The City of Ottawa is teaming up with Toronto-based architectural firm Urban Design Strategies to develop a new community design plan for mid-Centretown.
“There are several problems we’re looking to address,” says Somerset Ward Coun. Diane Holmes, who announced the design plan.
“The biggest problem at the moment is that there are different zoning laws depending on which street you’re on. We’ve found buildings located next to each other that have different zonings in terms of height and density limits, and this makes things difficult for city staff and residents.”
The new plan will standardize limits on buildings’ densities, heights and the size and shape of their ground floors in the area of Ottawa bounded by Elgin Street to the east, Kent Street to the west, Gloucester Street to the north and Highway 417 to the south.
The mid-Centretown design derives from the Downtown Ottawa Urban Design Strategy, a plan developed by the city’s planning and development department to renew downtown Ottawa over the next 20 years.
George Dark, a partner at Urban Design Strategies who has worked for the city before on controversial designs for Lansdowne Live and the redevelopment of the area between LeBreton Flats and downtown Ottawa, is creating the design plan.
“We are trying to refresh and understand the existing designs that make mid-Centretown such a great place to be,” says Dark.
Dark was in town last week meeting with a group of people in the transportation, heritage and architectural fields put together by the city.
“You always have to restructure and rebuild what goes where,” he says.
“There’s never a kind of one-size-fits-all plan. The area requires a much more tactile approach.”
Shawn Menard, president of the Centretown Citizens Community Association, is worried that the new design plan will result in high-rises cropping up across mid-Centretown.
“We can’t have extremely tall buildings going up all over the place to the detriment of the existing community,” says Menard.
He is concerned about the effect new high-rises would have on the neighbourhood, including cutting off light to existing properties, and increasing noise levels and congestion.
Other features of the community design plan include making mid-Centretown more pedestrian friendly by widening sidewalks and planting more trees.
“Right now, the neighbourhood is really a wasteland of parking lots,” says Holmes, who says the city is lucky to have spaces to redevelop.
She says the high number of parking lots encourages people to commute and drive through Centretown, instead of walking and cycling around the city.
Once preliminary meetings between the architectural company and the city have been held, Holmes says consultations with the public and design workshops will begin.