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In our contemporary zeal to develop a massive amount of land, we tend to site plan rather than build sites from our land forms. —William Rees Morrish, Civilizing Terrains: Mountains, Mounds and Mesas Canada, as a large and relatively unpopulated country, relies enormously on constructed infrastructure including transportation, power supply, water treatment, waste management, and communications systems. The engineering of these systems, along with associated processes of heavy resource extraction, is a quintessentially Canadian enterprise. Furthermore, infrastructure has been vital to the maintenance of cities and agricultural landscapes since the dawn of urbanization. Urban infrastructure has tended to be, until recently, enormously expensive and largely mono-functional, typically involving extensive channels and networks that flow materials from source to dump. As we move forward to develop more sustainable forms of urban infrastructure, we will be faced with complex design challenges and the need to innovate. Given the environmental impacts of contemporary
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cities, it is essential for us to create infrastructure that is better designed, more integrated, and multi-functional. Many cities today are pioneering in areas of urban infrastructure. For example, Edmonton is a world leader in solid waste management, recycling, and composting. According to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre’s website, it employs “North America’s largest collection of modern, sustainable waste-processing and research facilities.” Somewhat paradoxically, Calgary, a city infamous for its sprawl, is also a leader in a number of crucial areas, particularly parks development and wastewater management. As evidence of this, Calgary placed first in the world in the 2010 Mercer Quality of Living “Eco-City” Rankings, a section of the survey that measures water availability and potability, waste removal, sewage, air pollution, and traffic congestion. There are some advantages to low density and expanding cities like Calgary. The recently completed Ralph Klein Legacy Park (which includes the Environmental Education Centre) and the Shepard Wetlands project capture these conditions. The clients for the project were two City of Calgary departments: Water Resources and Parks. The City of Calgary has developed world-leading facilities and processes for treating sewage, and has more recently begun to aggressively address the treatment of stormwater runoff. According to Wolf Keller, Director of Water Resources, approximately 30 percent of Calgary’s runoff is being treated before being put into the Bow River, what he terms a 10/11canadian architect
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