Denley: Board of Trade’s ‘action plan’ for downtown Ottawa is a rehash

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The Ottawa Board of Trade’s new “transformative action plan for downtown Ottawa” is a banal document that fails to offer even one fresh insight or solution to our downtown’s myriad challenges.

While it’s nice to see the private sector addressing a problem too often left to government, one would have hoped that a business group report could dispense with the usual planning bafflegab and detail real actions. Sadly not.

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The BS begins with the standard Algonquin land acknowledgement and then this: “We are cognizant that many urban planning practices reinforced racist and exclusionary practices of colonialism.” A stroll through downtown Ottawa would reveal that its supposed role in racism and colonialism is far from urban planning’s greatest sin.

The plan has what it calls “big moves.” Here they are: More people downtown! More jobs downtown! A big investment fund for downtown! Gosh, why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?

And let’s not forget the other big initiative on offer. That would be “significant enhancements to the public realms of Sparks Street and ByWard Market, and the establishment of a new business incubation district and an arts/culture corridor.”

The report was prepared for the board by the Canadian Urban Institute and modestly claims to be “the result of months of research, deep listening and keen observation of local conditions, as well as of global urban trends, to arrive at a made-in-Ottawa strategy for the future of this city and the region.”

In reality, this report does little more than imagine our downtown to be a heavily populated urban hub with precious little real guidance on how to carry out the miraculous change. Obviously more people and more jobs would revitalize the downtown, but what would encourage residents to live there and employers to choose to open a business in the core?

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There are some significant attractions in the centre of the city, but precious little to make day-to-day life convenient or interesting. There are also too many streets of cheap-looking, over-sized office towers, vertical cells for federal worker bees who buzzed back home  as soon as the work day was over.

The success of Ottawa’s downtown has long rested on people being there not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The federal government used to expect employees to come to the office five days a week. That automatic influx of workers meant Ottawa didn’t need to make downtown a place where either people or businesses would choose to locate.

The critical flaw of the Board of Trade report, and most of the other thinking on revitalizing downtown Ottawa, is that it seeks to return to a long-ago past where a city core was the place for people to work and shop. The ability of people to work from home and the development of self-sufficient suburban communities have made that idea obsolete, along with the fancy LRT system the city is building, mostly to take people to and from downtown.

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The city’s core will start to work when people see something there that attracts them. Forget about “repurposing” surplus office towers as housing. They will still be ugly and out-sized. Tear them down, they’ll never be missed. Let’s get back to human scale. Limit rebuilding on the sites to six storeys. Expropriate an area of at least one good-sized city block and create an urban park. Maximize National Capital Commission properties for housing. Create a boardwalk along the Rideau Canal with opportunities for restaurants and shops. Better yet, sell the land to the private sector and let it do this.

Most of all, let’s stop talking about doing things and actually do them. The Board of Trade report argues that if the people and jobs come, downtown will be fixed. No, the fixing has to come first.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

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