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Originally Posted by Mikeed
Canada has a inherent geo-poltical challenge: the vast majority of it's grade A farmland is located closest to it's major urban areas and is existentially threatened by development. In Ontario- that's the Ottawa Valley, and Southern Ontario.
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One thing I've noticed is that the various environmentalist groups generally don't get all that worked up about farmland. High quality farmland, while relatively scarce at the provincial level, is locally abundant on the fringes of the urban area. By contrast, shield country, of which we have more in this country and province than we could ever know what to do with, is locally rare. So the activists get worked up about the natural areas on the Carp ridge but not so much about the farmland in the Carp valley just below.
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If it wasn't for the Greenbelt I argue that the development Kanata, Barrhaven and Orleans represents would *not* be self contained towns- rather, as it's be repeatedly argued for in this thread- tacked on sprawl the same intercity suburbs. I.e. the same commercial zones, community centres ect. We would have more areas like College Square, more areas like Merivale Road, more areas like the Train Yards. Woodroffe Avenue through the Greenbelt would be just like Merivale Road is now- sprawling car centric development. That is not to say that these developments are not built in Kanata or Barrhaven. But, rather then being more "intercity sprawl" you actually do have self-contained cities.
You can live in Barrhaven and never travel outside of it's boundaries. More so with Kanata and Orleans. Can the same be said for Nepean? Not when I lived for 3 years around College Square. Adding 203 square kms of Nepean style intercity sprawl would not make Ottawa more livable or more dense.
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I think it's a bit of a stretch to argue that our extra-Greenbelt suburbs are self-contained. Only Kanata comes close to that definition. But more fundamentally, none of them have been laid out in a way that would a suggest a plan to create bona fide "towns" or "cities": each individual suburban development was just tacked onto the previous; they were just "displaced" across the Greenbelt. They have no discernible centres, no internal logic or structure with radial streets, just planning cells appended, one after another. In other words, they just did across the Greenbelt more-or-less what they would have done without the Greenbelt.
With image manipulation software, you could, for instance, "copy" all of Barrhaven south of Fallowfield to north of the Jock and then "paste" it along Hunt Club (i.e. overlay Fallowfield and Hunt Club). Do that and you wouldn't know the difference.
From the perspective of encouraging innovation in regional urban planning, the Greenbelt is a failure on that count. With hindsight, I'd say the Greenbelt wasn't deep enough. As far as I'm concerned, Kanata should not exist: the closest development in the west should have started at Stittsville, beyond the high quality farmland of the Carp valley. Barrhaven (and Riverside South) too should not exist north of the Jock River; an extension based on Manotick as a starting point would have been preferable. In the east, probably nothing as far as Cumberland. In effect, most of the old townships of Nepean and Gloucester (along with much of March, Goulbourn and Cumberland) would be in the Greenbelt. There's no guarantee that pushing them out further would have led to better design, but there's a higher chance when they are being built around preëxisting communities.
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