Quote:
Originally Posted by getbak
Or any other major city in North America, for that matter.
Calgary is actually the city that's different because we tend to swallow up all of the surrounding bedroom communities (Bowness, Forest Lawn, Ogden, Midnapore, etc were all separate towns at one point).
Most major metro areas are a collection of a bunch of smaller cities wedged together. This is why when you look at a list of cities and their populations, Calgary is usually pretty high on the list, ahead of a lot of cities that are much larger.
According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_population, Calgary would be the 10th largest city in the US, ahead of San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, and Boston. When the entire "Metro" area is considered, all of those cities dwarf Calgary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_o...tistical_Areas.
So, how do these other large cities deal with the surrounding "leech" cities? Detroit and Buffalo have already been given as examples of cities where the core of the city has basically dried up and almost all of the population (and wealth) lives outside of the actual city, but other cities seem to do relatively well for themselves. |
I've only been to Buffalo once, and when I wasn't writing an exam I was blackout drunk after writing an exam, so I can't really say much about it, but I did live in Michigan for over 3 years and spent a decent amount of time in Detroit. The big difference between Detroit and Calgary is that the decay of central Detroit has more to do with the collpase of industry than it does any over usage of city infrastructure by suburban residents. There's simply no economy in Detroit, and hasn't been for years. All of the jobs moved to the suburbs along with the people, save for a few office buildings and scattered smaller scale things. Suburban office parks are pretty common, and outside of the Ren Center the majority of large employers seem to be outside of the city. Commuting from downtown Detroit to Royal Oak, a young professional community about halfway between the city and the real heart of the Oakland county suburbs, is actually pretty easy. The traffic isn't overly heavy on the interstate even at rush hour. However, commuting to other parts of the suburbs can be a massive pain at peak hours as everyone seems to be moving from one suburb to another, as opposed to commuting from the city center. I don't know the history of Detroit well enough to really say whether it was a case of jobs following people out (I suspect it was) or the inverse, but I don't think there's much relationship to any type of 'leeching' by suburban communities.