Shovels won’t hit the ground until the end of this decade, but the Tewin city-building project has been the talk of the town since 2020.
At a public consultation open house held in January at the Carlsbad Springs Community Centre, hundreds of area residents gathered to learn about the project and to voice concerns about various aspects of the plan.
The third of its kind, the open house provided an opportunity for the community to ask questions to subject-matter experts.
About 30 posters outlining the draft plan were systematically placed in the community centre’s main hall, where residents were invited to walk around and examine them.
While some living around the proposed area asked about how transportation will affect their daily commute, others discussed what would happen to already existing infrastructure and communities in the area where the Tewin development is planned.
Tewin — jointly proposed by the Algonquins of Ontario and developers Taggart and Caivan — has been controversial because of its massive scale and potential costs to taxpayers to extend urban infrastructure to the city’s rural southeast. But as Ottawa grapples with a housing crisis, Tewin offers a residential bonanza.
Spanning 445 hectares, the proposed development area promises an Algonquin-values based community designed to house 35,000 residents.
“People are always concerned about change,” said Craig Lametti, a partner at Urban Strategies Inc. and a key consultant on the Tewin project since 2019, a year before the project was publicly launched. “They’re trying to understand what it means for them,” he added.
Currently, much of the land designated for the Tewin project remains untouched, with some empty fields and others used for agricultural purposes. Dirt trails and bumpy roads connect the few scattered homes in the area.
Tewin’s design includes extensive green spaces and natural areas, all integrated in a community with more than 10,000 homes.
“That is a really big step for helping the city meet its targets,” Lametti said.
“A mix of smaller houses, some townhouses, some walk-up apartments and other types of buildings. And that means a variety of people would have an opportunity to live within the community.”
The houses that are already in place today are part of the “existing conditions” that project planners are looking at when designing the community.
Once the preliminary feedback has been reviewed and the design and development plans have been finalized this year, Lametti said he expects the project would begin to go through the approvals process at city council.
