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Originally Posted by Uhuniau
There you go, identifying an NCC problem right off the bat: the fixation with "scenic" and "uncongested" and "manicured lawns" in conjunction with "roadways". Classic 1930s Radiant Garden City Beautiful thinking that has gone a long way towards ruining Ottawa.
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There's not a lot of City Beautiful in the planning of Ottawa. The one City Beautiful plan we did have, the Holt Report, effectively went nowhere. About the only City Beautiful-type concept that went anywhere was the War Memorial with its location at the top of Elgin, with the square itself being one of the nicest places to look at Parliament from. Frankly, we could have done with more City Beautiful.
There's a little more Garden City in the guise of the Greenbelt and in the numerous parkways, but even there the Garden City concept of having much more self-sufficient satellite cities never really went anywhere, and the "satellite cities", such as they are, aren't even organized on Garden City lines.
As for Radiant City... the main expressions of that seem to be in the various federal government office parks (Tunney's Pasture, Confederation Heights, Hull). There's not a lot otherwise. There's also some of Le Corbusier's love of razing things (LeBreton, Hull).
Even the Gréber Plan's influence is overstated. Very little of it came to anything other than the railway relocations and the Greenbelt (and never did we get the combined rail and road bridge over at Lower Duck Island). The road network of the Gréber Plan was a far more "Parisian" network with Parisian-like streets and boulevards, but what we ended up with were American freeways and expressways in their place. The neighbourhoods that were built post-war were quite different than those envisaged by the Gréber Plan.
Basically the modernists took the Gréber Plan's freed-up railway corridors from the railway relocation to build freeways and expressways, and the rest of it was cast aside. Then the townships and the developers went wild.
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Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Regarding the Airport Parkway, it is a whole lot better than what preceded it. The old airport access road was a disgrace to the city.
You are wrong about the connection to the airport parkway. One of the first things the city did after taking over the Airport Parkway was to build the access ramps at Hunt Club Road. This was not done by the NCC. This is the main source of congestion on the Airport Parkway.
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I agree completely. Those north-side access ramps at Hunt Club handle most of the traffic on the Airport Parkway south of Brookfield Rd.
It's also quite likely in the event of widening the Airport Parkway that it'll only be widened as far as Hunt Club.
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Originally Posted by Kitchissippi
I didn't say emulate, those capital commissions are there out of some necessity because they are federal capitals and have to deal with the hierarchial structure of government. You can't have lower levels dictating to higher levels of authority.
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But that's not really an issue in Canberra or DC. In both cases, the territory of the capital (a territory in Australia, a district in the US) is under federal jurisdiction (i.e. just like the three territories in Canada) without any other "sovereign" levels of government in the way. If the local municipal government proves problematic, it can theoretically be legislated out of the way. Any commissions they have are merely there to carry out the planning itself.
In unitary or centralized states, again the local government is generally not an insurmountable obstacle for the central government.
I don't think there is another country where the federal capital can be effectively held hostage by a nominally lower level of government. The federal government, after all, has no zoning power so the only "planning" powers it has are related to its possession of land (past and present), the exercise of the power of expropriation, the threat thereof, and moral suasion (which is basically a polite way of being threatened, or blackmailed, as the case may be).
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You'd make a terrible plumber without awareness of backflow. No wonder you are getting a mixture of liquid turd and glass on the side with your meat.
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