A New Land Use Bylaw for the City of Calgary, Alberta
Nelson Medeiros
Provincial legislation that enabled Alberta municipalities to enact zoning bylaws was introduced in the 1929 Town Planning Act. Over time, the powers of municipalities in Alberta to regulate land use have morphed and evolved and have also included experiments with development control models. With some exceptions, the zoningg system today is conceptually similar to the model first proposed in 1929. Albertaas land use regulatory framework was last reviewed in 1977. Since that time Alberta has grown significantly and larger cities, such as Calgary, have experiencing challenges in managing land use in a large city. With its roots in the protection of private property interests, the zoning framework has proven to be difficult with respect to addressing urban problems in large urban areas where a myriad of social, environmental, economic and political matters are linked to land use. In 2003, The City of Calgary embarked on a major project to review and rewrite Calgaryys 1980 land use bylaw. The objective of the project was to accommodate contemporary planning theory by providing a tool to implement fine‐grained land use policy in response to the rapid growth in Calgary since 1980.The result was a land use bylaw that pushes the boundary of traditional land use regulation in Alberta by introducing new types of development controls, such as contextual building setback standards and maximum use sizes, in recognition that zoning must now achieve more than simple use classification if it still to be relevant as a land use management tool.
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