Brian Collinson

Recently I returned home to Oakville after a trip to Calgary, Alberta on a personal matter.  I always find these trips to Southern Alberta interesting, because of the insights they provide into the nature of suburbia and the suburban psyche.

Because of the current oil boom, Calgary is growing at quite a rate, continuously expanding outward.  It's a real case study of the nature of suburbia and exurbia, and its expansion.

The town of Cochrane, Alberta is located about 22 km (approx. 12 miles) to the west of Calgary — less than 20 minutes drive from the northwest edge of the city.  In my opinion, Cochrane is a place blessed with incredibly beautiful geography.  To stand at the top of Big Hill on the edge of Cochrane, and to look down at the town in the Bow River valley is surely to witness one of the most incredible vistas afforded by any town in Canada.

If you want to encounter the historical Canadian West, Cochrane has impeccable credentials.  The real west of the ranchers and pioneers — that's what Cochrane is all about.

When I was a kid growing up in Calgary, when families wanted a Sunday drive they drove out to Cochrane.  Maybe you stopped at Eamon's Super Service station on the 1A Highway for coffee.  Or maybe you just kept going right into Cochrane, and you went to MacKay's for some of the very best ice cream cones around.

Well, that was then.  Today, Eamon's is an abandoned building, a victim of the relentlessly expanding subdivisions of Calgary.  And Calgary continues its explosive, inexorable growth to the west, inching ever further out the 1A highway towards the town of Cochrane.

According to the 2002 census, Cochrane is the fastest-growing town in Canada.  In 2006, Cochrane had a population of 13,760.  In 30 years time, it's estimated that Cochrane will have 60,000 people — a completely mind-boggling amount of growth for a place that was little more than a hamlet, not so long ago.

This is what makes Cochrane such a study in suburban psychology: it is a prime example of a paradox that is at the heart of the suburban psyche.  I know that people in Cochrane would wince to hear me use the word "suburban" in the same sentence as Cochrane, but I think that it is warranted.  People who move to Cochrane are attracted to the physical beauty of the town, and to its remove from the hectic pace of life in the nearby big city.  They want to get away, to be nearer to the country and nature.  But, they inevitably bring the city with them.

If Cochrane does reach 60,000 people, it is not going to be the same town.  Many of those aspects of life in an authentically western small town that were so attractive to people seeking to get away from an increasingly hectic Calgary could very easily be gone.  That is something that nobody wants.  Yet, it could well be an unconscious by-product of Cochrane's growth.

This brings us up against some very fundamental questions that we are going to have to face about our suburban and exurban development.  How can "edge cities" develop in such a way that the natural environment that everybody so urgently wants to live in is sustained?  In many cases, North America has failed miserably at this in the past.  If we're going to answer the question of growth in a positive way in our present time, there is going to have to be real change in the way that we as North Americans "do suburbia".  And if we really look at these issues as they impact our personal lives, it is going to bring us into contact with some big questions about our relationship to nature, in the sense of both our own inner nature, and also, the natural world of which we are a part.