The Ottawa Planning Summit: Developing Our City

THE OTTAWA PLANNING SUMMIT: THE FIRST STEP



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This week, the City of Ottawa is holding a major planning summit. This isn’t news to most of you, as the media and citizens alike have taken a serious interest in this event. It’s great to see so many people taking an interest in planning matters and their communities’ development, and I see this summit as a great first step.

It’s important to view the summit as just that: a starting point. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and likewise, Ottawa can’t be planned in a day. Our goal with this summit is to launch a new era of planning for our city. By looking 10-15 years ahead, we can start to envision our city as we truly wish to see it. And of course, by looking back we can identify, retrospectively, where we have stumbled in the past. This summit is the first step in lighting the path so that the future steps in development will proceed more smoothly.

A CHALLENGING HISTORY: OTTAWA'S PAST DECADE

Over the past decade, we have been focused on the issue of the urban boundary, often to the exclusion of all else. Amalgamation brought together such a wide variety of people and communities that it was an achievement just to ‘hold the line’. The impacts of amalgamation were still fresh in people's minds, and Council was still finding its way. Issues beyond the urban boundary, such as tall building policies, farming support, and even suburban tree planting regulations were left by the wayside. There was no policy in place that encouraged innovation like mixed-use development or other ‘outside the box’ ideas. Right now—this summit, this moment in time—is the first real opportunity to set the stage for new development concepts in Ottawa.



History aplenty: the Centre Block on Parliament Hill under
construction in 1863. source



READY FOR CHANGE: A MATURE CITY

From the shaky aftermath of the amalgamation, though, emerges a City that is mature enough now to embark on these discussions in a cohesive and unified fashion. The gathering of minds that will occur in Ottawa this week should be the start of discussions on all these types of issues; and over the following 18 months leading up to the Official Plan Review, we shall then press these discussions towards action.

A GROWING CITY AND A GROWING LIST OF QUESTIONS

I have many questions that I hope to have addressed during the next 18 months of review. Why are we still so focused on intensification as a concept only for the city core, for example? Why have we allowed utility companies to monopolize suburban front yards, limiting the availability of viable tree planting space? Are CDP’s actually valuable and tenable? How are we planning to support our local farmlands, and where are we going to grow in rural areas? How can we get infrastructure out to the suburbs in a timely fashion? What strategies do we envision for the development of low, medium, and tall buildings? How can we incentivize mixed-use development?

How do we encourage balanced growth and stop reaching just for the low-hanging fruit?



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ONE STEP AT A TIME

This summit is not a day that will somehow provide a solution at the end of eight hours. It is but the first step in many to frame policies within the Official Plan. It is time for a series of discussions and strategy meetings on growth, development, and policy. We begin with a single step this week, and begin to work towards a big-picture solution. The City of Ottawa is poised for a new approach to growth. It is time to examine previous errors, learn from our scars, and get back on our feet.

I look forward to the summit as the first step we take together.

-Peter

FOR MORE ON THE SUMMIT:

You can follow the summit live as it is webcast. Head to ottawa.ca/planningsummit starting at 9am.

Follow the Hume Twitter feed for live tweeting.

You can also follow the hashtags #ottplan to see live tweeting from the Hume twitter feed (and others).

Also, updates are regularly posted on the Hume Facebook Page.

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