Clareview

I grew up in a district of Edmonton called Clareview. A very interesting place to have grown up, as it turns out, looking at this area from an urban planning and strong towns lens. Outside of the region of mature neighbourhoods, the area might have been considered a suburb at the time my family moved there. At the same time, it's also not that classic "built all at once" green field development. It's adjacent to Olde Towne Beverly, to the South, and the old town of North Edmonton to the west. Much of the area was built out as residential in the housing boom of the 70s, but many areas were left vacant or undeveloped when the boom collapsed. The area I moved into was developed later, during the '90s and '00s. The entire area was owned by one developer, Reidbuilt, and so there was no rush to sell the lots, so the area was filled in very slowly over the course of about two decades. Other regions left vacant after the housing boom of the 70s were similarly developed in a piecemeal fashion over the course of decades until Clareview was filled out. As a result, in Clareview, you can find a mix of housing types, and a mix of ages of development, even though the area would not be considered classically urban, and is certainly not a core neighbourhood. Though this happened accidentally, I think it makes an interesting case study for how diversity of residential types, buildings of different ages, and so on might make a suburban region more resilient. Could Clareview develop into a strong community that redevelops incrementally, since it wasn't developed all at once? Does this make it less fragile than suburbs that were built up all at once?

Councillor Paquette advocated strongly for Clareview to be one of the 15 minutes communities, and to my casual eye at least, it appears to be functioning that way now, having filled out with amenities and dense transit oriented development around the LRT station. More recently (last year) bike lanes are coming to Clareview as well, on Hermitage road and 40th street. This doubles as traffic calming on Hermitage road, which has always been notorious for frequent incidents of drivers going well over the posted limit of 50km/h.