The missing middle — it’s a relatively recent buzz term in the urban planning and development world and, with Calgary’s new zoning bylaws in place, it’s generating plenty of interest. “It’s about people connecting to their environment — the way of living that we used to have and, of course, some cities still do have,” says Alkarim Devani, co-founder of the development company RNDSQR and more recently, MDDL (the company name is a play on the word middle). He’s also a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary, studying the missing middle housing type and a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
So, what exactly is missing middle housing? “The definition differs, but within the Alberta context and even within the B.C. context, we are talking about a gentle, low-density form that exists alongside the single-family home.
The walk-up apartment is the biggest that you would get — the form doesn’t go beyond three, maybe four storeys — it’s really everything in between a single-family home and an apartment with an elevator — a duplex, triplex, stacked townhome, a work-live option,” says Devani. These house-scale building options meld seamlessly into existing inner-city residential neighbourhoods and support walkability, locally serving retail and public transportation options. Contextually and historically, middle housing is not a new building form.
“It just went missing when we saw policy changes in the early 1920s and ’30s that.