[GullFoss]

City isn't dead.... good restaurants are super busy a lot of nights. Lots more daytime choices - yoga, spin, cross fit, escape rooms, etc. Food scene is solid. So I can only assume you are referring to clubs and drinking establishments.

For drinking establishments we now have beer halls and cocktail lounges and shisha lounges...all of which were super limited more than 10 years ago. So more options there.

For the night clubs scene...youre right. It has been steadily getting worse since at least the mid-90s. But why? I bet three things:

1) Technology. In the 80s and 90s, we listened to the radio for new hits, the top 100. We went to underground clubs to find new sounds and interact with those sharing your interest in music. There was no better way. Now I can find new music and interact with fans better on online forums and applications such as SoundCloud. So technology has made this better, cheaper, and easier.

2) Better alternatives for night life. Beer halls accomplish a lot of what a club does. Can get wasted with buddies, flirt with ladies, hang out. But as a bonus - you can actually talk with people at a beer hall! Other alternatives to a night out of clubbing include cocktail bars and shisha lounges.

3) Better live music experiences elsewhere. Go to a super club (say one of dj mags top 100 in the world), or a music festival like Coachella, edc, Osheaga, shambhala, etc. Then compare it to a run-of-the-mill night club. It just can't compete. I'd rather do shambhala once a year than do 26 night of clubbing in a year.

4) cultural shift has reduce demand for certain types of dance clubs. Remember when guys use to just start bumping and grinding with girls at the club...that doesn't really fly for a large segment of the world today. #metoo

The eventual solution is fewer clubs overall...where lots of old ####ty clubs are replaced with fewer higher quality, higher capacity, purpose built clubs that make for a better night out and can use scalr of enterance fees to get awesome live acts. Better sound, better lights, better ventilation, better bar set up, better djs. But at the same time, the club night still has to be genre focused. So instead of 5 electronic focused dance club with capacity of 500, you need 1 club at 2500. Think Hakesan or The problem for Calgary is that back in the day it could only support one electronic dance club. So even if the city is twice as large now, it lacks critical mass more now than it did in the past.