7 Things Ottawa can Learn from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is widely viewed as the best urbanism book of all time. Its author, Jane Jacobs, has been cited in every single other book we’ve read for the Ottawa Urbanism Book Club. It’s a long read, but if you enjoy literature and history it's definitely worth it.
There’s way more ideas from the book, but here’s the top 7 things Ottawa can learn from The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
1. The importance of Diversity of Use
The number 1 most important point in the Death and Life of Great American Cities is the importance of diversity of use. Housing, shops, schools, and workplaces. Old and new buildings. It’s repeated again and again how important diversity of use is.
Jacobs talks about how important it is for spaces to have multiple primary uses, with a quote that’s very relevant to Lansdowne:
“The main difficulty with civic centers, especially those that contain buildings such as auditoriums and halls, bringing huge concentrations of people for relatively brief times, is to find other primary uses at least roughly proportionate in the concentration of people that they can supply at other times of day.” p. 204
For Lansdowne, which can be packed during football games but relatively empty at other times, this means finding even more primary uses. Events like 613Flea and the Farmers Market are other successful primary uses in my opinion, but a space as big and expensive as Lansdowne needs even more. Other good uses could be more relevant and smaller stores (less suburban style stores like Winners, no car dealerships), more housing, and perhaps some longer term attractions like important greenspace or a music venue (RIP).
2. Spread out the times
To build on the need for diversity, Jacob talks about how important it is to spread out the times that places will be used, so that they are busy and lively throughout the day. This is of course a suburban issue, but it’s also a big issue in Downtown Ottawa, where many shops or restaurants that rely on office workers close at 5 or 6 pm, and aren’t even open on weekends.
To improve on this, Ottawa needs more people downtown and more reasons to visit downtown. Converting vacant offices to housing may help. Build more housing in general downtown too. Making it easier to visit downtown, through more frequent and reliable transit especially, would help a ton.
3. Downtown matters for the whole city
To continue on the downtown theme, Jacobs talks a lot about how important downtown is to central activities and people just getting together and sharing ideas.
“Without a strong and inclusive central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interests isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater, socially, culturally and economically, than the sum of its separated parts." p. 165
Ottawa’s downtown certainly needs lots of work, and you can see the issues that arise from the lack of a strong downtown. The housing crisis and the growing number of homeless people makes many citizens scared or uncomfortable visiting downtown. The extra presence of police in the Byward Market just seems to have kicked homeless people to Centretown for now, which threatens to divide the two downtown neighbourhoods.
There is no easy solution for this, but without a doubt greater housing affordability and a strong social safety net will play a role. Downtown plays such a large role as a gathering place and as a reputation builder for our city that we need to work hard and invest to improve it.
4. Districts don’t matter
When looking at pushing for change or improvements in your city, don’t worry about districts or jurisdictions.
“Few people, unless they live in a world of paper maps, can identify with an abstraction called a district, or care much about it. Most of us identify with a place in the city because we use it, and get to know it reasonably intimately.” p. 129
This quote is super relevant to the Centretown Community Association and the current Bank Street transportation study. The study covers Bank Street south of the highway, no part of which includes Centretown.
Even though the study is outside of our district, it’s still super important to our community association. The changes to Bank Street nearby will change how our members get to work or school, and how safe they feel when walking, biking, or driving. Whether it’s in our district or not doesn’t matter at the end of the day.
5. Make Easy Things Easy
It’s important to make sure that citizens with good intentions and ideas for the neighbourhood don’t feel like the system is against them. Jacobs speaks of a group of citizens in Baltimore that had to work for almost a year to get a sculpture in a park, having to attend many meetings, conferences and negotiations.
“Innately simple achievements become monumentally difficult in these mazes. Difficult achievements become impossible.” p. 413
This is super relevant to the City of Ottawa, which with its many levels of government and bureaucracy can be very hard to navigate. Over a year ago I wanted to adopt and take care of a planter on the new O’Connor Street bike lane upgrades. I reached out to the city multiple times and never heard back. Due to disorganization and bureaucracy, I never got involved in that project and the city didn’t get free help beautifying its downtown (there’s planters there now anyways thankfully, but could they have redirected me elsewhere?)
Ottawa needs to make it way easier for citizens to get involved and help fix the city.
6. Drivers need carrots with the stick
While Jacobs pulls no punches about how driving probably needs to be made more difficult to improve transit, she notes that citizens need to be rewarded at the same time.
“‘Cars, cars, go away’ would be a policy not only doomed to defeat but rightly doomed to defeat. A city vacuum, we must remember, is not superior to redundant traffic, and people are rightly suspicious of programs that give them nothing for something.” p.370
What does the carrot and stick look like in real life? It could be that if you raise parking rates downtown, you lower transit prices across the city. If you get rid of parking spaces or a lot, consider turning it into something everyone can enjoy, like a park or a restaurant patio.
You could pull a page out of New York’s playbook, and when converting a typical traffic lane into a bus lane, you make the bus more frequent and free for everyone.
7. The area surrounding parks matters
Jacobs talks about how important the borders of parks are, and how large parks or water surrounded parks can be difficult to keep busy because they have less through traffic. A park works best when it’s not just a destination, but a place that many people may just happen to be passing through.
This is very relevant to Queen Elizabeth Drive in Ottawa, which is currently spotlighting as a Park with the NCC’s Summer Zone. The fact that it’s surrounded by the canal on one side, and the golden triangle on the other, an almost entirely residential area, means extra work needs to be done to make it a successful park. The Corktown and Flora footbridges help, which are great projects done by Ottawa that make the canal more accessible and traversable.
I’d also like to see more mixed use in the Golden Triangle, it’s strange to have an area so close to Uottawa, Elgin Street, and right in the middle of downtown that is mostly housing. Adding more diversity would certainly help getting more traffic to the area and leading to more through traffic on Queen Elizabeth Drive.
Thanks for reading and please considering getting involved with the Ottawa Urbanism Book Club.