Outdoors

You can now register your Ottawa garden for the 2022 Ottawa’s Best Home Garden contest!

Back in January, everything had shut down again and I was doing winter walks around parts of Ottawa that I found interesting and walkable. I decided to write a series for Apt613 called Urban Retail Walks. I did some Google research to see if anyone else was doing anything similar, and immediately found That Walking […]

Last summer, Apt613 launched Ottawa’s Best Home Garden, an initiative aimed at showcasing Ottawa’s green thumb and fine folks who are augmenting the beauty of our city. Now, we are doing it again!

Why do big box retail malls look the way they do? Do they need to be that way? Can they become a neighbourhood hub instead of an endless sea of parking lots and shopping carts? Residents around Ottawa’s South Keys shopping centre think they can and should, and are working to make that happen.

March’s Awesome Ottawa award goes to Sinda Garziz to support street art shedding light on the barriers experienced by those in Ottawa with precarious immigration status.

While it faced challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Paint it Up! mural program found a way to keep moving forward and continues to provide Ottawa’s youth with opportunities for personal growth and the chance to engage with the local art community.

When a longstanding regular at Centretown coffeehouse Arlington 5 pitched an idea to founder/owner Jessie Duffy, a unique collaboration with the School of Industrial Design at Carleton University followed. Those conversations led to Urban Imaginaries, a bold new project whose purpose “is to see people engage in everyday spaces in ways that are beyond transactional, and to open up a conversation around imagining multiple possibilities for the spaces we inhabit.”

February’s Awesome Ottawa award goes to Beth Tyler to support exploration of microscopic life at Ottawa’s Mud Lake, near Lincoln Fields.

“If we all work together,” Amber Bramer, Resource Development Manager at Cornerstone Housing for Women (CHFW) says, “we can provide women with safe, supportive housing and end chronic homelessness in Ottawa.” On Feb. 26, 2022, CHFW is holding their third annual Coldest Night of the Year event in Westboro and they’re asking for your help.

In this series, I’ve been writing about doing Urban Retail Walks through the winter of our pandemic discontent. This week I was going to tell you about a walk along the north part of Bank Street and across Sparks. But there seems to be something going on downtown, so we’ll leave that for another day. A walk down Richmond/Wellington in Westboro it is!

Imagine you could do anything with Colonel By Drive and Queen Elizabeth Driveway. Would you leave these parkways as they are, primarily as space for cars? Or do you see the potential for what is arguably the most valuable urban waterfront property in Ottawa to be transformed into something game-changing for our city and community?

In this series of Urban Retail Walks articles, Bruce Burwell has been highlighting great winter walks where the sidewalks will be clear and the scenery will be engaging. This week, he’ll tramp the sidewalks of the Glebe and Old Ottawa South down Bank Street from the Queensway to the Rideau River.

January’s Awesome Ottawa award goes to an anonymous local creator who is hiding clay gnomes around the city and posting pictures of where they can be found.

On this week’s Urban Retail Walk, Bruce Burwell takes us north on Preston from Carling through Little Italy to Somerset, east through Chinatown past Bank all the way to Metcalfe, south towards the Museum of Nature, west on Gladstone and back to Preston.