Challenge

The town of Okotoks can be described as bedroom community, where most inhabitants live in town but work elsewhere. Because the majority of people commute to work every day, car dependency is at an all-time high. The town’s infrastructure is mainly based around the car as an outcome of the American car industry, clustered layout of services and destinations combined with car centric mindsets. This made using the car very appealing for the inhabitants of Okotoks and resulted in wide streets and big parking lots. Car centric mindsets have completely taken over how infrastructure is made and who it appeals to. The town is also very homogeneous, in which the suburb lifestyle of isolated living has taken over. This is an ever-growing issue not just in Okotoks but in suburbs all over North America. (Figure 3)

There is a dire need of developed land, necessary hosing to grow alongside the population of the town. Now more than ever the sustainability of urban area and cities must deal with big challenges. Not only problems relating to rapid urbanization, congestion, pollution, health issues, other forms of environmental threats, lack of sustainable resources but much more problems we can’t even image. Although Okotoks isn’t that big of a city, it will be bigger in the future and so it will have to deal with some of a city’s challenges. So how can we tackle this?

Figure 3: Okotoks’ urban sprawl