[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="331" caption="Alain Miguelez has much to look forward to -- including the day they knock down the Rideau Street overpasses."][/caption]   2011 was the year in which urban planning and development became the confirmed fashionable topic of conversation around town. What with real estate having boomed as it has and with the amount of development Ottawa is (finally) seeing in its urban core, not a week went by without some intense debate about one project or another. And, true to Ottawa fashion (although hopefully this fashion will evolve into something more constructive), it always starts with vigorous opposition. Stepping back, however, here are ten reasons why not only “all is not lost”, but why Ottawa is in fact the city to watch in Canada when it comes to urban development.   1. The LRT.  Rail rapid transit has been debated way too long. We now have a plan, and it’s the right plan. Subway downtown, east-west first, north-south to the airport next, then add spokes to the corridors with the mose density (and ridership potential). This will completely transform our city for the better. Rapid transit will truly be rapid. The system will be worthy of a big city and support our growth for at least a century.   2. Lansdowne. This is Canada’s first and most serious attempt at requalifying an urban stadium and knitting it better into its neighbourhood. Not only will we reclaim our rightful place in the CFL and gain a pro soccer team, we will also gain a park, a new market, and a network of pedestrian-friendly streets and blocks that will be animated day in and day out. This project will be studied by other cities.   3. Westboro.  A neighbourhood that started as a distant streetcar suburb is now an urban hotspot, and its main street is starting to come along nicely. The new mixed-use buildings that line it are creating a much more enjoyable, coherent, populous and animated street.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Apartments, townhomes, condo lofts: well-established Hintonburg intensification, on site of abandoned factory - 3 minute walk from rapid transit."][/caption] Editor's note: For residents of Ottawa's core neighbourhoods, change is in the air. Mainstreets from Westboro to Centretown have being rejuvenated, residential towers are shooting up in the Rideau Street/Market area, the Wellington-Richmond corridor is booming with condo construction, and long-dormant brownfield sites near Carling and Preston are attracting some of the tallest building height in the city. From Churchill Avenue in the west to King Edward Avenue in the east, everywhere it seems intensification is gathering pace and actually happening, after years of being talked about. But if Ottawa has indeed reached a tipping point where intensification has been accepted as the way forward, what will it actually mean for the way we live in our city? Are there dangers? If so, what are they? And should the opportunities intensification provides outweigh them? What are those opportunities exactly? To find out, we asked two well-known urbanists to take sides on the debate. In today's installment, urban planner Alain Miguelez makes the case for intensification. Tomorrow, long-time community activist Jay Baltz will look carefully at the possible dangers and pitfalls of Ottawa's intensification strategy. Here's Alain: ***************************************************************************************************** 1. PROXIMITY Humankind can expend lots of energy and brainpower to make “far-ness” more “sustainable” (electric cars, for instance), but if we’re all driving clean-energy vehicles and are still stuck in traffic on the Queensway, we’re no further ahead. Building “green” buildings that recover all the rainwater that falls on them and draw geothermal heat is good, but if we have to road-rage on highways for half an hour to get to them, they’re not really “sustainable”. Achieving “near-ness” is the real answer. Having human beings live near the things they need and want is the true sustainable way to build cities.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="“My toolbox is so heavy – there’s no way I can park 2 metres away along the curb.”"][/caption] Have we lost our collective ability to live in the city – to be true cityzens? Now that suburban generations have existed for almost 70 years, have our habits and reflexes been so completely altered as a society that we have become genuinely clueless about urban life? Have we, in a sense, un-evolved as city animals? I ask myself the question, more or less seriously, every time I come across such an obvious blatant sign of outright disrespect for pedestrians as displayed by drivers who appropriate sidewalks or other pedestrian space as parking spots. We’ve all seen this, we’ve probably all muttered under our breaths. Maybe as drivers we’ve been guilty of it ourselves. A car parked right across the sidewalk. A delivery van or courier vehicle parked right on the sidewalk. A delivery truck with two wheels on the sidewalk, ramp down from the trailer, leaving a tiny path for people on foot. A contractor’s vehicle backed up on the front yard of a house, with open rear doors and little attention paid to where the front of the van ended up – on the sidewalk.

[flickrslideshow acct_name="spacing" id="72157625825213585" padding="5"] ----------------------------------- Images by Old Ottawa South Community Association - first is of 71 Hopewell as it appeared last year; second is a photoshopped image of what it is expected to look like after re-development. ----------------------------------- Spacing Ottawa contributor Alain Miguelez is a planner with the City of Ottawa. In late 2009, the City's Planning Department received an application for site plan control approval to allow three townhouses to be developed in replacement of a small detached home at 71 Hopewell Ave., in Old Ottawa South. Coincidentally, on October 28th 2009 Council approved updates to the Urban Design Guidelines for Low-Medium Density Infill Housing. In the following piece Alain takes us behind the scenes to to find what actually happened with this application - and explains how it was that City staff made the recommendation they did. _____________________________ _____________________________ The proposal, at first glance, was one of those dime-a-dozen that we have processed in the past five years. As staff, we weren’t surprised by the front-garage approach – in fact, we were starting to notice how these new garage-front infills were starting to spread in old established neighbourhoods. On some streets there are even consolidated stretches of these. In this case, though, the lot was so narrow that the two edge units couldn’t get a front door facing the street – the front door was accessible by a narrow walkway along the side. We indicated to the proponent that we wanted to explore other options for parking, entrances and front doors. In our minds, the proposal did not meet the intent of the Design Guidelines, which state throughout its pages (among other things) that front doors, rather than garages, must be the predominant element on facades. In fact, front garages are to be avoided where possible.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Bumper-to-bumper on our BRT - growing pains on the way to adulthood?"][/caption] Reading my friend Chris Bradshaw’s recent Spacing Ottawa opinion piece on rapid transit reminds me of the challenges of a growing family. Canada is a family of cities of various ages and therefore at various stages of maturity. Montreal and Toronto are the “older children”. They were the first ones to go through the growing pains of passing through the stages of development that children experience as they move through their teenage years and into adulthood. Because they are older, they always thought of themselves as the “bigger kids” and, like most first-borns and second-borns in large families, they were the ones who had to learn from mistakes, rather than benefit from the teachings of older siblings they never had. Ottawa, on the other hand, is one of the family’s younger children. It was cuddled and sheltered more than its older siblings and, accordingly, was spared some of the mistakes made by its older brothers and sisters. It has more green space than its older siblings. It has fewer of the harmful effects of some of the more misguided urban interventions tried by their larger siblings. It has fewer scars as a result. But just as we don’t imagine children growing from newborn to toddler to big kids while still drinking milk from a bottle or using diapers, so cities grow out of the more junior arrangements that come from the days when they were smaller. And children usually do resist, at first, things like potty training, picking up after themselves or doing their homework after school. It’s hard to grow up. It’s also unpleasant at first. And children aren’t equipped to see the richer life that awaits them once they learn new skills and take responsibility for themselves.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Subway tunnels, Seattle-style. We've been talking about getting our own since 1915."][/caption] As Ottawa takes decisive steps toward giving itself a downtown subway, it is fascinating to find that this is actually the fourth time that plans for grade-separated downtown transit have been proposed. This is typical of growing cities that have had to tackle such a major investment in transit. Montreal, for instance, first proposed a subway in 1910. It would be over half a century before the métro finally opened, in 1964. Likewise, Toronto’s first subway plan dates back to 1909. It took until 1954 to see the first trains roll. Even cities like Paris first discussed subways as early as 1854, and had to wait several decades until the first line was put in service in 1900. In Ottawa, the first subway plan dates back to 1915. In a report to Parliament, the Holt Commission noted the severe congestion of Sparks Street and arteries leading up to it, including Bank and Elgin Streets. As the drawing below illustrates, it recommended placing streetcars in a subway between Bronson and Rideau Streets, with southbound lines on Bank and Elgin. The portals would’ve been at the escarpment on the western edge, the Rideau Street intersection with Sussex at the eastern edge, and at about Laurier Avenue for the southern edges of the Bank and Elgin lines.

What better topic to kick off Spacing Ottawa than with Lansdowne Park? It has attracted a great deal of controversy and misinformation, but in looking at the future of this important municipal asset, I have sought to steer clear of the rhetoric and asked myself a few basic questions about what the city ought to consider as it ponders Lansdowne’s future. The answers I give here are my own, as a citizen of Ottawa and one who is ambitious about the evolution of this city. What should Ottawa seek to achieve at Lansdowne? Lansdowne was never intended as a park in the strict sense of the word. It has always been, and should continue to be, a magnet for people and a place of intense activity revolving around sports and commerce.