Imagine dining with a side of whimsy
Imagine closing the ByWard Market's George and York Streets to vehicles, painting or creating chalk art on the road, rolling in some wheeled trees, and setting up long tables and chairs for diners to enjoy one another's company.
Imagine, too, reducing parking on some of the cul-de-sacs off Preston Street, and instead growing fruits and vegetables there, and similarly allow restaurants to set up dining tables, thus reducing the distance from farm to table to just steps.
Imagine holding diverse, communal outdoor feasts on Argyle Avenue in Centretown, or attending artist-themed benefit dinners in Sandy Hill.
Imagine a “Winter Street” of mobile cabins and tents outside restaurants along Sparks Street or elsewhere.
“Date” cabins would seat just two people. “Social” cabins, three or four. And “Family” cabins could accommodate up to eight.
And just try to imagine an outdoor meal where dishes are delivered to you by a robotic bird. Whimsical? Absolutely. Impossible? Perhaps not.
These are just a few of the imaginings of Shelby Hagerman and Rehab Salama, recent master of architecture graduates at Carleton University's Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. On Monday, they released a 20-page handbook that suggests how Ottawa might reshape its outdoor dining experiences based both on pandemic experiences and restrictions, and solutions developed in other cities around the world.
Titled Dinner in the Street: Dining Safely and Socially in the Pandemic City and Beyond, the handbook hopes to get Ottawa residents, restaurateurs and public officials to consider ways to simultaneously address the physical-, social- and economic-health concerns that the pandemic has magnified.
“Dinner in the Street,” the handbook explains, “asks this central question: Can challenges of public health and spatial justice be served, literally, through dinners in the public realm?”
It's Hagerman and Salama's belief that they can, and that they can also improve life in a postCOVID-19 Ottawa.
“We wanted to reimagine public space, and how we could get together with community in a time of isolation,” Hagerman says.
“We wanted to see how design could help people on the front lines,” Salama adds, “and particularly the restaurants that were being heavily impacted.”
Inspired in part by the annual communal dinners held for the Azriela school's graduates, where as many as two dozen diners are seated at a single table, Hagerman and Salama began their research in April 2020.
Some of the elements they've incorporated — the robotic birds, for example — are perhaps more whimsical than practical, the idea borrowed from airports in Canada that use them to keep real birds away from jetliners' engines.
But other ideas in the handbook have already been adopted elsewhere.
For the past 16 months, Amsterdam diners have taken to glassedin, canal-side cabins for meals, where the intimacy of their close quarters is augmented by others similarly dining around them.
In Siena, Italy, meanwhile, long outdoor communal dinner tables winding through narrow streets have accompanied that city's twice-annual Palio horse races for centuries.
Another idea borrows from the Table for One pop-up restaurant in Ransäter, Sweden, which, consisting of just one table and a single chair in a meadow, hopes to takes the stigma out of dining alone.
“We took precedents from a lot of different sources,” says Hagerman, “and saw how we could localize them to Ottawa.”
They also consulted Ottawa restaurant owners and local officials.
It's the pair's hope that the ideas they've put forward aren't seen simply as measures for a pandemic, but ones that might also encourage conversations about how we consider community and public spaces, especially as some of the consequences of the pandemic — less traffic due to more people working from home, for example, or a general tendency away from physical closeness — bring about changes to our physical space and how we inhabit it.
“We hope to activate people's imagination about what the possibilities are for the future of dining, and how crazy and imaginative those can be, or how simple and practical,” Salama says.
“Maybe,” adds Hagerman, “this type of visual inspiration could lead to the public demanding more from their public spaces.
“We're not tangibly asking the public to want server birds specifically, but we're asking them to expand their imagination to what they might find in their dining experience.” bdeachman@postmedia.com
We wanted to re-imagine public space, and how we could get together with community in a time of isolation.