Blatchford, Edmonton

Blatchford is a carbon neutral community being developed on the site of the decommissioned City Centre Airport in Edmonton, Alberta. With an area of 2.17 km2, Blatchford is approximately the size of Edmonton's downtown core. It is planned to be a medium-high density neighbourhood which will rely on renewable energy and a district energy sharing system, contain two LRT stations, and be carbon neutral.

Development of Blatchford is occurring in phases; phase one, which is currently under construction, will see 250 townhouses and mixed-use buildings constructed on six parcels of land. Blatchford is expected to take 20 years to fully develop, and contain approximately 30,000 residents once it is complete.

The first residents moved into Blatchford in late 2020, approximately five years after ground was broken and four years after the first homes were originally expected to be occupied;, eight years after the first residents had been expected, 84 "homes" are occupied – including basement suites and garage suites.

History
A plan to develop a sustainable community on the grounds of the City Centre Airport was first approved by city council in 2009, when it voted to close the airport in phases. The community was named Blatchford in 2012, to honour Kenneth Blatchford, who helped to establish Blatchford Field (later the City Centre Airport) in 1926, when he was Mayor of Edmonton.

In 2011, Edmonton awarded a contract to architects Perkins + Will to design the community. However, the city scaled back the resulting plan when council gave it final approval in 2014, citing loses to the city of $280 million under the original plans. Under the revised 2014 plan, a proposed pneumatic waste collection system, and a biomass and geothermal energy system, were dropped, while the original plan for geothermal and biomass energy was replaced by a district energy sharing system, to provide renewable heating and cooling to all buildings in Blatchford. Because of these changes, the city forecast it would make a profit of $45 million from developing Blatchford.

Ground was broken on the project in 2015, as the city began work on underground utilities. As the project's developer, the city was responsible for installing roads, pipes, wires, and other core infrastructure for the community. In 2016, when residents were originally expected to move in at the earliest, the city acknowledged that the project was facing delays; in-part due to uncertainty surrounding the type of district energy sharing system that would be implemented. That year, council voted to delay the project by a year to resolve questions surrounding the energy sharing system, and to lobby the provincial and federal governments for funding. In 2019, the first plots of land in phase one were sold to four developers, with the first developer breaking ground in September, 2019. Energy Centre One, the first phase of the district energy sharing system, went online in November, 2019. The first residents moved into Blatchford in November 2020.

Layout
Residential development is earmarked for Blatchford West (which includes phase one of the development), and Blatchford East. Commercial development will be concentrated in Blatchford Market, there will be a large central park called Blatchford Park, and a civic plaza will be constructed around Energy Centre One. Two LRT stops in Blatchford will open in 2024-2025, as part of the extension of the Metro Line: One stop will be between the community's town centre and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and the other stop will be located in northeast Blatchford.

Sustainability features
Blatchford features a district energy sharing system, which provides renewable heating and cooling to all buildings in the community. Phase one of the system, Energy Centre One, was constructed at a cost of $19.4 million. It went online in November 2019, and utilizes a geo-exchange field. The next phase will utilize sewer heat exchange using existing sewage infrastructure. Edmonton predicts that completing the next stages of the utility will require an investment of $93 million over a period of 10-15 years, and it will cost $660 million over a period of 50 years. In total, it is expected to reduce energy consumption in Blatchford by 15-20%.

Blatchford requires its builders to follow "green building codes", which it claims will make its homes up to 37% more energy efficient than what is required in provincial building codes. The community incorporates natural storm water retention methods, such as storm ponds and rain gardens, to take pressure off of its drainage infrastructure and improve water quality. Blatchford will also include urban agriculture such as community gardens and fruit tree orchards, and naturalized landscapes, including wetlands and bioswales.

Criticisms
Blatchford faced opposition even before it was approved; a group called "Envision Edmonton" organized numerous initiatives to lobby against the City Centre Airport's closure. Envision Edmonton, and other critics of the proposal, circulated a petition which garnered over 70,000 signatures, organized protests, and supported pro-airport candidates in Edmonton's 2010 municipal election. The petition, which would have forced a municipal plebiscite on the fate of the airport, was found to fall below the requirements because less than 10% of Edmontonians signed it, and it was not filed within 60 days of city council's decision to close the airport. The petition contained approximately 100,000 signatures when it was filed, but city staff determined that almost 30,000 of them did not belong to eligible electors.

Perkins + Will, the firm which created the original design for Blatchford, criticized the city for scaling back sustainable features when the project was approved in 2014. They argued that the plan was made inferior by removing features such as geothermal energy and pneumatic waste collection, and that it fell short of its original goals. They further criticized the city for forcing them to defend their work at such a late stage of the planning phase.

Blatchford has faced criticisms from local developers who fear that the local condo market cannot support such a major development. Councillor Tim Cartmell echoed these concerns at a 2019 council meeting, arguing that low demand at Blatchford meant that the community could not support an expensive district energy sharing system.