Calgary’s Fabled Stampede Grounds Evolves into a Year-round Destination and Home.
Calgary’s beloved Stampede is a hundred-year-old celebration of cowboy, First Nations and agricultural traditions and culture. The festivities engage a million people every year—locals and hundreds of thousands of visitors—for 10 days during the summer, and the large area is sorely under-leveraged the rest of the year. Today, the area around Stampede Park has been master planned as a year-round culture and entertainment district that will be home to 4 million square feet of mixed-use development and 8,000 new residents. CMLC (Calgary Municipal Land Corporation) asked Resonance to help articulate, name, brand and communicate the vision for the district.
The Resonance team has worked for more than 15 years to articulate and communicate the story of the district’s immediate neighbor, East Village. For the new district, we engaged residents to understand their hopes and dreams for the area, workshopped language and stories with stakeholders, named the multi-faceted neighborhood, wrote the brand narrative and created the identity. We named the district the “The C+E” and positioned it as the heart of the sprawling Calgary region, the next chapter in downtown life and the city’s next economic development engine—a stage on which locals and the world can experience and celebrate Calgary.
The C+E identity is now a unifying brand for the many organizations in the district, including the Calgary Opera, Stampede, a new Bank of Montreal conference center and a planned new event center, along with the condominiums and apartments to come. The rallying cry and tagline makes the strategic emotional: Where Calgary Comes Together leverages love for Stampede and gives meaning to an exciting new opportunity for potential residents, businesses, visitors and cultural enterprises. Today, the C+E is becoming a multi-faceted, mixed-use destination that will celebrate the heritage and the future of arts, culture and entertainment.
