This is the fourth part in our week-long series The Future of Ottawa. In this guest column, journalism professor and Ottawa Citizen columnist Andrew Cohen argues that Ottawa is still making poor urban planning choices, notwithstanding a few notable exceptions. Twitter users: use hashtag #futott if you want to discuss this series on Twitter.
Ottawa is full of swagger these days. A new stadium opens in Lansdowne Park. The National Arts Centre is getting a new façade and the Canada Science and Technology Museum is getting a new roof – and new walls and windows, too.
Light rail is pushing slowly to completion. Jim Watson imagines a new central library and the Ottawa Senators imagine a new arena in LeBreton Flats.
Amid this tsunami of civic boosterism, you might think that the city is entering a belle époque. Why, the Strandherd-Armstrong Bridge in Barrhaven, gushes the Mayor, is “Ottawa’s Eiffel Tower.”
The soothing narrative is that Ottawa is undoing its calamitous mistakes of planning and design, that it’s now smarter and shrewder. In some cases, such as the planned restoration of the National Arts Centre, that’s true. After looking like a Stalinist detention centre on Elgin Street, it will finally replace its brutalist concrete with glass and open itself to the world. The prospect of the Senators moving downtown, from their cow pasture in Kanata, is also hopeful.
But don’t delude yourself. Much of this is only talk in a city that is all foreplay and no climax. Ottawa rarely corrects its mistakes, because it never thinks that it has made any.
Photo of entrance to Science and Technology Museum by Douglas Sprott (courtesy of Flickr – creative commons)
Should we applaud the federal government for spending $80 million renovating the Canada Science and Technology Museum? A decomposing corpse held together by chicken wire and duct tape, infected with mold, in a former bakery miles from downtown along the charming St. Laurent Boulevard?
A serious government of a serious country – one with world-beating achievements in transportation, medicine, aerospace, agriculture and energy – would build an edgy, new museum to showcase its success in science.
Then again, the federal government does build national institutions in Ottawa – no museums have opened since the Canadian War Museum in 2005 – beyond monuments of dubious taste and value.
The worst of them is the National Memorial to the Victims of Communism to be built in front of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Bad enough the site was to be the home of a new building of the Federal Court of Canada. Worse, the proposed design is so bad that it has been opposed by an advisory committee of the National Capital Commission, among others, who say it will ruin the space.
But why should we be surprised? The federal government cancelled a national portrait gallery in the former U.S. Embassy on Wellington, which has sat empty for years, and is trying to rent out the Canada and the World Pavilion on Sussex Drive. Meanwhile, the much-reviled Senate of Canada will spend millions making the Government Conference Centre (Ottawa’s Beaux-Arts former central train station, which should have another use) its temporary home during the rehabilitation of Centre Block.
That’s the federal government, which has little but scorn for the national capital. But blame the city, too.
It is terrific that Ottawa will get light rail, even if it is a generation after Calgary and Edmonton. But it will not serve the airport because the mayor says it’s too expensive. And, in refusing to put a station in Confederation Square, despite pleas from the NAC and local merchants, Watson is diminishing the city’s most majestic public space. It is a folly.
Photo of renovated Lansdowne by Erik Putrycz (courtesy of Flickr – creative commons)
As the city makes mistakes with mass transit, it makes more at Lansdowne. Beyond Whole Foods, the promised eclectic commerce includes TD Bank, Winners and Milestones. Having proceeded without an international design competition, Lansdowne is a lost opportunity. What could have been a soaring civic statement of nature, art, architecture and culture – an opportunity to do something bold – is a glorified shopping mall, a sports stadium and a lawn with an occasional ornament.
As for correcting other mistakes, it’s all talk. Watson speaks of a new central library, as if it is a new idea, but he wants to make it a public-private partnership, as if cities have no responsibility for these institutions. The Senators might move downtown. But who will pay?
Without a sense of ambition and enterprise that drives other cities, the hosannas heralding the emerging Ottawa are as enduring as the contrails of a jet airplane. It would be nice, oh so nice, to say that Ottawa is finally acting like a mature, sophisticated place, finding its future in this complex, urban country.
The truth is that it’s not. It remains polite and neo-colonial, a parochial town that gives every performance at the National Arts Centre a standing ovation and still gets excited – or annoyed – when noticed by The New York Times.
Mistakes? In this capital of contentment and unconsciousness, we continue to make new ones.
Andrew Cohen teaches journalism at Carleton University as well as writing a column for the Ottawa Citizen. An author of several books, his latest published work is Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History.
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