The push for Ottawa’s mid-town: Getting to square one

The 31st largest city in North America, 4th in Canada, home to nearly 1,000,000 residents, Ottawa is a town in need of change. It can ill afford the financial burden and social impacts of its urban sprawl, and its traditional economic engine, the Canadian Government, no longer offers enough civil service jobs or incentives to the private sector to sustain the livelihood of its inhabitants. This paper deals with intensification, a policy introduced by Ontario in its Provincial Policy Statement (2005: http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/Page1485.aspx; revised 2014: http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/Page10679.aspx) to counter urban sprawl, and suggests that, by giving priority to one of its components — the densification of arterial main streets — the municipal council may have stumbled on a way both to slow down the growth of suburbia and to make Ottawa more attractive to the people most likely to generate new ideas, new technologies and new jobs. The paper also explains how local community associations from the city’s 9th ward have, from the outset, prompted city councillors and officials to envisage main street densification along Merivale Road as a strategy contributing to Ottawa’s regeneration and renewal.