Photo courtesy of Justinvl from the Apartment613 Flickr Group
Andrew Cohen’s piece in the Ottawa Citizen last week certainly struck a nerve. At our latest “Urban drinks” at Shanghai, a few fellow bloggers spent some time discussing our annoyance at the suggestion that despite our “education and affluence” we were all working so hard to make a creative and interesting life in a city that (according to Cohen) can’t seem to do anything interesting or creative.
We’re obviously Ottawa “apologists” here on Apartment613. We have a great time in Ottawa and we write about a lot of what we enjoy here on the blog. It’s true that most of what we get excited about doesn’t come from grand visions headed by city hall, but rather from an engaged and relevant cultural community that consistently delivers. It’s tough to make the case that our city lacks vitality if you spend much time at Fringe, Electric Fields or House of Paint.
At the same time, we’ve been critical of a plan for Lansdowne that lacks vision and a transit system longing for good ideas. Associating the NAC with a “Stalinist detention centre” is a bit much, but there is a pressing and genuine need for accessible venues in Ottawa.
I think what was most frustrating about the Cohen piece wasn’t just that it was unhelpful and paternalistic, but rather that there’s more to the story. There must be some things that the city is doing right!
Cohen argued that “in this city, you will find little of what makes other cities today innovative, let alone a city that is the capital of a leading industrialized country.”
We’re hoping that we can help find some examples to prove him wrong. We’ve partnered with our friends at OpenFile Ottawa to commission a series of stories on what Ottawa is doing right. We’re calling them “Apologies for Ottawa”. What can we be proud of? Where can the tenants of our great city find solace? Submit your story suggestions to OpenFile – we’ll sift through these ideas about why Ottawa’s great and assign writers to the top five story suggestions, as selected by Apartment613 and Open File editors.
Hopefully together we can turn our apologies for Ottawa into ideas and motivation. Without question, our city needs work. Let’s just make sure we’ve got a realistic picture of what we’re working with.
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