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Old Posted Mar 22, 2012, 1:59 AM
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Dado Dado is offline
National Capital Region
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Ottawa, Canada
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jitterbug View Post
OK, as a resident of Ottawa for 44 of my 47 years, I'll bite.

I would say 3 main factors are at play:

1. Ottawa is a relatively young city (in global terms). Only about 150 years ago (that's like yesterday in the "old world") Ottawa was a small, isolated lumber town. We can still see remnants of these early years even today. Other than the Greber plan of the 1950s, Ottawa's development has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. So when someone has a big plan today, residents are suspicious and usually opposed.
Vancouver is a lot younger than us - we date variously to the 1790s (Hull) or the 1820s (Bytown) - and they have far less of this problem than we do.

We were never that isolated: it's a pretty easy trip up the Ottawa River from Montreal to get here. It was harder to get to Kingston and Toronto than it was to get to Ottawa, and since the Rideau Canal has been with us for most of our history, it hasn't really been that difficult to get here from Toronto and Kingston, either. We were probably more mentally isolated than physically isolated.

It's not like an evolutionary history is particularly unique to Ottawa. If anything, it's been more revolutionary than average: few places go from being the unoccupied shore opposite another town to the lynchpin of a major canal system in five years and then go on to becoming a capital city just a generation later. During the war we had a whole pile of temporary mediocrity forced upon the landscape, and then after the war the NCC did its bit by plonking down brutalist office blocks all over the place. All of this is far more revolutionary than evolutionary and there aren't a lot of cities with a history like it.

It's possible that a reactionary mindset took hold in response to this.

Quote:
2. Ottawa's modern-day raison d'etre is as the seat of the federal government. Much of the rest of Canada dislikes Ottawa for that very reason, and Ottawans know it. This inferiority complex manifests itself in many ways, such as through a low-key approach to city building. If we don't make too many waves, maybe they'll start to like us a bit more.
I think this point has far more to it than your previous point.

If you think about it, not a lot of capitals have a history like ours. We suddenly become the capital without a lot of real planning or preparation. Washington and Canberra were planned as capitals in a 'blank slate' kind of way. No one could be jealous of a town that "lucked out" because nothing at all existed there and everyone else could feel some kind of ownership of it. By contrast, most European capitals grew into the job organically due to being existing centres of commercial activity. But Ottawa was a small town that became the capital, so everyone else had an axe to grind. In some ways, it's too bad the decision to make Ottawa the capital wasn't taken at the same time construction of the Rideau Canal began.

Still, the fact that the rest of the country doesn't much like Ottawa doesn't entirely explain things, either. I don't think that Ottawans base any judgements on city building on the basis of what the rest of the country would think of us, especially since the same inferiority complex would tend to suggest that the rest of the country couldn't care less.

Quote:
3. Ottawans themselves like the status quo. Ottawa's natural surroundings are still pretty wild (especially west and north of the city), and there's a certain pride in being a "quiet, backwoods capital" as Dan Rather once described our town. Tall towers, innovative architecture, electronic billboards, and subways may be great for really big cities like New York or even Toronto, but we're Ottawans and we prefer to keep our waterfronts undeveloped and our buildings functional rather than fancy.
We have a good number of fancy buildings - they just happen to be federal museums and the like. The "functional" office buildings have all been imposed on us by the federal government and private developers whose only concerns are keeping building construction costs down. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that Ottawans themselves prefer functional to fancy.

As for waterfront development, well frankly until our developers learn to build real urban places from scratch, we're probably better off leaving them undeveloped. The most likely result of opening up the waterfront to development would be a whole slew of Metropoles that exist just for the views of the residents and don't give a damn about what it looks like at ground level.

Quote:
Of course, things are changing but it will take many more years to shake off Ottawa's small-town mentality. In the meantime, it's fun to look into the future as many do on this board, all the while trying to reconcile our humble beginnings of only a few generations.
Except we don't even have a small-town mentality. The average small town has far more of a 'can-do' attitude than we do in Ottawa. Take the infamous Royal Swans incident: it is absolutely inconceivable that the average Canadian small town would seriously contemplate getting rid of a gift of swans from the Queen for lack of will to build a new place to house them. The mayor (or reeve) would be on the phone with his second-cousin's brother-in-law who owns a duck raising concern to ask if he could build a place for the swans, and chances are he'd do it for a nominal charge. I've seen small town officials and politicians working their asses off to scrounge up every conceivable source of funds for certain projects and exploiting every conceivable short-cut to get the project done.
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Last edited by Dado; Mar 22, 2012 at 2:14 AM.
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