Gorgeous! Now, what time is the next bus back to town?

Editor's note: continuing on this week's theme, today's post is from a Spacing Ottawa contributor who has recently relocated to another city. Like Adam Bentley in Edmonton, David McClelland has taken his curiosity and urbanist point of view with him to a new home in the Niagara region.

A geographer by training, Dave was also the editor of the excellent "Ottawa Project", now in hiatus while he works through a a post-graduate certification in Environmental Management and Assessment at Niagara College.

I came across this article in the St. Catharine Standard last week, and it's been on my mind since then. In the fall, when I first moved to the area, the Regional Municipality of Niagara introduced a regional transit system, which runs between the major urban areas in the region: St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Welland, Port Colbourne, and Fort Erie. In theory, it seems like the perfect place for such a system, as these five cities contain a total of approximately 313,000 people, including over 30,000 post-secondary students. But the buses are extremely quiet, and I've seen some criticism on the Internet that the system is …

Light well, Outrement Station, Montréal Metro

As rail-starved Ottawans wait for the latest attempt at light-rail transit to creep slowly towards completion, one question remains unanswered: who will design the stations? Admittedly, this has little to do with the actual nuts and bolts of the proposed system, or to do with the all-important dilemma that is funding its construction, but it is an important question nevertheless. After all, this system will be used by tens of thousands of people every day, so it seems only logical that stations should be pleasant and interesting places to wait for a train, right?

The current Transitway system seems to be the antithesis of this philosophy. Right now, stations range from dank and unpleasant (St. Laurent), to utilitarian (the majority, like Hurdman and Lincoln Fields), to mildly pleasing (Dominion comes to mind). Transitway stations betray their 80s heritage at a glance: concrete abounds, and the ubiquitous red tubing and glass that makes up nearly every shelter quickly becomes depressing and repetitive.

It's hard not to compare to our neighbours to the east in Montreal. There, each individual Metro station was designed by a different architect, which, aside from obvious necessary similarities, lends each its …

Editor's note: How powerful is the written word? Sometimes to gauge the impact of a writer we have to imagine what our world would be like without their contribution; without Jane Jacobs it is possible to imagine that there might never have been an urbanist movement in North America. In New York there probably would have been a six lane road instead of  Washington Square, in Toronto  an expressway right through the Annex, and in Ottawa, perhaps a 17-lane  freeway instead of Laurier Avenue, as was on the drawing books of our road planners in the mid-1960s (see above). That these neighbourhood–killing projects never came to pass  is still in large part credited to a discourse that began with Jacobs' stinging critique of post-war urban planning.

Certainly  without Jacobs there would be no Spacing Ottawa blog,  and so to mark this week's launch of Ottawa's third season of Jane's Walks we asked contributor David McClelland to consider the Jane Jacobs legacy from the point of view of an Ottawa neighbourhood. He chose Downtown/Centretown.

When it comes to urban thinkers, there are few names that are quite so revered as Jane Jacobs. She's cited in nearly every passionate debate about urban …

Editor's note: an earlier version of this post appeared in Spacing Ottawa contributor Dave McClelland's Ottawa Project blog

Ottawa’s Union Station: it’s a majestic building, a half-scale replica of New York City’s old Penn Station, and painfully underused. Since 1966, when the National Capital Commission removed rail from downtown, the building has served as a government conference centre, rather than a hub for rail travelers. However, if mayor Larry O'Brien isn't just floating the idea for the fun it, it seems that trains might just return to Union Station, in the form of a downtown stop on the new light rail system—taking the place of the Rideau/Sussex station in the LRT proposal.

As its stands right now, the interior of Union Station is unknown to most Ottawans. An occasional conference centre for First Minister's meetings and other high-level discussions, its grand hall and spacious passageways are usually roped off to the citizens who walk past it each day. But as the main hall of a transit station, commuters would have cause to use the public space on a daily basis.

But to my mind, that’s not all that could be done with the station. I don’t know the interior dimensions …

In the late-1940s, Ottawa was a vastly different place from the city we know today. In spite of being Canada's capital for 80 years, the city was still relatively small (just over 270,000 people on both sides of the river) and retained much of its industrial roots—especially its position as an important centre for the logging industry—and maintained a haphazard collection of poorly-built “temporary” office buildings to house a civil service that exploded in numbers during the war.

Several plans had been prepared throughout the first half of the 20th century to beautify Ottawa, but all wound up falling by the wayside, due to the First World War, Great Depression, and changes in the winds of political favour. It wasn't until 1950, after several years of study, that a plan that would ultimately lead to the transformation of Canada's capital would appear: the Plan for the National Capital General Report, more commonly known as the Gréber plan, after its chief architect, Jacques Gréber.

Though Gréber, a Frenchman, was primarily known for his work in the classical Beaux Arts style, he was also clearly influenced by the modernist movement within urban planning, as pioneered by fellow Frenchman Le Corbusier and …