Ottawa Sun
Published: Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Stop, start, revisit: If Chicago and Vegas can figure it out, surely we can too

Later this year, city council will decide the future of Lansdowne Park and whether the Lansdowne Live proposal — in some shape or form — will revitalize the area or whether it will remain a bleak and barren monument to the city’s inability to conceive a vision and execute a plan to realize said vision.

And true to form, Glebe Coun. Clive Doucet continues to try to scuttle the Lansdowne effort with a motion at today’s council meeting directing the city’s auditor general to weigh in on whether council was given enough information when the original design competition for the park/pavement panacea was halted.

Sadly, this stop, start, revisit decisions and build nothing ethos has become a hallmark of successive city councils since amalgamation.   

Of course there is the War Museum courtesy of tax dollars, but from the NCC (read: The feds), not city hall. Then there is our new and modern international airport, oops, sorry again, this was private money raised by our airport authority and financed through passenger charges. 

To be fair, the city was the major player — land and financing — in the recent opening of the Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans, but such examples of touchstone community building are the exception now, not the norm over the past decade. 

While there is plenty of blame to assign to our local politicians, the fishbowl-naysayer environment in which they work also contributes to this malaise. Many local critics (yes, I’ve been one at times) and media types are quick to jump on any initiative … think Confederation Blvd. back in the ’80s, the construction of the Palladium, as it was then called, Lansdowne Park now or the present debate over a new central library. 

Simply put, we seem to be a city that, too often, dumps on any sort of project bigger than a downtown hot dog stand or suburban coffee shop. Yes, financing is always key, and yes we need to focus on priorities (sewers, roads, transit, parks, housing), but I fear the urban boundary road signs could read “Welcome to Ottawa: Community building … what’s that?” if we dither on Lansdowne or the new library for too long.

On the other hand, cities like Chicago and even Las Vegas seem to get it when it comes to civic pride and legacy initiatives. In 1997, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley directed his staff to work toward the development of an outdoor music venue to be built adjacent to Grant Park. In the heart of the city, this park — to become Millennium Park — would become a showpiece for urban renewal with the conversion of parking lots and active railway lines into a 24.5-acre undertaking which now embraces the city’s lakefront. 

And last week during a trip to Las Vegas for my wife’s birthday, I witnessed the ongoing construction of the $9.1-billion CityCenter project; an ambitious 67.1-acre city within a city, complete with hotels, casino, condos, retail space, living amenities, and its own three-station public tramway right on Las Vegas Blvd. Moreover, several of the world’s leading architects have been involved and it will represent the largest LEED-certified project in America, according to the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

If Chicago can build a leading park and Vegas can do the new urbanism, eco-friendly densification thing, surely we in Ottawa can figure out a way to endorse, finance, and rejuvenate Lansdowne Park and build a 21st-century library complex worthy of our status as the nation’s capital city.