__________ Last month’s unseasonably warm weather has had me looking forward the 2010 farmers’ market season. While cautious in my own gardening habits – I did not plant early lettuce, beans, peas, radishes etc… - I have been patiently waiting for the arrival of fresh spring vegetables after a winter’s worth of rather tired greens, canned tomatoes and heavy root veggies. A great thing about Ottawa is that many neighbourhoods within the City’s urban core are well-served by farmers’ markets (Parkdale/West Wellington, Mainstreet/Old Ottawa South, the Glebe). These markets offer opportunities to buy fresh produce, often grown by people within the Ottawa valley. However, recent debate over the “value” of one of the City’s markets – the Ottawa’s Farmers’ Market located in Parking Lot #4 of Lansdowne Park – raises some questions about just exactly how the City sees / understands the role of the farmer’s market in the modern city. Specifically, recent staff reports and Council decisions heavily emphasize the economic role of the farmers’ market rather than broadly interpreting the market as a public good.

Editor's note: Many commentators have noted that the decision by Mayor O'Brien to run again in this fall's municipal elections means that he can campaign by claiming two significant achievements: spearheading the decision to build an East-West LRT that includes a downtown tunnel, and backing the proposal to redevelop Lansdowne Park. So far, the two major projects have been presented as "stand alone"; here Spacing Ottawa contributor Dwight Williams suggests a way to link them. In the months since the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG) brought forth their proposal for redeveloping Lansdowne Park, ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="328" caption="Should Ottawans know who this man is?"][/caption] Editor's note: Immanuel Giulea is the Founder and Executive Director of the Société Macdonald-Cartier Society. Ottawa’s civic holiday in August is known as Colonel By Day. City Council reaffirmed that as recently as June 9--a decision that underlines the intimate connection between the City of Ottawa and its founder Lieutenant-Colonel John By. In recent weeks, Bob Plamondon has created some publicity around the idea of renaming our venerable and historic Wellington Street in front of Parliament Hill. Those in favour of renaming the street argue that the Duke of Wellington never set foot in North America and had no connection to the city. Instead of honouring a relatively unknown figure, they argue, why not pay tribute to our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="An all-too-common Centretown streetscape"][/caption] They're ugly when full, desolate when empty, and they promote unsustainable commuter practices. Unfortunately, surface parking lots disfigure the streetscape all over Centretown, tearing large holes in the urban fabric and making the built form of Canada's capital city often resemble a small town in the middle of the prairies. So it's no surprise that the team charged with delivering a cohesive Community Design Plan for Mid-Centretown have parking lots firmly in their sights as they begin the planning process that will make the area between Kent and Elgin ready to receive its share of the 10,000 extra residents Centretown is expected to attract by 2031. The .pdf of the slides the planning team presented to a Community Open House held this week is available on the planning team's blog site or you can click here for a direct download. It's a fascinating document, and one of the most telling visuals in the slide deck is  the one reproduced below.

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.

Kalle Hakala’s December 17th post  ("After the thaw: could this be a farm by next spring?") brought to mind the relationships between food production, consumption and urban landscapes. Community gardens, community-shared agriculture (CSA), farmers’ markets, patios, street vendors and even Ottawa’s new green bins are among just a few examples of the presence of food in public and private spaces of the city. The following post by Emily Sinclair is the first of series in which she will examine the impact of food issues on the experience of urban space. Easily dismissed as an antithesis to modern city-building by planners and other urban administrators at the turn of the 19th century, issues of food production and consumption have helped shape the physical form and social content of the modern city. Activities relating to food production – the messiness of soil, pests and livestock; the rural nature of labour for food cultivation – contradicted the cleanliness and modern appeal of urban life. Through zoning and land development, food production was banished from city parks and lawns to the rural countryside where it was deemed a more “appropriate” use of land. On the other hand, activities relating to food consumption, and in particular the decidedly urban pursuit of food retailing, quickly became the realm of private enterprise. The regulation of food consumption was assumed almost entirely by private market forces and surfaced only as a social concern in the narrow contexts health and welfare agencies.