Erin O’Connell is an urban planner who has worked in both the private and public sectors. She enjoys thinking about urban design, cycling to work, and wandering around her local hood. Let’s assume that most people enjoy interacting with their neighbours, and more generally, that people enjoy watching other people. Yes, there are some people who prefer to live without interaction with their immediate community (but perhaps interact with their on-line communities) but, for most people, spontaneous daily interaction is one of the joys of living in a neighbourhood. The last house we lived in had a front porch. It wasn’t exactly functional; its stairs were oriented towards the side of the dwelling, it served as the entrance for two separate units, and it was the storage area for a several pairs of recycling bins. But once in a while I’d find myself sitting out there on the steps watching the passers-by and waving at the others doing the same on the street. Not a lot of thought was given to this particular part of the house. Last year we moved to a new place, where there are grand renovation plans down the line, but currently no front porch. Well, to clarify, there is a small landing area between the ground and the front door, but not enough room to perch a chair or tables or do anything except enter and exit the house. In the all-too-common "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality, I can’t help but look around to my neighbours to see how they have modified their homes over the years and note the resulting patterns of use.

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 ...

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.

The always-excellent West Side Action is two parts into a 5-part series on Bronson Avenue. Bronson was designated as an arterial in the 1970s as part of the Centretown plan, and bears the brunt of north-south automobile traffic in a wide swath of  Centretown,  from Kent/Lyon in the east to Booth in the west. Factors like noise, dust, narrow sidewalks, and limited pedestrian crossings make Bronson a real barrier for foot and cycle traffic, separating Chinatown from points east and discouraging development along Bronson itself. Bronson is slated for reconstruction in 2011, and, astonishingly, the City presented a plan to the neighbourhood that would see engineers actually widen the roadbed, facilitating even greater traffic speed along the road.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Bumper-to-bumper on our BRT - growing pains on the way to adulthood?"][/caption] Reading my friend Chris Bradshaw’s recent Spacing Ottawa opinion piece on rapid transit reminds me of the challenges of a growing family. Canada is a family of cities of various ages and therefore at various stages of maturity. Montreal and Toronto are the “older children”. They were the first ones to go through the growing pains of passing through the stages of development that children experience as they move through their teenage years and into adulthood. Because they are older, they always thought of themselves as the “bigger kids” and, like most first-borns and second-borns in large families, they were the ones who had to learn from mistakes, rather than benefit from the teachings of older siblings they never had. Ottawa, on the other hand, is one of the family’s younger children. It was cuddled and sheltered more than its older siblings and, accordingly, was spared some of the mistakes made by its older brothers and sisters. It has more green space than its older siblings. It has fewer of the harmful effects of some of the more misguided urban interventions tried by their larger siblings. It has fewer scars as a result. But just as we don’t imagine children growing from newborn to toddler to big kids while still drinking milk from a bottle or using diapers, so cities grow out of the more junior arrangements that come from the days when they were smaller. And children usually do resist, at first, things like potty training, picking up after themselves or doing their homework after school. It’s hard to grow up. It’s also unpleasant at first. And children aren’t equipped to see the richer life that awaits them once they learn new skills and take responsibility for themselves.