The FINAL Centretown Community Design Plan Has Arrived!

Having incorporated feedback from this blog, our last community open house and a technical review undertaken by various City of Ottawa departments, the Centretown Community Design Plan is now released! You can download the CDP in its entirety here (64.9 MB PDF). Alternatively, you can download it by chapter by using the bar on the right hand side.

The Study Team thank you for your patience along the way – we appreciate it has taken a while for the Final CDP to wind its way through the necessary process. If you spot any technical or factual errors in the plan, please let the City know so it can be corrected. As always, our contact at the City is Bob Spicer. Please note that the blog will no longer be accepting posts. All correspondence must go through the City of Ottawa.

Centretown is evolving and shows no signs of slowing down. This CDP provides directions for shaping how the area can look and feel in the future. It identifies new community infrastructure and amenities that are required to ensure Centretown remains a liveable neighbourhood for everyone. It directs growth to certain locations, while steering it away from other locations. It presents solutions to some of Centretown’s most challenging urban conditions around mobility, built form and public spaces.

Already supported by the City, the community now needs to champion the plan to ensure that Centretown benefits from its recent growth spurt. The vision and initiatives presented in this CDP need to be carried forward by local residents – Centretown is your community to shape.

Thank You for a Great Open House!

A big thank you to everyone who came out to our final community open house on June 29th. Also, another big thank you to the Museum of Nature for allowing us to use their beautiful new space! It was a perfect space for the session. If you couldn’t make it last night, the summary information panels presented at the session can be downloaded here (5.5 MB PDF).

As a reminder, we are still accepting comments on the draft, so please provide them by July 15th. We will then revise the document over the summer. In the fall, it will be made available as part of the process to complete any necessary Official Plan Amendments / updates to the existing Secondary Plan.

Please provide any comments in writing to Robert Spicer, Community Planning and Urban Design Division City of Ottawa.

Hope everyone had a great Canada Day!

Ross

REMINDER: Final Community Meeting – JUNE 29!

Don’t miss your FINAL OPPORTUNITY to comment on the draft Mid-Centretown Community Plan. Our final Community Open House is scheduled for Wednesday June 29th at a terrific Centretown venue – the Museum of Nature! The session will run from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm in the third floor Salon with a formal presentation at 6:30pm, followed by a question and answer period. The team will be on hand to answer any detailed questions that you might have on the draft report or to hear any final ideas for what should be included in the Plan. Be sure to have a look at the draft report (you can download it from the post below this one). We have had great events so far, so we hope you will help us make the final one a lively and fun session. Plus, it is a great opportunity to have a good snoop at the wonderfully restored and modernized Museum of Nature!

Hope to see you this coming Wednesday!

Ross & the Project Team

The Draft Community Design Plan is Available!

Update: We heard some of you were having a hard time downloading the full document, so we’ve broken it down into individual chapters. The links are at the bottom of this post.

Well – here it is!

The team has completed the preliminary draft of the Mid-Centretown Community Design Plan. The full report has been posted on the blog for your review – we would love to hear your thoughts on the proposals for the future of Centretown. Please download the report and over the next couple of weeks share with us your thoughts, concerns or support for what you have read. We will review all feedback after June 13th, work to finalize the document, and then present the revised report back to the community at our final Open House on Wednesday June 29th at the Museum of Nature.

Centretown is evolving. Let us know if you agree with the recommendations presented for how Centretown can be made even better than it is today!

Download the report here or from the link on the sidebar to the right. Note that it’s a very large file (52 MB) so it may take some time to download.

Individual Chapters:

Chapter 1: The Study (19 MB PDF)
Chapter 2: Centretown Today (16 MB PDF)
Chapter 3: Centretown Tomorrow (11 MB PDF)
Chapter 4: Moving Around Centretown (9 MB PDF)
Chapter 5: Greening Centretown (18 MB PDF)
Chapter 6: Building Centretown (11 MB PDF)
Chapter 7: Implementation (3 MB PDF)

Blog Action: 2010 in Review

Here is a fun summary from our Blog Platform (Wordpress) on how we did over the last year with regard to postings and traffic. More than 5,100 people viewed the blog since May!

Thank You for a Great Session

As promised, the presentation that we gave and all of the information panels have been uploaded and are available here on the blog. Some files are very large, so please be patient when downloading. You can download these files either by using the “Project Downloads” sidebar on the right of this page (beneath the “Nov. 30 Open House” header), or by using the links at the bottom of this post.

After a bumpy ride back, we are now settled in Toronto and reflecting on Tuesday’s session – we thought that it went great and really appreciated the thoughtful comments and time that people have given to this project. There was a full-house turn-out of about 80 people (impressive for a dark, rainy night). We were most impressed with the cross-section of interests represented at the meeting and the many points of view expressed. It inspired a great discussion. Of course not everyone agreed on everything, but I think that we all agreed that Centretown is a great place, that it can be even better, and that this process can help to deliver some of the positive changes needed (with effort on everyone’s part).

We also wanted to apologize again for not having a fully accessible venue space for the event – that was a real shame and we were embarrassed about that oversight. We are already trying to secure a fully accessible event space for the third open house and think that you will be pretty excited with where we are planning to hold the next event.

Again – thank you for your help in shaping this plan for Centretown. We hope you will continue to provide feedback on the ideas and projects presented. Feel free to spread the word and collect other people’s views on some of these ideas. We also learned that some live-tweeting was going on at the event – great!! Click here to see current and recent tweets, and, if you’re a twitter user, use the #ccdp2011 hashtag to follow and participate in future twitter discussions. Let’s keep on getting the word out, collecting feedback on work already done and inspiring new ideas.

Nov. 30 Open House:

Presentation Slideshow (11 MB PDF)
Building Centretown Part 1 Presentation Panel (1.6 MB PDF)
Building Centretown Part 2 Presentation Panel (600 KB PDF)
Community Amenities Presentation Panel (550 KB PDF)
Greening Strategy Presentation Panel (508 KB PDF)
Mobility Strategy Presentation Panel (439 KB PDF)

REMINDER: Community Meeting #2 – TONIGHT!

Don’t forget the second Community Meeting for the Mid-Centretown Community Plan is being held tonight at Knox Presbyterian Church (120 Lisgar Street). The team will be on hand from 5:30pm, with a formal presentation at 6:30pm. Tonight’s Open House is about sharing with you with some of our emerging directions for the Community Design Plan on what the future of Mid-Centretown could look and feel like. We want to know your views on the vision, with a particular focus around such issues as mobility, community amenities, parks and public realm and intensification zones.

See you soon!

Join us for our next Community Open House

Our second community event is coming up on Tuesday, November 30th. The team will be at Knox Presbyterian Church at 120 Lisgar Street to present the emerging directions for what the future of Mid-Centretown could look, feel and be like. The night will include a presentation, a question & answer session and a series of themed activity stations (open space, amenities, transit, buildings) where you can talk one-on-one with team members about the ideas presented for the Plan.

We will be asking for your views on the vision, so please join us on November 30th to share your opinions and help bring to life the Community Plan.

Additional details about the event can be found here.

Midcentretown Tomorrow is Going Multimedia!

Update: Our first batch of reader-submitted photos have been uploaded! See below or the sidebar at the right for links to “Photos: The Good” and “Photos: The Not So Good.”

As important as words are, this blog seems to have an awful lot of them… So in an attempt to mix-it-up a bit and make the site (and the study) a bit more interesting for those of you who relate better to pictures or for those those don’t feel like writing a mini-novel as their contribution, we are creating opportunities for photographs and videos to be posted on the site as blog content.

After all, a picture says a thousand words, right?

Before the snow hits the ground, we are asking you to help generate blog content with your own photos or videos of Centrertown. Show us with your pictures what local issues are important to you, what places are important to you and should be protected or improved and what is the quality of character that Centretown should be striving for in the future.

To do this we have set up three image banks for you to share your pictures:

Centretown The Good: Send us your pictures of your favourite things in Centretown (buildings, businesses, streets, parks, people). Things that make you love living where you do.

Centretown The Not So Good: Send us your pictures of those aspects of Centretown that you think need the most help. Things that give you some cause for concern.

Centretown Tomorrow: Send us pictures of other places that you think Centretown should be like in the future – think of these as your inspiration for what Centretown could and should be. They can be photos you’ve taken on vacation from other great cities, or they can be photos you’ve seen online or in magazines that you think capture a great ‘urban vibe’ that Centretown should be striving towards. Think of these are the visionary photos.

Video: What is Your Centretown? For the video-savy, we are asking for you to show us in under 2 minutes what is important to you in Centretown. This can be filmed on your phone, on your digital camera or with a video camera. We want to hear you tell us why you think what you are filming is important (as part of your neighbourhood) and should be a priority in the study.

You can view these banks in three ways:

1) Click on the blue page titles in this post
2) Click on the “Multimedia’ tab at the top of the page and then click on the section titles within the text on that page
3) Click on the page titles in the sidebar to the right under the “Multimedia” section

We will be using a selection of your photos on the blog, for display in public forums and potentially as part of the CIP report.

You can send us your photos and videos via email by clicking here.

Let’s see where this takes us – hopefully it will bring interesting ideas and interesting images to the blog!

Can you improve Centretown without changing its streets?

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting a new discussion topic, ranging from Community facilities to defining the Character of Centretown, to generate dialogue about the future of Mid Centretown. We look forward to hearing your ideas in the comments.

Streets are the veins of our cities, moving people from one place to another using many different modes of transportation – cars, buses, bikes, skateboards, on foot, rollerblades, streetcars. Streets also help shape the physical form the city, giving it its structure and creating the addresses for different types of development.

Downtown streets are very different to suburban or rural streets. Unlike rural and suburban streets, which are focused mainly on moving traffic, a downtown street must perform multiple functions – it acts as a public meeting place, it creates an address for businesses, it beautifies the city and provides an it with an identity, all while moving many different types of users across the downtown (not just those in cars!).

Due to Centretown’s location at the gateway to downtown and its support of long feeder roads for the 417, the community has easy access to major transportation facilities, such as proximity to Highway 417 (The Queensway), the Transitway, major arterial roads, local transit and City / NCC multi-use pathways. However, this easy access comes at a price.

A major traffic issue is caused by the location of the community between the downtown and the Queensway. This proximity creates significant vehicular travel demand during the weekday peak periods on the north-south arterial roadways running right through the neighbourhood (Kent, O’Connor, Metcalfe, Bronson). The level of traffic on these streets at peak times generally contributes to a negative urban environment with respect to the volume, speed of traffic, use of road space, landscaping and viability of commercial retail along the one-way arterial roadways.

Delcan are currently exploring options for how we can improve the quality of streets across Centretown and begin to repair some of the damage done through ‘highway’ infrastructure. Click here to read their (593 KB) draft Mobility Position Paper which includes considerations around traffic, parking, cycling and public transit. The paper offers:

• a summary of the transportation context within the framework of the City of Ottawa’s Official Plan and other strategic planning documents;
• a qualitative overview of existing land use and transportation conditions;
• an overview of current and emerging transportation trends;
• an overview of transportation issues within the study area to be addressed by the CDP, and;
• an outline of future directions and next steps to be undertaken in further developing a transportation vision and framework as part of the CDP study.

Also provided is a Municipal Infrastructure Position Paper (2.5 MB), also by Delcan, that discusses some of the challenges of Centretown’s century old infrastructure – much of which is hidden underground and out of site (sewers, waste water, electrical, etc.).