With a number of urbanesque infill developments starting to appear in the former post-war suburbs inside the Greenbelt, I think it's time we figure out what topics go where. This issue was exemplified in the discussion on
2940 Baseline Rd:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ottawan
Finally, regarding the thread issue: we have debated the meaning of "Downtown and City of Ottawa" vs. "The Suburbs" a number of times in several threads. The current operational consensus seems to be that "The Suburbs" in fact does include what I consider 'inner suburbs', ie, those within the Greenbelt. Therefore, on the traditional definition, this development should be in the suburb forum. However, personally I would be happy to have things as Inside vs. Outside the Greenbelt.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rocketphish
As the starter of this thread, let me say that I intentionally placed it within "Downtown and City of Ottawa" because my definition of the word 'suburbs', like S-Man's and others, refers to being 'outside the greenbelt' (Orleans, Ottawa South, Barrhaven, Kanata, Stittsville, etc.). Rockcliffe , the Glebe and Westboro all used to be the suburbs many decades ago, but as the city expands, so must our notion of what is central, and what is not. At the present moment in time, the Greenbelt provides an easily understandable boundary separating nearer from farther.
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There are a number of problems with the way things are divided right now, illustrated well by the two above comments.
By convention, we have tended to include projects in the Glebe and Westboro, which once was a police village and the seat of Nepean Township, as being in "Downtown and City of Ottawa" even though they aren't really "downtown" and, as noted, Westboro is arguably not even "City of Ottawa" historically.
In this case, the use of "City of Ottawa" as part of the forum name is downright confusing. My guess is that it is a mental artifact of pre-amalgamation and that it refers to the old City of Ottawa at the time of amalgamation - but that was a decade ago. I have a fuzzy idea of where the Ottawa-Nepean border ran (e.g. Lincoln Fields was in Ottawa but Bayshore and Centrepointe were in Nepean) and I have not the faintest idea where the Ottawa-Gloucester border ran. People from other cities, or those from Ottawa who are not old enough to remember pre-amalgamation (which would pretty much be anyone born since the late 1980s), are not going to understand this odd double use of "City of Ottawa". If you read it the title "Downtown and City of Ottawa" literally it would include everything from Parliament Hill out to the borders near Rockland, Kemptville and Arnprior, but then you'd be wondering about the apparently redundant inclusion of "Downtown".
The idea, as far as I can tell, of the "Downtown and City of Ottawa" forum was to capture urban infill, and that basically occurs in downtown and what urban infill doesn't occur there mainly occurs in what was the rest of the old City of Ottawa - at least until recently. However, that kind of ignores the fact that much of the old City of Ottawa is itself still suburban and would nominally belong in the 'Suburbs' forum, including ongoing [re]development (e.g. the redevelopment at Fairlawn Plaza opposite Carlingwood can only be described as suburban in nature).
If we're going to have a "downtown" forum, then it should probably be limited to places that are reasonably "downtown" (i.e. bounded by the Ottawa River, the Rideau River, the Queensway and the O-Train).
As I see it, we have a few options to clean this up. All of them involve striking the words "City of Ottawa" from the "Downtown and City of Ottawa" forum.
The first is we make a strict downtown vs "everything else inside the urban boundary" distinction. The second is we make that same distinction with respect to downtown, but make a further distinction based on the inside and outside the Greenbelt. The third is that we make a distinction between inside and outside the Greenbelt.
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