City’s social contract is breaking down
The city’s social contract with citizens is breaking down, says Erwin Dreessen.
In 2017 and last year, TVO broadcast a fascinating series by Canadian-Danish urbanist Mikael Colville-Andersen entitled The Life-Sized City. In each of the 12 cities he visited around the world (including Windsor/Detroit and Montreal), a common theme was how empowering neighbourhoods results in more innovative solutions to urban form and more satisfactory living. A neighbourhood’s quality of life improves when its residents are intimately involved in shaping its future.
Empowering neighbourhoods was much in fashion in the 1980s and ’90s in Ottawa. A key way toward that goal was to develop neighbourhood plans that embodied the vision, key principles and specific land use designations of the area, within the framework of the municipality’s main Official Plan. This gave residents a real sense of ability to control what their neighbourhoods should look like and how they should evolve.
Before amalgamation, the old City of Ottawa, as well as Nepean, dedicated significant resources to developing neighbourhood plans. Through extensive consultation with each community, a consensus resulted. The plans were then distilled into so-called Secondary Plans (SPs) which were approved by council and gave them the force of law. Smaller Ottawa-Carleton municipalities, including a number of villages, had their own official plans.
By the time of amalgamation in 2001, the new Ottawa had about 36 such secondary plans on the books, including former municipalities’ official plans, all collected in Volume 2 of the new City’s Official Plan that was adopted in 2003. Since then, some 26 additional secondary plans have come into force.
In addition, much effort has gone recently into development of so-called Community Design Plans (CDPs). In greenfields such as Kanata North and Riverside South, these efforts have been led by developers — part of progressing from designated Urban Expansion Area to more detailed planning of the new community. In established areas, the term is essentially the new name for neighbourhood plans. Although CDPs are approved by Ottawa council, they have no force in law unless they are translated into a secondary plan.
Have such planning efforts over the past 30 years empowered neighbourhoods? Answering that question would be an useful research topic for urban planners. An equally interesting question is whether the amendments to secondary plans, old and new, which have been numerous, have enjoyed significant consensus of the community.
Recent events suggest that the answer is no, that the trust that had been built up between the city, landowners and the community in achieving the plan, has subsequently been broken. That was clearly the case when, in July 2018, council approved an amendment to the Bayview Station SP (originally adopted in 2013), allowing three high-rises of 65, 56 and 27 storeys as the proponent wished, in place of the 30-storey height limit specified in the SP. Community members came out in droves, protesting lack of information — clearly, not enough effort had been put into achieving a consensus. The planning department’s rationale was that the taller buildings would have the same number of units, missing the point completely.
This June 27, four items before planning committee each involved disrespect for secondary plans. The one that received the most media attention was the shocking failure of The Regional Group, facilitated by planning staff, to respect the agreements that had been built up over many years on the development of the former Oblate lands in Old Ottawa East. Another decision changed the Scott Street SP (originally adopted in February 2014) and a third modified the Wellington Street West SP (originally adopted in 2011), both over the objections of the local community associations and citizens. A fourth item involved an interpretation of “transition” in the SP for Riverside Park that ignored building heights; the plan had been adopted before amalgamation.
These actions by planning staff and Ottawa council are ominous signs of a willingness to breach a social contract, and counteract any objective to value and empower neighbourhoods. They reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of what neighbourhood planning is about and feed into public disillusion with the planning process.
As part of the desire to come up with a brand new Official Plan, staff has suggested that Volume 2 plans and policies “will be reviewed to remove duplication or conflicting policies and directions.” Will that involve seeing the existing secondary plans only as technical details and ignoring that they represent the aspirations of a community? Given the time frame involved (the whole project is to be wrapped up by March 2021) there will be little opportunity to ask what the neighbours think or to build on community visions. In fact, as two councillors have said in light of the events on June 27, citizens see little incentive to participate in planning exercises seeing how easily council sides with whatever a proponent wants, never mind what the community thinks.
Nothing less than a culture change for both planning staff and council is required to turn this around.
Erwin Dreessen is a longtime community activist.