Essay 4: The Necessary City

Somewhere in your city, there's an eight-year-old who will grow up to decide whether it's the kind of place worth staying in. Not consciously. Not yet. But the city she experiences over the next decade—its streets, its schools, its parks, its libraries, its cultural spaces—will quietly shape that answer long before she's old enough to ask the question.

We build cities for her. Or we should.

Every few years, cities sit down to review their budget and to decide what kind of city they can afford to be. Those conversations are always full of the same pressures: competing priorities, finite resources, and the instinct to protect what seems essential while deferring what seems optional. Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that the most consequential decision a city makes isn’t about what it funds. It’s about what it decides counts as necessary.

Roads, transit, water, schools. We don't debate whether these things belong in a city. We debate how much, and where, and when. But the category itself is settled. We've decided these things are necessary, and that decision doesn't get relitigated every few years. Culture doesn’t usually get that far. It's still fighting to be taken seriously as a category, let alone funded as one.

Culture rarely gets that treatment. Instead, we get blessed with another word: beautiful.

Beautiful is how we talk about culture when we've already decided it's optional. Nobody calls a bridge beautiful before they ask whether it's load-bearing. We reserve that language for the things we've quietly agreed a city could survive without. And once something is filed under "nice to have," it becomes the first line item people are willing to cut, the first grant people are willing to defer, the first building people are willing to let wait one more year.

I think that's a category error. And I think cities are making it constantly, without quite realizing it.

Culture is infrastructure too. Not because a concert hall moves water or carries traffic, but because it does the thing infrastructure is actually for: it lets a community function as one. It's where strangers learn to sit next to each other. It's where a city tells itself who it is, and who it's still becoming. It's where that eight-year-old experiences something that quietly expands what she believes is possible for her life. You cannot build a road that does that. You can only build a space within which people gather.

But let me be clear: that space only functions as infrastructure if everyone feels it was built for them.

Infrastructure thinking has to mean all of it. The landmark buildings and the grassroots companies. The institutions with donor walls and the ones operating out of community halls. Smaller arts organizations in cities everywhere have faced real pressure lately, and it would be easy to read that as a zero-sum story. Big projects winning while small ones lose. It isn't. They don't compete for the same kind of resources or attention. What they share is a city that has decided culture counts. Remove that conviction, and everything suffers.

We've never been great at making that case in the language that actually moves resources. We talk about culture in the language of enrichment (nourishing, inspiring, uplifting), when we should be talking about it alongside belonging, retention, education, economic vitality, and public health. The plain fact is that a city where people gather, create, and see themselves reflected is a city people choose to stay in, invest in, and raise their kids in. That's not an arts argument. That's a city-building argument.

Let me be clear again: this isn’t me as the CEO of Werklund Centre making a lonely argument for funding, either. Across our city, organizations are reimagining themselves and their impact, securing once-in-a-generation funding to transform the communities they were designed to serve. That kind of convergence doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the belief was already there, waiting for someone to act on it.

Some cities are further along than others. I can only speak to the one I know best right now.

Calgary has made record investments in arts and culture over the last decade. In recent years, no Canadian city has bet more boldly on culture as a driver of civic life. Other cities have noticed. Some with admiration, some waiting to see whether it holds. This budget cycle will answer the question those investments left open: was this a long-term strategic priority, one Calgary intends to build on for a generation? Or was it a short-lived trend, shaped by a particular moment and a particular set of council members, that the next budget quietly walks back?

It wouldn't be the first time Calgary faced that question. In 1969, three women—Martha Cohen, Vera Swanson, and Sandra LeBlanc—sat around a kitchen table and decided the city needed a world-class performing arts centre. It took sixteen years, $102 million, and a city council vote that nearly went the other way. When Werklund Centre opened in 1985 as the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts, Calgary was a third of the size it is today. Nobody waited until the city was big enough to deserve it. They built the space, and the city grew into it.

That instinct—to build for the city you intend to become, not just the city you currently are—is available to every city. It doesn't require a particular budget, or a particular council, or a particular moment in history. It requires a decision about what counts as necessary. Calgary has made that decision before. This budget cycle will reveal whether it still believes it.

None of this is an argument against calling culture beautiful. It is beautiful. It's an argument against letting beautiful be the only case we make. Because beauty, on its own, is deemed optional. Necessity is not.

That eight-year-old is growing up in a city that is, right now, deciding what kind of place it intends to be. Our job, as people who care about the future of the places we share, is to make sure the answer is a city she chooses to stay in. To make sure the spaces we build are never treated as negotiable. Not this budget cycle. Not the next one.

So that by the time she's old enough to make that choice, the city has already made it for her.