Of the many benefits of living in a capital city, efficiency and common sense in urban planning isn’t among them.
Such is the case with Ottawa’s Experimental Farm, the four square kilometres of 128-year-old farmland located smack dab in the middle of a city of more than 800,000.
Recently, the federal government announced that 60 acres of the farm, located just off Carling Avenue, would be transferred to the Ottawa Hospital to build a new, desperately needed Civic campus.
This drew the ire of a number of community organizations and advocates, who decried the transfer as the next step in the continued whittling-away of this national heritage site.
Critics of the transfer are right to value the farm’s historic, scientific, and aesthetic contributions to the city and the country. It is littered with buildings of immense historical value, is the home of marquis wheat, and it has yielded extraordinary accomplishments in agricultural research, a legacy continued to this day. What’s more, it has gifted Ottawa such treasures as the Dominion Arboretum, Ornamental Gardens, and Dominion Observatory.
However, despite the beautiful green spaces and historical buildings provided by the farm, it remains just that: a farm. The majority of the land is used to experiment with crops such as wheat and corn. These are important crops, no doubt, but hardly what one would expect to see just outside a city’s urban core.
Meanwhile, the parcel of land being gifted to the Ottawa Hospital is nothing short of ideal. It is a central location, quite literally across the street from the current campus, it is inexpensive, and it is currently serving simply as a patch of farmland.
If this discussion involved a different section of the farm, critics may be more justified in their outrage. The loss of the gardens, the arboretum, or historic buildings such as the Dominion Observatory might be one thing.
But there is no need for these spaces to be removed and there certainly seems to be no plans for that in the foreseeable future. The four-square kilometres of farmland sitting in the middle of Ottawa speak to the difficulty of simultaneously operating as both a Capital and a functioning city.
It is an enormous task to reconcile the differences between advocates, community groups, lobbying organizations, and various levels of government who often view any decision as “too much, too soon.”
Meanwhile, housing developments and necessary infrastructure continue to expand well outside the city’s urban core, making it all the more difficult to provide essential services and build a functioning city for all residents of Ottawa.
Sixty of the 960 acres of the experimental farm is no great loss to the city, but a long-awaited campus for the Ottawa Hospital is a significant gain. It is the kind of decision that, in any other city, would raise the question “Why was this not done earlier?”
But Ottawa is not like every other city in Canada and being the capital comes with its own special burdens.