Mid-Centretown planner — “if projects are not sitting in a city’s 10 year capital plan they are not going to happen”

Landscape Architect George Dark and his Urban Strategies group have been retained by the City to lead a planning process that will have as an end product a Community Design Plan (CDP) for a part of Ottawa they’re calling “Mid-Centretown”; it’s a district running from Kent to Elgin, with Laurier and the Queensway acting as north and south boundaries. In its own words, the project is

“about creating a comprehensive Growth Plan for the Mid-Centretown portion of Centretown. As a blue print for the future, the Growth Plan must consider much more than just where new buildings should be located and what they should look like. It must also explore how Centretown can become the best possible place to live and work…”

A CDP is a multi-step process; this past week saw the design team host its second public meeting, where the above presentation was shown to elicit community feedback about the direction the plans are going.

To help us interpret the images, we asked George about the presentation and the CDP process itself.

Spacing Ottawa: What’s the most important thing for viewers to keep in mind as they look at the slideshow?

George Dark: Well Centretown is an ever-evolving place and has been for a long time. It’s probably the most complex of all Ottawa urban neighbourhoods. And it’s a place with a lot of interested stakeholders –young urbanites , retired folk, historical properties, a large rental community, a national museum, a very strong interest in redevelopment, and so on .

We have tried to step back a bit, listen to all the input and then bring forward a way of thinking about Centrertown in the future. You can’t and shouldn’t treat it like a single project or a single site. And it is important to try and get all the layers represented . The change will be incremental and take quite a long time; along the way some things probably should not change, and isolating those areas is taking some time. We think the LRT will change a lot of things in Centertown, and that, coupled with a new idea about one way streets, is going to be important to the future. On the building side it is clear in some places taller buildings are in the cards. Urban design is going to have to play a larger role on how that happens .

Spacing Ottawa From an urbanist’s point of view it was encouraging to see the suggestion in the presentation that four of the North/South one-way arterials through Centretown be converted to two-way traffic. The Downtown Urban Design Strategy of 2004 had a similar recommendation for Metcalfe Street. It’s an example of how CDPs can articulate a community’s desire with no guarantees that those “wishes will come true”.

Given that, how much can a CDP help to make these kind of improvements possible; do you have specific examples of how a CDP has helped to “make a wish come true” for communities you have worked with in the past?

George Dark: Well it is becoming an important topic in downtowns. As for other places  — we did it in Hamilton. We made it an issue. We made people talk about it. We got the city interested in it . This is a hard issue because these streets are really off- ramps for the highway, so in the end it becomes a question of balance and Centretown’s continuing and evolving role as the kind of place you can live without owning a car. Ottawa is scoping a large mobility study for the core around the emerging LRT, so that is a great place to start the balance discussion. It’s also a challenge to figure out where to start the process of renewal. We think Metcalfe Street is the right place .

The other ideas like greening streets, looking for new open spaces, and maintaining housing types — these will have to follow the same process. One thing we learned long ago is that if these projects are not sitting in a city’s 10 year capital plan they are not going to happen .