Quote:
Originally Posted by d_jeffrey
To be a great city, Ottawa will need to get a) a real transportation system (that means deemed as essential service and be actually rapid) b) a vivid cultural scene (a few plays and shows is not that) c) unique restaurants (that is one that is definitely getting there) d) rid of public servants e) more immigrants
|
So Copenhagen and Stockholm aren't great cities? Both have lots of (d) and much less (e) than we do. Worse still for (d) would be Brussels. Or what of the megacities of Asia - they pretty much all fail on (b), (c) and (e) compared to us. Even Hong Kong, which, while technically it is a city made up of immigrants, is really just a Chinese-populated city created under British rule - ethnically it's probably more homogeneous than Kingston, never mind Ottawa.
Frankly, what I think you're doing is mixing cause and effect. Great cities don't result from the things in your list, but rather these sort of things occur in great cities (except (d)). Just dumping boatloads of immigrants, opening restaurants and creating a real transportation system aren't going to make Ottawa a great city.
The risk aversion aspect of the bureaucratic mentality that permeates Ottawa is, I think, one of the greatest barriers to Ottawa becoming a great city. There's a reactionary political culture in Ottawa. On paper, Ottawa has a lot going for it - the cultural trappings of being the capital, a fairly rich history that has endowed us with some significant assets like the Byward Market and the canal - no other major Canadian city has something quite like the canal in so central a location, a good location with fairly prominent natural assets close at hand (I can be cycling or skiing or skating or swimming or sailing or canoeing or whitewater kayaking or whatever in a relatively short period of time, unlike, for example, Toronto). We've even got a linguistic duality the likes of which is really only found in Montreal. The federal government provides a degree of stability and its promotion-agency, the NCC, is responsible for creating or having got the ball rolling on many of the fine festivals and events that occur throughout the year. We've got many of the amenities (and the potential for more) that one would expect and hope to find in a great city. And yet... that risk-averse political culture suppresses most of the potential.
Take our favourite target, transit. Our reactionary bureaucratic political culture couldn't take the risk of adopting light rail rather than BRT in the late 1970s/early 1980s like Edmonton and Calgary did. It's not that light rail in and of itself would have made us great, but rather the willingness to take the risk on it would have been a step in the right direction. The history of the O-Train is illustrative here because of the sheer amount of bureaucratic intransigence that had to be fought and beaten back to get it. It was our zenith moment in the high-flying late 90s and for a brief moment it looked like a new political culture might emerge coinciding with the new City, but, alas, the bureaucratic culture reasserted itself with a vengeance. The openness to new ideas just is not there.
I honestly don't know how a city fixes a problem like this, and we (not us here, but city-wide) don't likely even realize we have this problem. Changing a political culture, and indeed a wider culture in the populace, is not an easy task but until we do we're not going to accede to the greatness to which we aspire.