Calgary's Muslim Mayor Goes Green
My friend Chrystia Freeland at the International Herald Tribune has a profile up today of Calgary's new mayor. It turns out he is a Muslim revolutionary: revolutionary for Calgary, at least, in that he's trying to persuade the people of Canada's oil capital to ride public transit more often.
When Mr. Nenshi earned his upset victory last October, the first flutter of outside enthusiasm was around the fact that an Ismaili Muslim son of South Asian immigrants who came to Canada from Tanzania had been chosen to lead the capital of Canada’s conservative heartland.
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Mr. Nenshi is an evangelist of high-density living and of public transit — at least one member of his team doesn’t even own a car.
These are revolutionary notions in Calgary, a city that is spread across as many acres as New York, but houses just a tenth as many people. Calgarians love their cars — that’s how more than two-thirds of them get to work — and they are bullish on the oil industry that not only puts gas in their tanks but also is the lifeblood of their economy.
Yet these same Calgarians embraced a geeky, Harvard-educated former McKinsey consultant, who keeps magazines like IFR and The Banker in his foyer and loves technocratic solutions to urban problems like “spot intensification” and containing sprawl by charging developers more to build on the outskirts of town.
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“One of the things we discussed is that a lot of people live online,” Mr. Nenshi said, including the 600,000 Calgarians, in a city of 1.3 million, who are on Facebook. “Social media was the tool that enabled our philosophy.”
When he first moved back home to Calgary after professional stints in Toronto and New York, Mr. Nenshi said, his East Coast friends were baffled: “The New York people and the Harvard people were like ‘Naheed, why are you in the middle of the Canadian prairies?”’
But he thinks the “Four Seasons hotel tribe” of globe-trotting superelites may be missing the fact that they inhabit a world that is rather provincial itself.
“When I lived in Toronto and New York — big, big cities — how come I saw the same people all the time?” Mr. Nenshi asked. “This so-called borderless world has become more insular. The number of times I hear from people — ‘Oh, I ran into so and so on the flight from J.F.K. to Dubai.’
“I am very happy to let the Four Seasons tribe do their work on global prosperity,” Mr. Nenshi said. “I’ll do my work on local prosperity.”
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