Lansdowne vote: dark day, or a new dawn?

In a 15-9 vote last night Ottawa City Council approved the Lansdowne Live partnership. While Spacing Ottawa took no position on the redevelopment — our contributors and commenters were split on the issue — over the course of the debate and the public consultation process we ran strong arguments both in favour and opposed to the OSEG proposal, starting with an impassioned “pro” editorial on our very first day from Alain Miguelez, who called it a key city-building project and argued that:

There should be more people at Lansdowne. There should be more action. As a city we should rejoice about any plan that accomplishes this. When you sweep aside all the cobwebs of the rhetoric and entrenched positions, we as a city should want Lansdowne to be a public space and people place designed around sports, markets, commerce, and green space. And that, in my view, is what would really make this redevelopment as a marker of our civic maturity.

Much less enamored with the proposal was Tim Lash, who turned his written response to a city survey into an excellent op-ed pointing out the shortcomings of the partnership with OSEG, which, he maintains, sees the city give far too much of the public realm away, with even the expense of developing the proposal itself being at the taxpayer’s risk. He called for a better process, taking the whole of the site into account:

Start with a clear unified public purpose or set of purposes for the Park as a whole; the design must be for the whole at once, based on a coherent and publicly accepted purpose, to avoid piecemeal fragmentation, and to achieve harmony of elements that nestle together or complement each other at different scales and with functions that flow together well….Do not privilege any private design that jumps the gun. Tell the developers to wait until the purpose and master plan are set, and ensure they know that any advance expenses at this time are at their own risk, not at the risk of Ottawa citizens, and will not prejudice open public decision on the whole.

As the editor of Spacing Ottawa I’ve spoken with many readers and contributors about Lansdowne and I’ve observed a similar split in opinion again and again. Broadly speaking, once you leave the Glebe itself – where proximity makes its own argument– those who value a full spectrum of urban experience (above the details of who is in charge of what) are looking forward to the development; others who view public space as a vital asset of shared citizenship are deeply suspicious of a complex deal that ties governance to private interests for decades to come.

And then there is process. Many Spacing readers will be anxious about a vote that saw rural and suburban councilors come together to vote down the concerns of urban representatives on a debate that had significant consequences for a downtown neighbourhood. With the Lansdowne verdict impossible to ignore, there is a real risk that urban neighbourhoods will go into defensive mode, seeing themselves under permanent threat from the next council-supported Big Development, and fail to grasp the opportunities that intensification can bring.

Photo by Mike Gifford