. He’s an avid cyclist and urbanist, and far more familiar with downtown than I am. It’s sort of Calgary’s version of the High Line in New York: an elevated urban park. But instead of being on an abandoned train line, it’s on the top floor of a parking garage.
The park is a little snow-covered, but offers fresh air, sunlight, and a half-decent view over the Beltline neighbourhood south of downtown. It’s also deserted, with some sad-looking oversized text signs spouting toxic positivity seemingly left over from 2020. It was an experience I was glad to have, though I found it odd that I had never known about it despite living all my life in Calgary.
Like most western Canadian cities, modern Calgary grew up built beside the railroad tracks, and basically owes its existence to trains1. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) mainline still goes right through downtown Calgary, separating it from the Beltline. You know you leave downtown when you cross the tracks, usually via an underpass, a walk that is fairly tedious despite the attempts at adding public art. It’s a little surreal to see cars carrying oil, sulphur, grain, and other heavy goods in such close proximity to zoom meetings and breakout rooms. Infuriatingly, the tracks don’t carry any passengers other than an occasional luxury tourist train in what feels like comically wasted potential. There supposedly are proposals to build high-speed rail at some point, but I’m not optimistic.
After a few minutes to take in the views over the city, we head back into the labyrinth.
There’s a common refrain about whether physical barriers like walls are meant to keep people out or to keep people in. I am not quite sure which purpose the Plus 15 was meant to do. Stafford Beer, a systems theorist that died in 2002, had the pithy words, “the purpose of a system is what it does”. That is, it’s more important to examine the real-world effects, intentional or not, instead of the intent or design.
To me, the Plus 15 serves to insulate, literally and metaphorically, from the outside world. The “grittiness” of city life–think Great Stink of London, garbage pickup strikes leading to piles of trash on the sidewalk, and closer to home, homeless encampments, and the opioid crisis–has been removed, leading to a quasi-utopian (or dystopian) vision of a futuristic city. In exchange, nature has been nearly extirpated. It’s a constant room temperature, year round, all day. It’s always bright thanks to LED and fluorescent lighting. It does keep people out, but it also keeps people in. When you leave your office without a coat and it’s -20 outside, you’re probably not going to venture outside very long.
There are however, an amazing amount of chiropractors and physio clinics. This strikes me as very interesting, as many of the people going in are office workers working jobs involving quite a lot of sitting–isn’t that what we were taught to desire? I wonder if sitting really is the new smoking.
It doesn’t help that in the austere and prison-esque stone and tile landscape of the Plus 15, there are no natural areas to speak of. There is the occasional “winter garden”, typically a few trees planted in tiny grates and tasteful terraced planters with greenery, but nothing approaching a lawn you can sit or lay down on, or a forest you can get lost in. We do have the Devonian Gardens, an indoor quasi-park on the 4th floor of a shopping centre connected to the network, but since its–ahem–re-imagining in 2012, it’s more akin to a botanical zoo: you can look but not touch, and are confined to the tile walkways. It has the ambience of the shopping centre it sits atop: not terribly unpleasant, but hardly an escape.2
Given the nature of what goes on in these stone and tile hallways, petroleum and natural gas projects and pipelines being envisioned, engineered, and executed, it’s oddly divorced from the reality of these megaprojects: the disruption on the ground to build well roads, drilling, burying pipelines, the gigantic refineries (mostly around Edmonton) remediating abandoned wells, to say nothing of the massive amount of earth moved in the oil sands. Oil and gas are dirty–and right now, essential to our way of life–industries, but by the time the money flows to Calgary, it’s squeaky clean. This isn’t anything unique in the world of global finance, but it does feel oddly sanitized. It definitely has the trappings of being the “home” city of an empire, while the rest of Alberta is just something to exploit.
It’s easy to think of the environment as an abstract thing “out there”, when you spend so much time in the hallways where nature doesn’t exist. The comparative lack of urban parks downtown doesn’t help. We have Prince’s Island Park, a glorious green space along the Bow River, but it’s really out of reach for most downtown workers on lunch. Transit doesn’t really reach it, either.
I think about New York City, the veritable capital of Capital and wealth. Central Park is the most famous urban park on earth, but Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan is far more interesting to me. It’s a tiny park by comparison, surrounded by high-rises, and the New York Public Library3 as backdrop. At lunchtime in the warm months, the manicured lawn is full of people eating outside, lounging on the grass, and laughing together. In the winter, it’s a skating rink and winter market. This is what every urban park aspires to: a really lively place where you can literally touch grass, accessible to many, and oddly free of the ills of poverty.4
Calgary, a long way from reaching the status of Gotham, really does need to create more public greenspace. There’s currently an effort to “re-vitalize” Olympic Plaza, a relic of the 1988 Winter Olympics, but its setting is less than ideal. It’s bordered by City Hall, the arts centre, the convention centre, a church, and a non-descript medium rise tower block. There are usually some people in the square, but it lacks lawn and liveliness. It’s a common place for people experiencing homelessness to hang out, simply because there are very few other public places.
We next walk through a corridor in a parkade (ie, multi-story parking garage) full of concrete cow sculptures. This was a public art project commissioned in 1999, inspired by a cow-themed project in Zürich via Chicago. Starting with a blank 3D canvas of a fibreglass cow, different artists and corporate patrons aimed to bring splashes of colour and life into downtown streets. The cows were very popular, then sent, fittingly, to “pasture” in this parking lot corridor.
Calgary for years was known as “cowtown”: a nod to its history as a colonial frontier outpost, too dry for most settled agriculture other than ranching. The city is constantly trying to re-brand itself and is in somewhat of an eternal identity crisis. Welcome signs say “Heart of the New West”, whatever that means, and “Be part of the energy”, referring to the oil and gas companies headquartered here. Most recently, in 2024 the city unveiled itself as “blue sky city”: I am not sure if it’s a dig to cloudy Vancouver, or if the city’s really sucking up to Jack Dorsey and his new social media site. Either way, it’s easy to see where such a bland and generic corporate slogan was conceived: here in the Plus 15.
As we cross over 2nd Street W, Jon points out that despite two Plus 15 bridges crossing it, it’s to be the site of a future elevated rail line. The struggle here is between the provincial government, headed by a party rather hostile to inner-city issues, and the city council, more concerned with an imminent collapse of property tax revenues downtown. The minister of municipal affairs, Ric McIver, was formerly a city of Calgary councillor, and it’s pretty obvious that he has beef with today’s council. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Calgary’s last urbanist darling mayor, Naheed Nenshi, is now heading up the provincial left-leaning opposition party.
The results are disappointing but not unexpected, given the huge imbalance of power: Alberta (and most of Canada, for that matter) has no devolved home-rule or city charters, so the province can act with impunity, meddling in local affairs and being capricious with the purse strings. The colonial history of Canada runs deep in how it is ruled today.
Somewhere around here, we see a first: a liquor store, and we reflect that until now, there have been no liquor stores or cannabis stores in the Plus 15, in stark contrast with the rest of Calgary, where deregulation has meant that it’s very easier to get your vice of choice. It is also an expensive, upmarket one, carrying expensive whiskies and rare wines. No single cans or malt liquor in sight.
The last sections, around the arts centre and Glenbow Museum (still under renovation) aren’t connected to the main western cluster of the network, so we’re outside for a few minutes. It’s nice to get some fresh air, despite the cold, and to see the sun.
We dart back inside at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, housed in the Calgary Public Building. It’s a 1930s building with a nice classical facade and sadly almost always overlooked. Luke knows his way around these parts pretty well; we go back upstairs, and walk through the most interesting hallways on the entire network. Since the Plus 15 passes through the arts centre, its fittingly has art on display. There are small galleries to the side, a sound exhibit, and windows peering into the theatre carpentry shops–a far cry from the sterile stone and glass corridors elsewhere.
Nearing journey’s end at City Hall, there are floor markings easily missed that are a relic of an earlier era of the Plus 15: some dots hinting at a path to follow. These dots, and the guiding signs were designed by Lance Wyman, an American graphic designer whose other works include the Mexico ’68 Olympics logo, and the map of the Washington DC Metro. From Wyman’s website, it appears he was inspired by dot patterns on Indigenous tipis, something I was completely unaware of.
The city has decided to scrap Wyman’s system, in favour of a vague “better overall experience”. Perhaps the long time Plus 15 logo–a person in a cowboy hat stomping on the dots from the tipi–was a little too real. They hired a large multinational firm to redesign the signs, with predictable results: the new proposed system sucks. The signs are incredibly generic, and will look outdated very quickly when trends change. They wouldn’t look out of place in Shanghai or in London, and that is exactly their downfall. Quite simply, the nature of the maze-like system of half shopping mall and half airport corridor, can’t be improved by just changing the signs. Owners of the building have no incentive to make it easier to pass through the building; they want the opposite, for you to linger, and spend more (unless you don’t have money, in which case, they want you to leave without a fuss). The similar PATH system (all underground, though) in Toronto has similar navigational issues, and no amount of signs will help it, especially since the city caved to building owners.
Re-doing the signs is very much a do-nothing, feel-good pet project for someone higher up. It will have no impact on making the streets more lively or bringing people off the street. The glaring issue with street life in urban Calgary is that (at least during lunchtime, on weekdays) there are two separate cities co-existing on top of each other: one rich, and one poor.
British author China Miéville’s novel The City and The City describes two cities–one rich, one poor–which occupy the same physical space. Inhabitants are taught from a young age to “unsee” the people and buildings in the other one, even if they are inches away. In the same way, the Plus 15 makes us “unsee” that other city that we do not belong to. The differences in public safety are noticeable: the lower city is patrolled by city cops and transit officers, while the elevated city has its immaculately dressed private security armies. The system has become a tool of oppression through economic segregation and marginalization of people who aren’t dressed in the “correct” corporate outfits.
Climate change and milder winters will quickly make the system obsolete. The question is, when it’s time to take the bridges apart, are the denizens of the Plus 15 ready to come back down to the world they left behind?
- That, and conquest. ↩︎
- Removing plants seems to be a nationwide trend. Markville Place in Markham, Ont., a literal shopping centre, once had a plant-lined “river” flowing along the lower level. It didn’t survive the mall’s renovation in the early 2010s. See here. ↩︎
- The gorgeous building is more like a museum today. Actual reading and research does go on, but the lending library is cater-corner. ↩︎
- New York City has a horrible housing crisis, but has one thing going for it: A “right to shelter” state law on the books, meaning in theory that no one needs to sleep outside. You definitely do see homeless people, but comparatively little evidence of people living in encampments, say. In 2025, skyrocketing rents are straining the system. ↩︎
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