OFFICE retrofit study

City of Calgary Downtown Revitalization Plan - Office Retrofit Study

During the last several decades, the Downtown Core of Calgary was designed to support a predominantly office-centric culture, as a “central business district”. The decline of oil and gas activity in the city has left over 30% of the downtown vacant. This has created a massive loss of not only tax generation, but also left the streets and pedestrian realm devoid of public activity and interest.

We undertook a study to understand what types of programming would re-activate the downtown core, and what physical augmentations would assist in revitalizing the downtown district. Simultaneously, the City of Calgary approved a plan with funding to encourage building owners to investigate refurbishing their disused buildings.

This study revealed a number of findings:

• Buildings do not need a complete floor-to-roof retrofit to contribute to activating the street

• There can be multiple levels of enhancements to suite the level of investment and public benefit

• Not all buildings are compatible with a complete office to residential conversion

• There are several buildings in the downtown core with key street-level interfaces connected to existing pedestrian and multi-model nodes. These would be prime opportunities for enhancing the street activity

• Encouraging programming that is active outside daytime hours would contribute to vibrancy

• Financial incentives would be required to convince large REIT’s to make renovations for most scales