[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Jane's Walk 2009 in the Byward Market"][/caption] With 35 captivating neighbourhood-based walks on the program, this year's edition of Jane's Walk promises to be the most deliciously diverse version of the festival yet. We don't have the space to preview all of the tours on offer this weekend, but we do want to draw our readers' attention to several of the walks with a strong Spacing connection. From the outset of this blog, the people behind Apartment 613 have been huge supporters of Spacing Ottawa and it is no surprise ...

Are the patterned openings to these storm sewer grates trying to tell us something? Some people look at them and see an odd jumble, others think a man's necktie is being evoked for some strange reason, and still others see a fish in the middle of the pattern right away. Of course, once the fish is pointed out, most people will see it that way from then on. Then the next mystery is why? Again, it's a head-scratcher for some, while some intuit the reason right away. The fish symbol alerts us to the fact that however murky the flow of water below us might look through these grates, the ultimate point of outflow is directly into our rivers, either the Ottawa or the Rideau. So the symbol is trying to tell us something. But does the City of Ottawa itself ever explain the meaning of its lovely fish grates?

Walking around Ottawa, with eyes directed only towards the city’s 70-plus statues and monuments the heroism of Canada, can seem overwhelming. A knight, Sir Galahad, welcomes visitors at the gates of Parliament Hill while countless Fathers of Confederation populate the lawn. Twenty-two figures of gallant bravery charge through the arch of the National War Memorial, while just down Sussex Drive, three more contemporary soldiers stand (and kneel) on the Peacekeepers’ Memorial. What is striking about this parade of heroes is its unquestionable masculinity. Sure, there is a woman in the Peacekeepers’ Memorial despite the protests of the Department of National Defense who argued, at the time of its designing, that no woman had performed that role making the design not historically accurate. There are also two female nurses at the end of the charge of soldiers through the National War Memorial.  However, what is celebrated in Ottawa are male leaders and heroes, though there are a few women celebrated in Ottawa: the Famous Five, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Laura Secord. However, women more commonly are featured as allegorical figures representing a virtue or the nation.

They are the least-thought out public spaces in Ottawa and yet they are used hundreds of thousands of times in a day. Many people spend more time in and around them them per day than they do with their families. The spaces are all improvised on a case-by-case basis yet every building has one, and no two are the exactly same. They are, of course, the smoking areas. Arising as a necessity from mid-90s legislation that first banned smokers from federal government buildings and later from any workplace in Ontario, they cropped up in front of and behind buildings across Ottawa. Butt-filled and foul smelling, not too many even thought about the demands the improvised spaces put on the public sphere.