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 issues in North America, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her 1961 attack on modern urban planning policies, is still required reading at countless universities around the world. And though she died in 2006, her legacy lives on: Jane's Walks are held around Canada and the United States, which celebrate urban life and her passionate, incredibly observant view of cities. But in spite of all this, many people do not seem to be familiar with what exactly her ideas were. Many know the gist of what she writes about in Death and Life, but aren't as certain in their knowledge of the ideas that underpin them. And while it would be nearly impossible to summarize all of the ideas in the book (as, while very readable, it's also densely packed), one section of the book is on the four conditions that make for diverse neighborhoods. So to better understand the ideas of Jacobs, why not take a look at downtown Ottawa through the lens of these four conditions? “1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.” To anyone interested in cities today, this seems obvious: a good neighborhood has mixed uses. But when Jacobs was writing in the 1950s and 60s, this seemed less obvious. It was widely believed that a healthy city was a segregated city—people should live in one place, work in another, and be entertained in a third, and so on. However, Jacobs didn't buy into this, realizing instead that the more services a place could offer, the more attractive it would be, both as a place to live and a place to visit. Simple, but revolutionary nevertheless. Thankfully, downtown Ottawa generally features a good mix of uses. The very heart of the CBD is far too dominated by government offices, of course (and this has a great deal to do with why Sparks Street is so dead outside of the business lunch rush), but it is still surrounded by residences, condos, shops, bars, and so on. So while it could be better, it could be a lot worse—one only needs to look at Tunney's Pasture to see the effects of a strict, single-use area.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption=" Laneway art installation in Melbourne, Australia"][/caption] This week the Citizen's David Reevely ran an excellent post on Ottawa's  neglected laneway system, which has largely been allowed to disappear via generations of encroachments, though it is still visible as a series of thin lines on certain old maps of the city. Reevely identified the West Wellington area as the "big kahuna" of the old back alley network, and I was reminded of a piece I wrote for a print publication several years ago about the West Wellington laneways. The following is that article, slightly edited. - Evan Thornton It was a green dumpster plopped down in a patch of weeds; but something near to it had my friend acting weird. He was around the back, muttering; I heard phrases like “right through here” and “just where the map said it was”. Now he had me curious, and I tip-toed through the muck to join him. In front of us was a bizarre little structure sticking out of the back wall of the bowling alley like a carbuncle; imagine a plank-sided out-house grafted onto a cinderblock wall. A rich growth of weeds below almost convinced us it was an old privie; boarded-up, but still doing its bit to fertilize the soil below the cracked asphalt of this miniature urban wasteland.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="267" caption="Voice of Fire: the template for curatorial controversy since 1989"][/caption] You might remember the ink spilled several months ago over Maria Cook's Ottawa Citizen article revealing plans for a 10-storey Roxy Paine sculpture, a kind of giant stalagmite atop Nepean Point. Online commentators quickly lashed the New York artist's Hundred Foot Line, and in the tradition of taxpayer critiques, ridiculed the commission as yet another foreign and aloof New York abstraction pushed onto the "suckers" at the National Art Gallery. Not to be outdone, the curatorial establishment rallied to defend the installation, apparently eager to assume the role of a cultural bastion desperately resisting the philistine masses. (A Mount Carmel complex which says a lot about the gallery's PR doctrine and its evolution since the early 90s, but let me concentrate for a moment on what seems vital.) These art controversies may strike us as naive, foolish, or ridiculous, but I believe they present some otherwise unavailable clues or code outlining larger processes in Ottawa's historical development. More specifically, these public art installations are likely the latest phase in Ottawa's well-known spatial mutation, beginning in the 1950s, when the horizontal city — the "Edinburgh of the West" whose only towers were the spires on churches and on Parliament — burgeoned into the familiar vertical experience of glass and concrete, the stunted mockery of Toronto or New York. (With all that came packaged: wild architectures; kaleidoscopic visual stimulation, etc.)

With last week's post on the old Ottawa streetcar system fresh in out minds, this edition of Where In Ottawa tests your knowledge of Ottawa transit history: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Can you solve this week's streetcar puzzler on your own, or will you rely on the kindness of strangers?"][/caption] I am looking at the area that once contained one of the trickiest one-two combinations in the city's streetcar network. You had to run the gauntlet and avoid becoming a deadman. Where am I? As well as sending us your guess, you can also ...

Between Tonya Davidson's post on the Centennial year and the above video of Ottawa's old streetcar system, it seems it is History Week here at Spacing Ottawa. It was Eric Darwin from West Side Action that first drew our attention to this amazing colour video, mostly shot in the late 1950s, of streetcars plying Ottawa's roads and avenues. The segments are haphazardly joined together, but as you'll see, the route took the cars through Confederation square, along ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Did Montréal get the best Centennial legacy of them all?"][/caption] 1967 was a good year— the “last good year” according to Pierre Berton. Canada’s centennial sparked centennial-project craze across the country. I first started to think about the lingering legacies of Centennial celebrations on a visit to St. Paul, Alberta. I was on a little road trip checking out ‘big things on the side of the road’ and stopped in St. Paul to visit the town’s UFO landing pad. Reading the accompanying plaque I discovered that the UFO landing pad was a centennial project. For the citizens of this Albertan town, welcoming out-of-planet visitors was the perfect way to celebrate Canada’s birthday and Canadian hospitality. While countless arenas, community centers and parks were built in honour of the Centennial, Berton outlines other more extraordinary celebratory acts. Men grew ‘centennial beards,’ one man attempted (unsuccessfully) to lead a dog team from Tuktoyaktuk to Edmonton, and a team of paddlers embarked on a canoe trip/ race following the historic route of the Voyageurs from the North Saskatchewan River to Montreal, all in celebration of the nation’s birthday. Berton also noted this more anarchist style ‘centennial project’: “It almost seemed that every man and woman in the country was determined to mark the anniversary with a personal effort, even if to somebody it meant throwing a hammer through the window of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto. A note from the anonymous vandal attached to the hammer announced that this was his centennial project” (39).

I was visiting Baseline Transitway Station recently and had that sudden feeling of dislocation you get when what you see in front of you is very different than what your eyes have been trained to expect. In a flash a new fact was driven home: the place is no longer what it was when I first visited in the fall of 1985. Nor is it anything like what it is expected to be in a year's time. Right now, it's a great deal of open space. From April to November, that may yet be a good thing. But in the dead - or perhaps not so dead in these days of fears of climate derangement? - of an Ottawa winter, such a space may seem more desolate than it truly is.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="489" caption="Birkett Castle, now the Hungarian Embassy --photo by E. Thornton"][/caption] When it was recently announced that Jim Watson would be joining the mayoral race, I began to think about mayors and their stamps of the city’s built environment. In a capital city that duly celebrates ‘nation-builders’ where can we find the ‘city-builders’? When I started to dig a little it turns out that Ottawa’s mayors — particularly those from the first half of the 20th century — haunt the city everywhere, in street signs, bridges and hospitals they advocated for, decadent ‘castles’ they lived in, and swimming pools. Lyon Street is named for the mayor who had the honour of celebrating Confederation — Robert Lyon was the mayor in 1867 and was a serious man, most notable for having a family full of famous characters, and the longest beard in Ottawa’s mayoral history.