What prompted me to write is David’s comments in regards to the city “maturing”.

There is nothing wrong with keeping ones roots and bringing them into the present. The “cowboy” image represents more than the Stampede & parties that happen once a year.

This image represents hard work, going the extra mile, openness, hospitality & friendship; embracing ones fellow man & volunteerism – all which were so excellently displayed during the 1988 Olympics & is still one of the best & most successful in all Olympic history.

Having lived in this city all my life, I can tell you how hard it is to feel the “growing pains” which brings all too many that don’t embrace these same values. What once was a friendly open city, where all were greeted with a smile & there was no fear in walking the streets is now quickly becoming a city where thugs gang up to beat someone for just sleeping on the streets. There are fewer smiles, cages around parking lots & discourtious driver all angry to get nowhere FAST & think nothing of bullying the slower driver. We used to have patience for one another- now not so much.

So I think I’ll hang onto the old “roots” in hopes that maybe we’ll come to our senses and realize that all that is “new” is not necessarily “better”. Ind you will still see me give a friendly smile & though i’ll use “hello,” instead of a “howdy” to welcome you to this city, it will all be in the spirit of what I believe Calgary is REALLY all about.

Of course the city is no longer built on a beef foundation – it’s now mostly financed by oil and gas development, an industry that happens to admire the western ethos and is less comfortable with its own itinerant workers (roughnecks, who mostly live elsewhere in Alberta anyway).

Long may the cowboy ride.

Easier said than done. These kinds of “provincial” images can be the hardest for a city to shake. Perhaps the closest comparison I can make to “cowboy” Calgary is not New Orleans, but Munich. Munich is the technology capital of Germany, not to mention a major immigrant destination, but it will forever be known to tourists (usually of the Anglo-Saxon variety) as the beer-drinking, lederhosen-wearing, tuba-playing Oktoberfest city.

Chicago is sitting on something of an image problem right now, as it prepares for a 2016 Olympic bid. It is competing with Los Angeles for the bid, and we all know how the image of Los Angeles (to everyone except urban enthusiasts like ourselves and the people who actually live there) is limited to palm trees, movie stars, and California sunshine. Chicago, on the other hand, is a far more underrated city, without such cut-and-dry images to project to the world. Now, sure, we Chicagoans see the legendary downtown architecture, the most innovative restaurants in the US, the extensive nightlife culture, the small-theater scene, the summer festivals, and the intimate relationship with our lake, but the world sees humorless businessmen, the Union Stockyards (which haven’t existed since 1971), the gangster crime of the Prohibition era, overweight sausage-eating men obsessed with losing sports teams, unbearable snowstorms, and a strange concoction we have the audacity to call “pizza.” To be sure, I’ve been living here for five years and I’ve seen the city grow like never before: the number of independent shops has tripled, there’s a downtown building boom, several new architectural showpieces have been completed or are under construction (including Millennium Park, whose “Cloud Gate” sculpture has become one of the top 5 most photographed sculptures in the world), and neighborhoods throughout the city are diversifying, not segregating (as had been the trend for the previous 30 years). However, it’s going to take a long time for the world to catch up with all of this.

I’m interested to see how long the cowboy image will hold up as the statistics show that the city is becoming extremely multi-cultural (even more so than Montreal when looking at the percentage of foreign born population). For some reason Canadian multi-culturalism combined with ‘cowboy culture’ just doesn’t seem authentic. I’m looking forward to seeing Calgary mature as a city and maybe outgrow this Wild West image.

Kind of reminds me of New Orleans’s image as a French city, which in reality is not true, if you define a French city as a place where French is the dominant language of business or daily activities, or even just widely spoken. History is one thing but modern reality is another. In my opinion Calgary and New Orleans get an A+ for branding but are somewhat lacking in authenticity.