What I see Nenshi doing is embracing the concepts of new urbanism which, to me at least, rejects alot of the 90s planning mantra which lead to green belts and restrictive greenfield policies.
I'm not expert on new urbanism but I do follow alot of them on twitter. It's a fascinating field on inquiry and something I very much encourage any one to look into. One of the basic tenets of the field is that urbanism, more density, more walkability or multi-modal transport, organized around a grid layout where vehicles do not dominate are almost infinitely more desirable as places to live for most of the population.
To that extent new urbanism doesn't concern itself with greenbelts, it's more focused on revitalizing failed suburban concepts and city designs. Nenshi's effort to bring in some new urbanist principles have made this city alot better both in infills and the core and to new developments.
Captain Yooh's shot across the bow is bringing up pretty much a lost argument (restricted greenfield development) to an irrelevant context (it's not happening here in Calgary anyways). What I do see is a general push back against traditional suburban community design and a preservation of that business model that enriches developers, consigns people to traffic jams and vehicle dependency, impoverishes local governments, and ruins our air quality and environment.
You could say Nenshi is visionary when he realizes this is the future and that future generations will not want to live in suburbs. This could be the great hedge that Calgary makes to continue to be a desirable place to live and work for a whole new generation of people that may otherwise spurn Calgary's built form and move on elsewhere.
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