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 hang out? And do you use it on a regular basis?

Spacing Ottawa contributor Erin O'Connell would love to hear from you. She's been thinking a lot about front porches lately; their their cultural/functional role, the importance of design, and their symbolic role in neighbourhoods. She'll be sharing her observations with us in the near future, but meanwhile we'd be keen to hear your front porch thoughts in the comment section below, or tweeted to us at @spacingottawa.

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.]]> http://spacingottawa.ca/2010/06/10/caring-about-carling/feed/ 1 http://spacingottawa.ca/2010/06/10/surface-parking-targeted-in-design-plan-for-centretown/ http://spacingottawa.ca/2010/06/10/surface-parking-targeted-in-design-plan-for-centretown/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:20:13 +0000 Evan Thornton http://spacingottawa.ca/?p=2789

An all-too-common Centretown streetscape

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 study area is outlined in dark red, stretching from the Queensway north to Gloucester. Note the large splotches of grey; each grey block is a surface parking lot. They are…

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.

Here's West Side Action's Eric Darwin on the issue:

The problem with the City's current approach is that it assumes Bronson is a four lane street. And that it is congested. And therefore, the solution is to widen it.

I don't think Bronson IS a four lane street, and there is a whole pile of traffic engineering literature to support my view. Bronson only LOOKS like it has four through lanes. In fact, what it has is

…

Bumper-to-bumper on our BRT - growing pains on the way to adulthood?

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…

Jane's Walk 2009 in the Byward Market

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 to us that they have also brought their interest in all things urban to helping organize and promote the Ottawa version of Jane's Walk. As well, this year they'll be leading a tour of the Bank Street business strip, meeting at 2.00 PM on Saturday at the corner of Bank and Laurier and talking to owners of that ever-evolving street's most interesting businesses, live-blogging as they go.

Tonya Davidson has written a series of intriguing posts for us on the social aspect of Ottawa's statuary; she is writing  a doctoral thesis on that very topic and walkers on her tour of Ottawa are guaranteed to find out…

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…

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 Evan Thornton also weighed in on "putting the spark back into Sparks Street".

photo by Pierre Tourigny

Ottawa-the national capital, often overshadows Ottawa-the place to live. This is particularly true in architecture, where institutions like parliament, the Museum of Civilization and the National Art Gallery of Canada grab all the attention. Today, Apartment613 is featuring a photo essay by photographer Steve McCullough that explores some of the structures that - while not national treasures - help to give the city its unique style.

Steve uses his camera to bring out the extraordinary in the everyday, even capturing the infamous City Center in an attractive light.

Frequently voted the ugliest building in Ottawa, the City Centre is nonetheless a notable landmark. At the very least it makes for an unusually industrial presence in a town notable for its relative lack of industry. From certain angles and in certain light, this warehouse complex can be said to have a certain charm, but it remains a building that most residents of Chinatown and Hintonburg love to hate.

The Belltown Dome, the Old CBC Building and even Tunny's Paster get similar treatment, as do many of the houses and churches that many Ottawans walk by every day, but often never take the time to appreciate. Think of Steve's post as your own personal digital…