What is a Calgary suburb? It's about facts and feel

The suburbs. For some, nothing but car culture, urban sprawland small lawns. For others, nothing's better; an affordable place to raise a family, run the dogs and still be close to work.

CBC Calgary has launched a new contest to declare our best suburb, after suburban homes outperformed the inner city in terms of price appreciationin the latest round of property assessments.

It's meant to be a bit of fun, fuelled entirely by online voting. As the contest moves along, we'll roll out stories about individual communities and themes that emerge.

Just what is a suburb in this city is not as simple as looking at a map or a list of communities.

So what qualifies asa suburb?

The first challenge is Calgary does not have a single, true suburb inside its limits. It's strictly one city with one government, despite swallowing up communities like Bowness and Forest Lawn over the decades.

What it does have is an inner city, according to the municipal development plan, which is anything built before the 1950s. Then, from the 1950s into the 1990s, "established neighbourhoods" were built.

For Francisco Alaniz Uribe with the University of Calgary's Urban Lab, thinking of the city as a series of rings is a helpful start.

"Pretty much the last couple of rings at the very edge of the city, that's what I have in mind," he said.

"I know that's how the city has grown, more or less concentric,and then the rings that expand out. So the newer, let's say, the more recent set of rings of development, will be the suburbs."

In those outskirts is where Mayor Jyoti Gondek found herself when she moved to Calgary. The affordability of Coventry Hills and Panorama Hills made a lot of sense after coming from Winnipeg.

"I was a councillor for four years for a periphery ward, and I think we tend to look down our nose at suburbs and we tend to make some pretty judgy statements about who lives there and why they live there," she said.

And while Gondek points out there is really just one Calgary, there's something about the sprawl in the 1970s and 1980s that stands out.

"We started creating communities that focused less on mobility by any other means than the vehicle. So we built all these residential communities, the suburbs, where you really needed a car to get to so many things," she said.

Suburbs a reflection of city's growth

That's also when Calgary's population started to quickly grow, adding nearly 30,000 people between 1979 and 1980 as people flooded into the city during one of the province'soil booms. That's whendevelopment ramped up on the northern edges of Nose Hill Park and south of Fish Creek, too.

Then there are communities that were annexed, like Bowness. We've excluded those from the contestbut included Midnapore, which was ahamlet, mainly because it wasn't built out until the late 1970s. We're also generally sticking with communities that weren't fully developed until after the mid-1970s.

According to historian Harry Sanders, there's a case for that as a cutoff point, even though he also believes the city technically has no true suburbs.

"I [take]the man from Mars approach:if somebody from Mars showed up and took a look at Calgary and had to make their own independent conclusions," he said. "You've got a core that leads up to a certain time. So, yeah, I think that's totally justifiable [as a cutoff point]."

'It's going to be really great'

It's not just about dates and distance from the core for some Calgarians, but also about feel, notes Sanders.

"You go back in time, and somebody who lived in Altadore in 1912 is going to say, 'Well, obviously, Altadore is a suburb, you know?' But now we say my instinct is no, that's the inner city."

For newer Calgarians, like Carly Deibler, a 35-year-old neighbourhood like Signal Hill feels pretty established. She moved from Denver, Colo.,nearly four years ago, first landing in Tuscany and now settling in Springbank Hill.

Deibler looks forward to her community developing a bit more of a complete feel as it grows into its area structure plan.

"It's going to be really great. For today, it is a little quiet and there's not really much going on. So, you know, there's pros and cons to that," she said.

If you live in what we're calling a suburb, voting takes place each week here. Bookmark the page, and get ready for prizes rolling out over the next six weeks.