CALGARY — When Alex Sarian decided to leave his position as acting executive director of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, he and his wife made a shortlist of “world-class” cities to which they would consider moving.

“Our first reaction was, ‘We’re moving to Tokyo, we’re moving to Barcelona, we’re moving to Mexico City’—all the places that we’d love to travel to,” he said.

Instead, the former head of one of the world’s preeminent performing-arts centres wound up in Calgary, a city better known for cowboys and black crude than theatre.

In January 2020, Arts Commons, Calgary’s public arts centre, named Sarian its new president and CEO, where he will oversee a planned $450-million expansion of the city’s performing arts infrastructure, adding 173,000 square feet of capacity, including three new theatres. The project is part of wider civic revitalization effort—one that some view as a crucial piece of the city’s push to attract talent, particularly for tech companies facing a persistent labour crunch.

That expansion comes alongside another $200-million downtown densification strategy, a (stalled) effort to build a new complex to house the NHL’s Calgary Flames and host events, and a significant overhaul of the city’s convention centre. 

The revitalization effort points to an aspect of talent retention and attraction that business owners widely understand, but that the broader public seldom talks about. Workers aren’t simply assets, but people who want to raise families and enjoy the amenities around them, Sarian said, so municipalities must accommodate those needs to maintain a steady workforce. The arts, he said, is just one piece of that strategy. 

“That’s how we’re going to be successful, not just as an organization, but as a city, is if we stop just being arts people, and start being seen as a vehicle through which Calgary becomes a better, more competitive city.” 

Calgary is already affordable, at least compared with other major Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver, where average home prices are more than double. But it suffers, perhaps, from outsiders perceiving it as a frigid destination with stiff conservative leanings and, like other second-tier cities, a comparative lack of amenities for arts, culture and cuisine. 

Some Alberta tech executives say the city could reverse that perception with the right investments. At a Calgary city hall meeting in April 2021, Hanif Joshaghani, co-founder and CEO of Symend, an automated-billing platform, said such considerations play a major role in where the company’s staff ultimately decides to live. 

“All of that stuff goes toward the quality of life, and quality of life then has a virtuous relationship … with our ability to attract and maintain people here,” he said. “Because if we bring them here, and they’re like, ‘There’s nothing to do here and I don’t enjoy my quality of life,’ they’ll just leave.”

A shortage of labour in Alberta is among the biggest challenges facing the province’s nascent tech sector, intensified by fast rates of growth that have led to a string of capital raisings and exits in recent years. The Calgary Chamber of Commerce recently warned about the dwindling population of 20- to 24-year-olds in the city, part of a broader exodus of young people in Alberta that is chipping away at its longstanding claim to youthfulness. 

Calgary’s revitalization efforts recall the doctrine of urban gentrification that the U.S. academic Robert Florida popularized in the early 2000s, which held that cities could attract newcomers and improve their economies by packing their downtown cores with a wider offering of cultural amenities and chic cafes. Municipal economic development offices around the globe began to absorb his thinking, spending piles of public dollars on new concert halls and networks of bike paths in an effort to lure the so-called “creative class.” 

Two decades on, the Florida doctrine has had a mixed legacy. While urban centres have in fact become more vibrant places to live in some cases, academics and economists like Steven Malanga have argued that the “basic economics behind [Florida’s] ideas don’t work,” and that they have actually served to widen the wealth gap.

Such criticism has led Florida himself to question his original thesis, saying in his 2017 book The Urban Crisis that gentrification had led to prosperity, but had left behind the lower class in doing so.

Still, it was Alberta’s growing tech scene that in part attracted Rohit Chokhani, the new artistic and executive director of Alberta Theatre Projects, to move to Calgary. (Alberta Theatre Projects is housed within Arts Commons venues.) Chokhani, an Indian immigrant who left Vancouver to take the position, said he was driven largely by career opportunities and a more affordable lifestyle. A close reader of immigration trends, he also saw more newcomers were favouring smaller cities over Canada’s major urban centres. 

“Yes, there are still people going to those areas, but it is significantly high coming into Alberta, coming into Calgary. And also within Canada, the young professional generation, a lot of them from the tech sector, are also going to Alberta and to Calgary. And I said, ‘You know what, what I’m thinking is not [unique].’” 

Chokhani expects to announce Alberta Theatre Projects’s new season sometime in June, after having completed the recent production of Kim’s Convenience, a play about South Korean immigrant small-business owners that debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival before it was adapted for television. 

Calgary’s city council has meanwhile taken on a number of big-ticket projects to increase density in the core, with a recent announcement to convert 414,000 square feet of vacant commercial office space to residential units in an effort to drive more people to the city’s desolate downtown. The conversion is part of the downtown “revitalization” plan that’s expected to cost $200 million. 

Still, those lofty plans have not been met with equal enthusiasm by the provincial United Conservative government, which allocated only $5 million to Calgary’s revitalization plan in its latest budget—a document that Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek dismissed as “an exercise in self-congratulation.” 

As for the Arts Commons’s $450-million expansion plans, the proposed economics that underpin the project are likely to alarm any resident with small-government inclinations. Sarian said that for every $1 invested in arts and culture, $4 is returned in revenues down the road—a proposition that might worry close observers of, say, the Canada Infrastructure Bank. 

But Sarian said he is looking to embrace all varieties of residents in his role as head of Arts Commons, even those who might be wary of large-scale public investments. Roughly half of the $450-million project has already been funded by the public sector, he said, and the remaining sums are expected to come from private donors.

Sarian acknowledged that arts and culture aren’t obvious boons in a city intensely focussed on traditional commerce. But that is mostly a matter of perception, he said, while in reality high-net-worth people are often major supporters of community building.

“Those are the individuals that tend to give to charities like education and health care, and arts and culture,” Sarian said. “And so I have come to my position with an appreciation for how much the arts culture needs that conservative mentality, because we depend so much on the private sector.”