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“I’ll tell you a story,” says Druh Farrell, a Calgary city councillor. Before she was elected, she would often walk from her house in Hillhurst, one of Calgary’s oldest neighbourhoods, across the Bow River to City Hall. It’s a 45-minute trek.

“I didn’t see a single person,’’ she said. ‘‘The streets were empty.”

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The city’s downtown has long been a place residents drive through, on their way home from work to a house in the suburbs. A series of factors are conspiring to change that: oil-fuelled growth has ended the city’s easy 20-minute cross-town commute; city hall is sitting on billions in debt, largely accrued to support that expansive growth; and an increasingly cosmopolitan workforce is demanding novelties like dedicated bicycle tracks, and access to restaurants and galleries that strip malls generally can’t support.

But as Mayor Naheed Nenshi and his allies try to change Calgary — exemplified by East Village, a government-led experiment in gentrification that will be home to 11,000 residents by 2027 — they are coming up against traditionalists who like the freedom and space of the suburbs (and the developers who build those suburbs). Perhaps more importantly, they are facing down a Calgary cultural attitude that downtown is not where people are supposed to live.