In many neighbourhoods in Ottawa, front porches seem like holdovers from another age. They are so rarely used, it's almost as if residents are now embarrassed to be seen on them. Their long decline as a social space may have started as far back as the 1950s; the above video is from a Disney picture in 1963 and seems to be hearkening back to an era the filmmakers felt was already slipping away. Do you have a front porch? Is it a welcoming space to ...

Anecdote, urban legend, sometimes even myth: we don't usually associate such descriptors with the street map of our city, but there is a story behind each and every street name we encounter in our daily navigations. And with over seven thousand of them now in use, there is a rich store of narrative to be revealed by exploring the history behind Ottawa's street names. They are a unique insight into what the builders of our city held most dear, and a lens through which we can see how our civic culture has ...

Editor's note: this post originally appeared on the author's own West Side Action blog. Last night was the first Public Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting for the Carling Avenue reconstruction project from the O-Train to Bronson Avenue. Scheduled for 2011, its for a complete rebuild of the street: new sewers, water mains, dozens of cable and gas pipes, curbs, sidewalks, lighting...everything. The handout emphasized the following priorities in this order: pedestrian, cycling, transit, vehicle. Of course, the the Technical Adisory Committee (TAC) had first whack at the project and they specified two through lanes in each direction, a bus lane, a cycling lane,very generous turn lanes, etc etc all of which exceeds the available right of way. Now, which elements do we guess might get dropped? No points for the correct answer: car lanes, bus lane, bike lane if room, "2m sidewalk (where feasible)". So much for ped priority. And for streetscaping ... to be added in at the end on the leftover spaces. So, I spent the evening in pleasant dialogue with the city planner and his consultants, educating them as to local pedestrian desire lines, questioning them on traffic volume assumptions, and suggesting the ideal Carling-Avenue-according-to-Eric plan.

[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.

In the dense forest of corporate buildings in downtown Ottawa, wouldn’t it be nice to distinguish one corner from another? Too many offer only the pre-requisite coffee shop or dry cleaner tucked inside a big glass wall. One solution that enlivens urban centres is investment in corporate sculpture. When I was young, I had the chance to go to Chicago on a school field trip. To an art student, downtown Chicago is the epitome of cool. It’s a city that appreciates art and urbanism. We took architecture walks down streets lined with architecture by the likes of Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rohe and you couldn’t help but notice the large commissioned sculptures that proudly sit in front of many of the city’s big buildings. It’s commonplace to give directions by saying: “Turn left at the big bat.” The “bat” being Batcolumn, a monumental grey skeleton of a baseball bat by pop artist Claes Oldenburg. Not only that, but people love the bat, gather and eat lunch in its shadow.

[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.

This week on Ottawa Morning the CBC's Julie Ireton is taking an in-depth look at Ottawa's dysfunctional Sparks Street mall, the national tourist attraction that doubles as an echo chamber from October through April. In this segment she hears ideas on how to revitalize the street; the concepts include a dedicated vintage trolley system, on-street parking, and dropping in an "anchor store", or maybe even two. With ideas to share  like Kate Wetherow's on how to make vacant buildings come to life -- combined with some pot-shots at the federal bureaucracy -- Spacing's ...