Panel 3
Ghost Town or Gathering Place?: Reimagining Downtown Through Public Will
August 06, 2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
While major investments promise to “revitalize” Calgary’s downtown, the heart of the city still struggles with vacancy, unease, and a disappearing sense of civic life. But what if revitalization isn’t about development, but about desire? What do people actually want from their downtowns and why aren’t they showing up? This panel asks artists, architects, urban planners, and grassroots organizers: how do we build a city centre that isn’t just safe, but magnetic?
From radical placemaking projects to informal social infrastructures, we’ll explore how design, public art, and programming can address both the psychic and physical emptiness of the core. We’ll also look at how fear narratives, surveillance architecture, and aesthetic cleansing have historically pushed certain bodies out of downtowns. This panel challenges dominant narratives of “progress” and instead considers who gets to imagine, inhabit, and transform downtown into a space for collective joy, memory, and care.
This event has completed.
Speakers:
Courtney Walcott
Jennifer Thompson
Fabiola MacIntyre
Moderator(s):
Bethel Afework