I was delighted to see Avenue Magazine recognize Eau Claire, in its latest issue, as one of Calgary’s “top ten” neighbourhoods. Of course, for those of us who live here, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Residents of Eau Claire know well how our community combines easy access to the best of downtown with all the attractions of the river and one of the city’s best park systems.
Among other factors, Avenue singled out our level of community engagement, easy walkability, and access to transit as highlights. But we should also score highly in terms of other criteria they use, including access to parks and pathways, and lots of restaurants, cafés and bars—if not right in Eau Claire then certainly within easy walking distance. Of course, our parks situation just saw a major improvement with the completing of the recent major upgrades to the west Eau Claire park and the river pathway system.
Some of these are attributes of other centre city communities as well and we see both Beltline and the Commercial Core also ranked in the top ten—just demonstrating that downtown, urban living is high-quality living. That confirms the value of the vision that your community association works to promote for Eau Claire – as a distinct urban residential community. There will always be economic pressure to try to develop our neighbourhood as a growth area for the downtown office core. Your association will however continue to remind the city that this is also a place where people live and want to live and needs to grow as such.
Also striking in Avenue’s review was how relatively small we are as a community, with a population of only about 1500 compared with other downtown communities like Beltline (approximately 23,200) and the downtown core (about 8500). This just demonstrates how much harder it is – and important – for us to promote a distinct identity for Eau Claire.
September marks the start of another 10 months of activity for your ECCA Board. As the city contemplates a review of the overall downtown plan, advancing that identity and vision will continue to be priorities for us.
Jim Hughes
President, ECCA
Calgary is Canada’s most Liveable City (The Economist)
Eau Claire is a Top-ten neighbourhood
(Avenue)
Eau Claire is 4th in walkability but we border #1, Chinatown, and #2, Downtown Commercial Core to create a large, interesting, walkable area that covers Prince’s Island, Riverfront and the most interesting architecture in the city.
