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A unique opportunity to live differently for people and planet.
The City of Edmonton is the land developer for Blatchford – a growing, award-winning green-built community that is centrally located on Edmonton’s former municipal airport grounds.
The City develops and sells land in Blatchford to home builders. This generates revenue so Blatchford can grow without affecting property taxes. Home builders then build and sell homes like in other communities.
With its home in the heart of the city, Edmonton’s first sustainable community is designed to be family and eco-friendly.
In 2014, City Council approved a business case to transform the decommissioned Edmonton Municipal Airport into an urban, people-first infill community with an innovative vision:
Blatchford will be home to up to 30,000 Edmontonians living, working and learning in a sustainable community that uses 100% renewable energy, is carbon-neutral, significantly reduces its ecological footprint, and empowers residents to pursue a range of sustainable lifestyle choices.
The Blatchford community combines the best of mature neighbourhoods — central living, connected streets, vibrant public spaces — with sustainable features that make the community resilient, including renewable energy, low-impact development, paths and public transit, energy and water-efficient buildings, diversity of housing and high-quality design standards.
A few years ago, Edmonton had two airports.
The first was a site of pioneering aviation. After Blatchford Field opened in 1927, it became a “Gateway to the North” for bush pilots and northern communities and served as a vital link in Allied war efforts.
As commercial aviation grew, so did infrastructure demands. In 1960, the city opened the much larger Edmonton International Airport.
Neither airport was as commercially competitive as possible. A back-and-forth public debate began.
Plebiscites in the 1990s saw a narrow mandate to keep both airports open, only to lean towards closing one a few years later.
While advocates favoured an airport minutes from downtown, tradeoffs were unavoidable. Flight paths impeded new buildings. The city wasn’t generating tax revenues. Services continued to shrink.
In 2009, City Council voted to completely close the city centre airport and the following year they approved the community’s vision. The last plane flew out of the airport on November 30, 2013.
After Council approved the community’s business plan in 2014, the City began preparing the site for residential construction – work that included removal and recycling of buildings and runways and installing utilities.
The City is responsible for developing the land in Blatchford and selling it to home builders. The home builders then build and sell the homes. The City’s land development work includes:
In the role of land developer, the City is able to custom design the community so it’s optimized for people and the planet. This includes the design of streets, parks, trails, landscaping and plazas. This role also uniquely positions the City to create custom green building codes and architectural design standards for Blatchford that home builders must agree to follow.
There’s a common misperception that Blatchford’s redevelopment is funded through taxpayers. In reality, the City generates revenue for Blatchford from selling parcels of land to homebuilders. This allows Blatchford to grow without affecting the property taxes of Edmontonians.
What’s more, one of the original principles when establishing Blatchford’s District Energy Sharing System was that this utility should be self-sustaining without relying on general tax levy support. Hence, capital expenditures to date have instead been funded primarily through self-supporting tax-guaranteed debt.
Depending on long-term housing markets, Blatchford’s full development is expected to be completed in 2042, at a pace typical of other neighbourhoods in Edmonton.
This map shows where the project is today.
Developed: Land has necessary infrastructure in place for residential construction. In most cases, homes are built or under construction in these areas.
Under construction: Construction of infrastructure like sewers, utilities, streets, bike lanes and landscaping in public areas/parks is underway.
Planned: Rezoning, planning and engineering design work has begun.
Cities account for nearly half of Canada’s carbon emissions.
With its emphasis on building energy efficient homes, heating and cooling buildings with renewably-sourced energy and supporting a pedestrian-friendly, car-free lifestyle, Blatchford fits into the City of Edmonton’s plans for a climate-resilient city.
Those plans include reducing carbon emissions. Here’s an example of how Blatchford is making an impact in this area: While about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in Edmonton are produced from buildings, Blatchford homes will release about 75% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than homes in a typical community.
Blatchford’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions comes thanks to unique elements like a renewable-sourced District Energy Sharing System and the requirement that home builders agree to incorporate solar energy and meet other Blatchford-specific green building codes.
District energy (like Blatchford’s) is also a key part of the City’s Energy Transition Strategy, which outlines that 36% of greenhouse gas emission reductions are to come from energy system transformation.
Development interrupts natural water flow and can create major problems. Rain or snow that hits paved areas collects pollutants, which then feed into river systems. Poor water diversion can also be a major hazard during storms, overwhelming drainage systems and causing catastrophic damage to homes and infrastructure.
That’s why one of Blatchford’s sustainable features is supporting natural water flow. What does this look like in practice? A portion of rainwater that falls on homes in Blatchford will be diverted to large cisterns used to irrigate community gardens.
Other water flows and filters through bioswales and rain gardens into the community’s picturesque stormwater pond. And Blatchford’s soil cells not only retain rainwater to help trees grow and stay healthy in an urban environment – they also play a role in filtering rainwater before it enters the stormwater system.
Renewable energy is built in from the ground up in Blatchford. A District Energy Sharing System delivers heating and cooling to the community’s homes sourced from a geo-exchange system built underneath the first stormwater pond.
Instead of furnaces that burn fossil fuels, homes are equipped with energy-efficient heat pumps. Rooftops generate even more renewable energy with mandatory solar panels that are now required under Blatchford’s custom green building codes.
As the land developer for Blatchford, the City created custom green building codes that go above and beyond what the industry requires for sustainability and energy conservation. Before becoming a Blatchford builder, home builders must first submit their designs to the City and agree to meet the community’s codes.
The codes are built around three principles: building envelope, energy systems, and sustainable building features.
A town home designed to Blatchford’s current green building codes is roughly equivalent to a Tier 5 level of energy performance in the 2023 National Building Code (Alberta Edition). That’s about a 70% energy improvement over a building built to Tier 1 – which is the minimum required to meet the energy code and is industry standard.
Blatchford’s people-first design emphasizes public spaces and mobility.
When fully developed, the community will have more than 80 acres of parks and green spaces, a vibrant market district, multiple public plazas, schools, and an expanded NAIT campus.
As a landmark project for the City, Blatchford serves as a proof of concept for new and transformative design ideas – like narrower streets, reduced parking requirements and the acceptance of secondary and garage suites in townhouses. This then makes these ideas easier to implement elsewhere in Edmonton.
Great cities are known for great public spaces. In Blatchford, spaces are carefully designed for different experiences and purposes – so that even streets and alleys themselves become destinations.
Physical activity and social interaction are encouraged by amenities like a naturalized path network around the stormwater pond, hardscaped gathering places like 12/30 plaza, and parkside warming huts. Spaces are connected by corridors and pathways, so you’re never more than a block or two from green space. And because Blatchford is built at a higher density, this community supports a wider variety of parks and plazas.
In fact, the current park design and ponds will have approximately double the green space compared to what’s seen in a typical Edmonton community.
Encouraging car-free travel, Blatchford is designed to meet all needs in a small footprint. It’s also built to make walking and cycling safe and natural, encouraging people to spend more time outside.
Blatchford supports mobility that’s convenient, healthy and climate friendly by custom designing streets geared for getting around by foot or bike. This means wider sidewalks, narrower roads, boulevard trees for shade, separated bike lanes, mid-block walkways, pedestrian-only walkways, boardwalks and nature trails.
The community also has two LRT stops to make Blatchford a quick ride to three major post-secondary institutions, two major hospitals and downtown.
With an anticipated completion date of 2042, Blatchford is a long-term, ever-evolving project.
The plan for achieving this community’s sustainability vision is meant to adapt and evolve. This ensures approaches to sustainability align with emerging technologies, best practices, data, learnings, City priorities and fiscal responsibility. To the right are examples of the plan’s evolution.
A 2013 study analyzed energy implications, greenhouse gas emissions and costs of six energy delivery options. Two leading options were identified: (1) a District Energy Sharing System (DESS) with geoexchange, and (2) a traditional district system with a combined heat and power plant.
Option 1 (DESS with geoexchange) was implemented in Blatchford because:
A DESS with geoexchange is more efficient and has the potential to reach the project’s energy goal of being both carbon neutral and 100 per cent powered by renewable energy.
A biomass plant burns biological materials (usually wood) to create energy. This would therefore not be carbon-neutral and not 100 per cent renewable energy.
A biomass plant would have resulted in a combustion plant and associated storage and material handling facilities being located inside the neighbourhood.
Biological materials for burning are not readily available within Edmonton. This would have involved continuously trucking in thousands of tons of biological material on a daily basis to Edmonton from other regions to operate the system.
A November 26, 2015 report to City Council detailed the cost and benefits of building a recreational lake in Blatchford. Given the conflicts between the Blatchford vision and a public amenity recreation lake (as well as the costs and timing concerns), City administration did not recommend adding a recreation lake to the community.
The current park design and ponds will have approximately double the green space compared to what’s seen in a typical Edmonton community.
A pneumatic waste system would have seen residents and businesses putting a portion of their waste into a vacuum tube to be ‘transported’ to a central location in Blatchford.
The estimated cost of the pneumatic waste system for the entire site was $91 million dollars (cost estimated as part of the 2014 business plan presented to City Council).
It’s important to note that this approach doesn’t emphasize garbage reduction. Garbage would also still need to be trucked to the Waste Management Centre from this central location.
For these reasons, the project determined that from a cost, effort and environmental impact perspective it would be better to connect to Edmonton’s waste management system and focus on reducing the amount of waste going to the landfill.
Peaking energy sources are required to ensure the system can provide reliable energy to the community’s residents and businesses during shorter periods of time when extra energy is needed in the system – such as during extreme cold or hot weather.
Aside from these short and rare periods, the utility’s energy will come fully from renewable sources, such as geoexchange and sewer waste heat recovery.
The City looked at the opportunity of providing base and peak loads from renewables alone and not relying on peaking energy centres utilizing natural gas. This approach would have led to an increase in capital costs of over $100 million, which the utility and its customer base would have to absorb.
It is important to note that the decision to use natural gas for peaking energy centres will result only in a minor dent in the achieved greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energy goals.
In an ever-changing world where renewable energy sources and fuels are becoming more abundant and economical, the City is constantly looking to offset any fossil fuel with renewable ones, while keeping the social, environmental and economical balance of the project in mind.
Blatchford’s vision is to build a community that’s good for both people and the planet.
Through sustainable design and lifestyle choices, Blatchford and its residents are already having a positive impact.
Approximately 40 percent of Edmonton’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. Blatchford homes will release fewer greenhouse gas emissions (about 75% less) than homes in a typical community.
A townhome designed to Blatchford’s current green building codes is roughly equivalent to the top level (Tier 5) of energy performance in the 2023 National Building Code (Alberta Edition). That’s about a 70% energy improvement over a building built to Tier 1 – which is the minimum required to meet the energy code and is industry standard.
Blatchford’s getting noticed for its innovation in climate action, design, planning and technology.
Nationally and internationally, the Blatchford team is regularly asked by municipalities, educational institutions, organizations and delegates to provide site tours and share learnings and successes as a leader in the sustainability space.
Awards: In 2023, Blatchford’s District Energy Sharing System won two international awards from the Federation of Consulting Engineers, while the Canadian Homebuilders Association named Blatchford the Best New Community both regionally and nationally.
Edmonton is home to a million people, and it’s getting ready to welcome the next million. Blatchford is part of Edmonton’s plans for growth, with smarter land use, better transportation and climate resilient infrastructure.
Blatchford is building a more resilient future with renewables and energy efficiency, low-impact development and an emphasis on community infrastructure.
Blatchford is designed around public spaces and mobility, making it a great place to live. And as a landmark project developed by the City of Edmonton, the transformative design features will be easier to implement elsewhere.
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