Robert Smythe
John Leaning, a visionary urban planner and architect, died on September 22, 2022 at the age of 95.
A pioneer in the protection of older residential neighbourhoods, the restoration of historic streetscapes, and the development of a citizen-driven community-based process for city planning, he held a special significance for Centretown.
In the early 1970s, he devised what was in its time one of the most radical community designs in Canada: the Centretown Plan. It reimagined this area – once destined for discard and large scale commercial redevelopment – as a humanly scaled, liveable residential neighbourhood.
Leaning came to a community already galvanized by events. Growing outrage over the widespread loss of housing, the demolition of historic buildings, block-busting, and high-speed arterial roads planned to slice through the neighbourhood, had rallied Centretown’s citizens to a new cause.
“Citizens took the lead”
In his recollections of the time that it took to produce the Centretown Plan, John Leaning wrote: “What happened in Centretown from 1969 to 1976 could happen in any city – a reverse of urban decay in an area where people had almost given up hope of maintaining a reasonable living environment. Planning operations are often exercises in frustration, producing only committee meetings and mountains of paper. I believe that the Centretown experience was different mainly because the citizens themselves took a lead in the planning process and because a substantial element in the Ottawa City Council supported them.
“As an architect and planner, I had considerable personal interest in the neighbourhood planning process. I was perhaps motivated in a very different way from the people in Centretown.
“I was brought up in a low-rise, pre-War suburb of London, England, 13 miles from the city centre and another 13 from the real countryside. Having spent the first 20 years of my life in this area, which had neither roots nor a sense of visual integrity or location, I have always been concerned with the need for community identification, both visual and social, and I hold the visual quality of my surroundings as a first concern.”
Leaning’s plan for Centretown was innovative in many ways. After a decade of destructive urban renewal, the City of Ottawa was beginning to understand that the city was a series of distinctive neighbourhoods, not a blank slate to be dominated by top-down planning.
He opened a field office on Cooper Street, making his efforts somewhat independent of the City Hall bureaucracy. And it operated with an unprecedented degree of community empowerment: a collaborative partnership with a 50-member citizens’ planning committee, a panel of all ages and incomes drawn from every corner of Centretown.
Dense but respectful
The plan designated future low, medium, and high profile residential districts in Centretown (all were to be designed to be dense but respectful of their surroundings).
While many of his ideas have been blown away by subsequent more developer-friendly plans, Leaning’s plan introduced new forms of heritage zoning, which offered a degree of historic building protection long before any other heritage legislation.
There were also measures to discourage the speculative demolition of existing healthy housing stock. For transportation, of course, it encouraged the green modes: walking, cycling, and transit.
Diverting car traffic
Its proposal for multiple street closures were among the plan’s most revolutionary, and controversial, recommendations.
Leaning wrote, “For the Centretown Plan my idea was not to stop the car, but to divert it into properly-designated traffic routes, leaving other streets and the spaces between to be used for something better than asphalt parking spaces.
“In the proposals for Centretown I suggested that the existing network of streets should be improved to take the future traffic load across the area while leaving the residential areas between to be better organized as recreational spaces.”
In the end, this proved to be a step too far for some residents and a transportation plan for Centretown was left for another day, i.e. never.
“One of the most exciting periods of my life”
The 1970s were a heady time for the progressive urban movement. In an interview for a history of the relationship between the plan and affordable housing, Judy Forrest, a young planner hired to work with John Leaning, said that she was proud of the dual accomplishments of helping to create both the Centretown Plan and the non-profit housing corporation Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation (CCOC).
“It was one of the most exciting periods of my life.”
She remembers that in the first weeks of the study, she and John examined each block of Centretown, creating a schematic of every building with its outline and John’s assessment of the heritage value of the building.
“I thought this was a bit curious (to go into this level of detail) but it was very interesting to examine the various components of the neighbourhood at that detail.”
She adds that “the new plan focused on preserving the fabric of the built form and preserving the residential aspect of the neighbourhood – a huge shift. There definitely was some tension between John and city staff who resented the fact that an outsider was hired to do the plan and given a degree of freedom that they never had.”
Former city councillor Brian Bourns described the era that the activists came from: ”We were New Democratic Youth, leftie-weirdos … serious hippies.”
Bourns, who was the chair of the Centretown Citizens Planning Committee from 1972-1974, added, “So yes – you can credit John with saving Centretown. It took substantial courage (and as a consultant I wonder if it took a little commercial recklessness) to work the Planning Department into going along and implementing the process. He created a planning process that worked; there were not a lot of neighbourhood studies before and not a lot of methodology around. He recognized the elements of Centretown that needed to be kept and he found ways to achieve it.”
A memorial service for John Leaning has been scheduled for February 2023.