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Old Posted Apr 25, 2012, 4:15 PM
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Dado Dado is offline
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Building a better suburb

Building a better suburb

[note: this column had a different - and less accurate - title in the paper version: The suburbs need to keep growing ]

By Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen April 25, 2012 7:57 AM

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion...316/story.html

If we are going to build a better Ottawa, we need to start by asking the right questions. In the days leading up to this week’s planning “summit,” we have heard plenty of concern from politicians and design experts about “suburban sprawl,” but the fact that our suburbs are getting larger is not the problem. The right question is not “Should our suburbs keep expanding?” Inevitably, they will. The better question is “What should those new suburbs be like?”

The term suburban sprawl implies uncontrolled, low-density development at the edge of the city. That’s not the case in Ottawa. New development lands are approved by city council, and most of the development has gone to Orléans, south Nepean and Kanata, exactly the areas where it was planned to go. Some Ontario Municipal Board decisions have expanded the urban boundary faster than the city would like, but the additions are minor.

New suburbs are dense, too. The density of houses and townhouses in new suburbs is just slightly higher than that in the Glebe. Look at the townhouse-dominated development in our suburbs and you will realize that these extensive housing blocks on tiny lots just couldn’t be much denser. The idea of big suburban lots with picket fences is a myth.

Ottawa is also not experiencing a hollowing out of the centre of the city. Fully 57.5 per cent of the population lives inside the Greenbelt. Only 32.6 per cent of people live in the suburbs.

As Ottawa continues to grow, though, the suburban percentage will become larger. Despite a fairly aggressive program of intensification, there simply aren’t enough development opportunities inside the Greenbelt to meet the need. That’s why Ottawa’s suburbs need to grow.

But let’s get to the important point. The problem with Ottawa’s newer suburbs is that most of them lack the necessary ingredients of a successful neighbourhood. Those would include community centres, rinks, libraries, parks that are not just playing fields, sidewalks, bike paths, retail a person could walk to, and employment.

That can change, but it’s going to take a concerted effort by the development industry and the city. Let’s start by asking some different questions. What are the most successful neighbourhoods in Ottawa? What makes them good? How can we do that in the suburbs? What are the most successful suburbs elsewhere? How can we meet or exceed what they have to offer?

For the city, improvement will come from fewer counterproductive rules and more creative collaboration. Developers claim, with some validity, that the city’s rules for road width, setback from the road and lot sizes tend to make every suburb the same. That’s what happens when government imposes a template. Lot sizes are so tight in the suburbs now that developers are sometimes not allowed to plant trees because they will interfere with underground services.

Developers also say they face an additional disincentive to try something different. Despite years of political promises, approvals are still painfully slow for projects that meet all the standard conditions. Try something different and they will be in the queue forever, developers fear.

The city needs to take this criticism seriously and ask developers what creative things they want to do. Are there really such plans, or is it a bluff? Let’s see the good ideas and clear information about what the city needs to do to make them happen.

The city isn’t upholding its own obligations. There have been recent improvements in building suburban parks and recreational centres somewhat more quickly, but the city has no minimum, standard list of what it will build to make a community more than a sea of houses. As long as people in new areas can drive to services elsewhere, that’s good enough for the city.

Communities need jobs, too. The city has been too eager to allow employment lands to be rezoned for other uses. More jobs in the suburbs doesn’t mean everyone will move there to be close to work, but it creates that choice.

Neither the city nor the development industry has done much to articulate what a good new development ought to look like. There is value to both in doing that. More important, there is value for the generations of people who will live in these neighbourhoods.

The lack of any clear goals or intelligent discussion about how to build better suburbs leaves us trapped in the same position. There is little visible improvement in the look or livability of our new suburbs.

Now is the time to tackle this issue. A city’s official plan only gets a major review once every 10 years, and this week’s planning summit is the first step in that review. The work Ottawa is starting now will be complete in about 18 months, the new plan itself approved in two years. After that, we won’t get another good opportunity to discuss these issues until 2022. If nothing is done, the city will have changed markedly by then, and not for the better.
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