Lower Mount Royal

Close enough to downtown to walk, Lower Mount Royal has a street-level energy built around restaurants and patios more than anything else. The commercial strip is where people actually spend time — dinner out, a coffee before the bus, picking up a prescription at Shoppers Drug Mart — and routes fanning out toward Killarney, Bankview, and Altadore make a car easy to skip for most trips. The Safeway over in Cliff Bungalow handles the main grocery run, close enough that most people walk it. Shaw Millenium Park and the Contemporary Calgary Art Gallery in the Downtown West End sit just over the neighbourhood line — near enough that residents use them without really tracking the boundary.