Stephen Thirlwall
This summer, a task force was formed to address issues confronting Ottawa’s downtown. Its goal is to create a plan for the economic, environment-friendly and social revitalization of Ottawa’s core.
In the August BUZZ, Robert Smythe presented the challenges to this process and wished it well.
I want to take the conversation much further and in another direction.
The make-up of the task force is very encouraging. It includes representation from government, major developers, and the Indigenous community, alongside local social services, a community association and BIAs. If these groups can achieve success, this might help bring back some trust in our political and social systems.
While there is potential in the task force, it has huge challenges in terms of how it will function. These include acting as a unified team and not as feuding factions, addressing the true realities in the downtown core and not abstract models, looking beyond putting a dollar value on everything and providing ideas and plans that can and will be implemented.
It may seem a little “late in the game” to raise these points. However, these comments are not just valuable to this task force but are also applicable to how our new city council might function.
Non-combatant consultations and planning
The biggest challenge facing the new task force is whether they can work as a unified force to bring together many new ideas and strategies towards achieving various goals. The participants need to function in a cooperative and collaborative fashion. Yes, there can be a clash of ideas but this needs to be minimized between the various members.
If all participants have equal status, if they each clearly present their thoughts but don’t hold rigidly to them, and if they listen carefully and openly to what others present, the process might succeed. If contention, competition, hidden agendas, behind-the-scene deals and so on are the mode of operation, the process will be undermined and likely dead from the start. It won’t benefit anyone.
Some barriers to success include presenting past ideas and practices that have not worked well but continue to be used, and basing all decisions solely on money and abstract models that don’t represent the reality of downtown and its population. Overly hierarchical modes have greatly stifled creativity and flexibility.
More humanity is essential to the process. Success will require treating all of the downtown population equally regardless of their condition and background; listening to the public even though its inputs are very diverse; and giving downtown equal support within the full-city development instead of ignoring its needs.
Reading community reality
The current problems of downtown were not all caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns and convoy occupation. For at least a couple of decades, there has been gradual but steady reduction in downtown office workers, a neglect of support and a redirection of support elsewhere that has resulted in various shops and activities closing up or moving further out in the city.
For example, City Council had already decided that the new central library would be built in LeBreton Flats with no plan for even a small community library branch to remain in Centretown. The lack of adequately built and affordable housing in the core remains unachievable after being talked about for decades.
For downtown community planning to be successful, it needs accurate information on the people and activities and the forces that are affecting it, positively and negatively. Each place has its own distinct set of realities.
Ottawa has always had two main downtown districts with existing or planned extensions down Bank, Somerset West, Wellington, and Rideau streets into the nearby inner-city neighbourhoods (Glebe, Chinatown, Little Italy, Hintonburg, and Montreal Road). As a resident of Centretown, I functionally use this full larger area as my downtown. Efforts to forcibly create a new third downtown in LeBreton Flats have so far failed, but could eventually occur more organically over the next 20 years.
On a broad, urban scale, new suburban development involves primarily developing previously unbuilt spaces. Not so in the downtown. Here it is a continual process of building between existing buildings, subdividing existing buildings, replacing old buildings with new ones, and melding historical features with new construction, with the hope of saving some historical buildings and neighbourhoods.
Downtown has been ignored
Downtown Ottawa is a finite, relatively small space with the highest and densest population in the city. This population is rapidly increasing. But at City Council, downtown and the immediate surrounding inner-city districts are far outnumbered by suburban communities and concerns, and thus face certain inequalities in the system. The downtown has been relatively ignored, unsupported, and undermined in terms of Ottawa’s management and development.
At the community level, parts of downtown have maintained much of their own vitality. In some Centretown neighbourhoods, through community-based groups, reinvigoration is already happening. These groups approach revitalization as an internal organic process and not one forced from outside. Advances are happening at the ground level through significant volunteer efforts operating on limited support funding.
Other parts of downtown are increasingly fractionated by new developments. The call for intensification is adding pressure to previously stable neighbourhoods. It is hard to tell whether the call for urgent rapid development is a true concern.
Diverse residents
The make-up of the downtown population and the immediate inner city has four main components. These are: 1) long-term and transient residents, 2) the weekday workforce, 3) tourists and 4) individuals from across the city and region who come downtown for social activities and entertainment. Equal attention has to be given to each group since they all “feed off” one another.
Music, literary, theatre, dance, and other artistic festivals are essential to the vitality of downtown Ottawa, as are BIA-sponsored street festivals such as Glow Fair. These require support from all levels of government and businesses, and they involve a large community volunteer force. The recent Pride Parade was as much a family fun-time and an advertisement for numerous corporations, small businesses, community and government services as it was a recognition of Pride.
In terms of residents downtown, there is an increasingly complex diversity. The percentage of seniors, many of whom are single, is growing. There are transient residents, including a large student population and young professionals, who are here for only a few months or years. There are immigrants/refugees and Indigenous peoples, many of whom use downtown as an entry point and, in time, move elsewhere. The core has a significant body of low-income people, including the physically and mentally disabled, those struggling with addictions, and those living on the street.
Across this lies a range of cultural and gender diversities.
Families with children require schools, safe parks, affordable community activities and services, which can be perceived to be better in the suburbs. I am aware of several families who moved out of Centretown for that reason, which is a significant problem.
Rethinking “development”
“Development” is an interesting word. In Centretown, it currently stands for the extensive building of high rises and tall mid rises, and the full-throttle upgrading of public utilities such as roads and sewers. This has led to considerable noise and traffic disruption on roads and sidewalks. Current projects such as the Queensway expansion, and the renewal and installation of new gas lines are making access to and within downtown extremely difficult. They also imply an unwitting commitment to another 30 to 50 years of significant fossil fuel consumption.
Development can also mean a much deeper commitment to support activities that draw many people to the downtown, thus creating a special economy that supports many large and small businesses, and provides adequate social services. It can also mean greater encouragement and support of local community associations and BIAs to naturally develop the community from within rather than being strictly redesigned and rebuilt by outsiders who seem to have no, or limited, relationships with our downtown neighbourhoods.
Implementation and coordination
Whatever ideas and plans come out of the task force, there also has to be a means of implementing them at the municipal level, which is very much dominated by provincial government regulations, decisions, and funding. How flexible are our local and provincial systems and civil servants in accepting and making changes?
Yet despite these challenges, this task force is a good proposition and shows possibility. It needs our public support, input, and encouragement, not our distrust.