Spacing Ottawa's Next City Cafe presents: Wednesday March 21st at 7pm at the Alpha Soul Cafe - 1015 Wellington Street West in Hintonburg Creating Collaborative Spaces How does collaboration happen? What are the benefits? How do we foster a collaborative culture within Ottawa? join the conversation, share your experiences, help shape Ottawa with special guests: Vinod Rajasekaran from Hub Ottawa, Julie Dupont from the City of Ottawa, Diane Touchette from Under One Roof and Clive Doucet as they talk about their experiences, exciting new collaborative spaces in Ottawa and how collaboration can change this city. Share your ideas and experiences on twitter at #nextcity

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="State-run high-speed train running beside privately-operated autoroute: the French do things differently"][/caption] The question you see often posed with some bewilderment in Canada and the U.S. is  - what is the matter with the French?  Why can’t they get it right?  Why can’t they get rid of their unions?  Why can’t they lower their agricultural tariffs and reduce their rich public services?  Don’t they know they can’t afford their school, heath, rail systems?  What’s the matter with them? The temptation when responding is to promenade from factoid to factoid.  I notice this whenever I write about some recent sustainability innovation in France, the Mia electric car, the Bordeaux city electric trams and now of course, the recently introduced electric-sharing car, the ‘blue car’ in Paris.  Where billionaire investor Vincent Bolloré has teamed up with Mayor Bertrand Delanoe to give Parisiens the car equivalent of their ‘velolib’ service. The ‘blue car’ is a subcompact that has a range of 250 kilometers on one charge with a top speed 130 km.  The Bolloré group has spent 1.5 billion euros to develop their new lithium, metal-polymer battery to power the cars. One of the returns they hope from ‘autolib’ is that it will promote and popularize their new battery. But nations are more than a collection of differing factoids.  How is that the folks who live in Bordeaux can choose expensive trams powered by underground wiring and the folks in Ottawa can’t even get a tram?   How is that Charles DeGaulle one of the most Conservative of Conservative French Presidents ever when asked by the private sector to build super highways across the country, similar to Ontario’s 401 and 400 series responded:  “If you want fast highways for your big trucks, you build them and toll them.  We already have a national road system – the N series.”

It’s hard to find anything in the world that I find more tiresome than listening to an ‘expert’ explain how the suburbs can be more sustainable if they were planned better - but we have to accept them because the suburbs are where the cheap housing is. It’s as if cheap suburban housing is an Act of God and expensive housing in the city centre is the distaff performance. The latest in a long line is Joel Kotkin in the Globe and Mail, (March 14). Cheap, suburban housing has got zero to do with good or bad planning. It never has, not since Levittown was invented. Cheap suburban housing was a political creation, it always has been and remains so. It’s a deliberate, continuing act of city councils right across North America. Suburban tract housing, highway arterials, warehouse districts (malls) are subsidized by all levels of government and have been for 70 plus years.