Thousands will soon be moving into Calgary's converted office towers. What are they going to do there?

Pretty cool, I hope it works out for them, and other cities can do the same. The more liveable density in our core neighborhoods, the better. Downtown Calgary can be a pretty drab concrete hellscape, so hopefully the residents can add some colour and life to the place.

Eventually, it lost its human scale, residential population, vitality, sense of safety, and most of its sunshine. An equal amount of effort, she says, will be required to turn it back into neighbourhoods once again.

Some of these seem like weird issues to take. Our civilisation is an intrinsically larger than human scale undertaking; if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to go back into the wild. Similarly, every tall downtown is shaded, because of the square cube law of basic geometry. Honestly it's impressive how much light we do manage to let in.

In every thread where someone suggests that office towers should be converted to residential in order to increase housing availability and cut on carbon emissions from commuting, there's a counter that this conversion is all but impossibleimpractical. And yet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

With a start-up fund of $200 million — and a goal of investing $1 billion over the duration of the program — the city offered developers a sped-up approval process and, more importantly, $75 per square foot in incentives to convert empty office towers into residential apartment buildings.

But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it's seen (it isn't easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built.

Something that makes this easier, he says, is the realization that those streets no longer need to do the things they did in the past, when everyone came downtown at the same time, and left together, resulting in incredible peak-traffic volumes.

"Where that settles, you can start taking bits away and adding to the public spaces for those other types of mobility, like bicycles, better transit facilities, but also programming lanes of traffic that aren't used during peak times," he said.

Paul Fairie, the principal co-ordinator of the Downtown Core Neighbourhood Association, also thinks something needs to be done about the big, empty east-west avenues, particularly on the weekends.

For Sandalack, the everyday urbanism that Paul Fairie talks about — the coffee shops, dry cleaners, daycare centres and so on — can't happen if the interaction between buildings and streets is wrong, as it is in most of downtown Calgary.

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On a somewhat related note people have brought up the window thing a lot for this topic.

This BC article topic goes over a example: https://www.burnabynow.com/local-news/burnaby-resident-concerned-about-windowless-bedrooms-in-rental-units-6501435

Tldr: They're required for fire safety, ventilation and natural light but there's alternatives to fulfill those requirements.