Joy Olagoke

Look Up

I walk into a lot of things, because of this my parents have heard me wincing in agony throughout my life. My dad reminds me to look at the ground when I walk, but in doing so you can miss so much.

I'm not a Calgarian. One of the first buildings I visited outside of Uni and MEC was the St. Louis Hotel for a Design Matters event. It had this beautiful skylight in the middle and rain from earlier in the day left some droplets on the glass. I thought "wow," a frame for nature/ the seasons/ weather.

I love to be in nature, most of us do. To be inside and feel like you're outside, or to have subtle nods and views to it really impacts how I feel andfor how long I can stay in a space.

"Describe a memory tied to a place," I remember places that remind me of the outdoors, from the skylight at the St. Louis Hotel to the Yurt I stayed in, in Nelson.

IShrat Nawreen ShamMa

I have all happy memories tied to Bangladesh Airforce Officer’s Mess where we’d attend get to gathers ,birthday parties , weddings etc. My dad served in Bangladesh Airforce as a pilot for 27 years, therefore we got to visit this place very often in our childhood. It is located in the center of Dhaka Cantonment , in Bangladesh. With time there has been many changes and upgrades.They filled up the lake to have more land. But it still has the essence I felt as a child , of warmth and happiness. As I grow up and revisit it, the spaces seem smaller and smaller. Most probably because I myself have grown up. The food is excellent there and still tastes so good to this very day.

Marta Sensidoni

“Views of River Park Calgary in Lockdown”, 2020.

Sasha Simic

When I first moved to Calgary two years ago one of the first things I noticed was the high number of pedestrian overpasses throughout the city. As someone who does not own a car in one of Canada's most car-centric cities, I was constantly trying to navigate my way on foot across highways and heavily relying on these overpasses to get to my destination. 

One overpass in particular, over Shaganappi Trail, stands out in my memory. Although there is nothing particularly special about this overpass, it became a symbol to me of how inaccessible and alienating this city can make you feel if you do not own a car. When I reflect on how much time I've spent walking kilometres out of the way of my destination in order to safely cross Shaganappi Trail using this overpass, it makes me feel like these overpasses are just bandaids for the issue that pedestrians are an afterthought in this city. If anything, it strengthens my resolve to become an architect that can influence the design of communities and encourage design practices that honor pedestrians.

Emily Cargan

Free Play 

I moved into the world of early childhood education (ECE) two years ago and quickly became appalled by the coerciveness of the environment for young children, with ECE supervisors so anxious to avert risk and maintain safety that simple things were immediately vetoed, such as a child acting on their own initiative to get material from a classroom cupboard full only of child-friendly materials. Obviously, keeping children safe is a priority in any environment but a concern for safety should not act as an obstacle to each child’s developing their own essential and confident sense of autonomy and agency. 

The ECE world got me thinking about my own childhood. I grew up on a small farm in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The general environment was sectarian and restrictive - your life choices it seemed were already determined for you by virtue of your name, where you grew up, your religious background. And yet, within this environment, I had absolute freedom as a child to take risks, to test my own limits, to explore and to learn. My time was my own and was largely unsupervised. 

The drawing I share here is one I made at the age of nine from the vantage point of the mountain behind my parents’ house (the flat-roofed one) and my adjoining grandmother’s house. When I look at this drawing, I remember standing on a high mass of concrete blocks stationed in the field beside the garden at the front of the house. I could spend hours climbing to the top of these blocks, which were slightly lower than the barbed wire fence beside them. I would gleefully jump from the blocks over the wire and land in the adjacent garden. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. I never fell. I never hurt myself. I never got caught on the wire. Instead I gained the steadfast joy of learning the potentialities of my own body and revelling in what it could do on this makeshift obstacle course. I feel my childhood was a gift. Can children today say the same thing?

Christina Amaral-Kim

An iron border, strong despite its bowing in places, and visibly porous from outside and in. Occasional stone entryways allow the passing through of those who have passed on, carried on the shoulders of the living. Oak and maple giants offer patches of shade to deer, rabbits, and the occasional bookworm nestled at the base of a trunk. The grounds, whose edges adjoin the sidewalk of two major avenues, are directly integrated in the city, and yet, traversing deeper, one finds it secluded. The winding, hilly paths quiet the urban soundscape and amplify the sounds of birds nesting above -- and of one’s own thoughts.

My lifelong partner-to-be and I would spend many a moment here. Catching falling leaves on a gusty October day, exchanging temporarily our overworked student identities for those of carefree kids. Longboarding on the paths after class -- more accurately, me teetering on the board with a constant shoulder for support. A chance meeting with a professional photographer, which resulted in a treasured photo on the steps of a mausoleum, our backs blanketed by the vibrant foliage. A difficult conversation after the proposal and my mixed reaction: forced slow steps on the asphalt, desperate breaks on tree stumps, and the parting of our gazes toward nearby headstones.

More than a cemetery, Mount Hope is an immersive natural and cultural experience whose invitation to witness its beauty contrasts with its designed purpose: to house the remains (and memory) of those who have passed. There, I was encouraged to challenge the usual solemnity of such places and to instead observe the magnificence around me with curiosity. Teeming with life aboveground, it spoke of joy where there is often only loss and painted plainly the interconnectedness of all things. I can’t say it taught me to come to terms with death (that’s still a formidable undertaking), but it invited me to look more closely at my relationship with it through a less fearful lens than before.

I now reflect on this cemetery and move it from memory to my current context. An immigrant to Canada and a settler of Indigenous lands here, I am witnessing through the media the recent discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at Canadian residential schools. In contrast to the elaborate monuments of Mount Hope, the decision to not mark these graves -- or in some cases, to remove the original headstones -- is a blatant disacknowledgement of the lives that were lost there. Rather than wonder, their discovery elicits agony and outrage. These spaces were intentionally inconspicuous, the memories of these children deliberately unhonoured. There had been no effort to make them beautiful and inviting because they wanted no visitors. Perhaps one day, when the children’s bodies have been returned to the families and communities from which they were stolen, and when they have been properly remembered and celebrated, perhaps then the places where they are buried will be places of beauty and joy. But for now, they cannot be; there is continued revelation and enormous healing to be done first, to carve a passage through which joy may later flow in.

Mojdeh Kamali

I think it's the Bow River. There is something about this place that has always calmed me down. Every time I leave home to bike around the campus, I find myself biking to see Bow River down the hills. When I reach there, every problem fades away. I can sit there and watch the river pass on, only to realize I got this!

I always wondered why Bow River calms me down? And I remember there used to be a stream passing by in the middle of my grandma's house, and we used to have breakfast or tea next to that river passing by. So, I realized the aspects of the city that strengths my connection to my memory are what remind me of home and a safe place.