After a five-year delay, Canada Lands Company has resumed plans for a major new development at the former Canadian Forces Base Rockcliffe, with the first public meeting scheduled for fall.
However, the crown corporation has backed off a previous plan that aimed to create a model of environmental sustainability and contemporary urban design.
“We’re not looking to just pull out the old plan and keep going,” says Robert Howald, vice-president of real estate for CLC, which sells surplus federal property to the private sector.
“We’re looking to revisit the property. It’s five years later. The marketplace has changed. The communities in the area have changed. The whole financial structure of the world has changed.”
Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, a member of the planning and design team for the earlier $500,000 master plan, calls it a lost opportunity to demonstrate new ways of living in harmony with nature.
“I’m very disappointed,” Kuwabara says. “We spent a lot of time. I thought it was a moment of real innovation.
“Ottawa is full of smart people who we thought would want to live in a forward-looking sustainable community,” he says. “Is that all thrown out the window?”
The former base is bounded by Montreal Road to the south, Rockcliffe Parkway to the north, Blair Road to the east and the Aviation Parkway to the west. It is prime development land, just 5.5 kilometres east of Parliament Hill.
In 2006, CLC unveiled a project called Rockcliffe Landing, a community of between 10,000 and 15,000 people.
Billed as a showcase community for 21st-century urban life, the proposal showed eight distinct neighbourhoods made up of stores, offices and 4,500 to 6,000 houses and apartments. Land was set aside for a museum or a federal institution.
The plan aimed to protect the escarpment, the existing landscape and create green corridors that link the Montfort Woods and the National Capital Commission lands toward the Ottawa River.
The energy-efficiency research of the neighbouring National Research Council, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology were to be demonstrated in the houses and commercial buildings.
The project focused on preservation of landscape, quality of architecture and urban design, carbon footprint reduction and public transit. It was to to be the largest eco-town in Canada.
“There are very few sites like this,” Kuwabara says. “You’re right on the river. It’s a very privileged location in the national capital.”
In 2007, a land claim by the Algonquins of Ontario blocked the sale of the 125-hectare site by the Department of National Defence to CLC.
The $27.2-million sale went through last spring after the Algonquins struck a $10-million deal with the federal government.
The deal gives Algonquins the right to buy part of the site and develop it, in keeping with CLC’s overall plan.
“There’s some form of commemoration of the Algonquin First Nations experience in the Ottawa area that could find way its way into park design or street signage,” Howald adds.
The CLC will hire a land-use planning consultant soon. It is reviewing market reports, water and sewage reports, and traffic studies.
“What we have been doing more than anything else is poring over the work that had been done five years ago to see what needs to be updated,” Howald says.
“We’re trying to gauge what level of development that site can support with the realities of traffic and getting on and off the site. We’re assessing what the constraints are.”
The base is surrounded by residential communities: Rothwell Heights to the east, Fairhaven and Thorncliffe Village to the south, and Manor Park, Rockcliffe Park and Vanier to the west.
The five-year project delay means “you have to re-look at what kind of development a marketplace could support,” Howald says. “It could end up being quite similar to what it was before, but we need to undertake that exercise once again.
“Some of those higher-order philosophies that we had in place around sustainability, those will still be very strong in our efforts.”
Howald says the next step is to contact community associations.
After a public open house in the fall, there will be two more public meetings. By the second and third meetings, at the end of 2012 and in spring of 2013, a community design plan will be presented for feedback.
After going through the municipal planning process, CLC will put in roads and the services and then sell serviced lots to builders.
“CLC intends to continue with its tradition of building great communities in Canada, by using innovative and environmentally sustainable design plans for the development of our Rockcliffe project,” CLC spokeswoman Antoinette Bozac says.
CLC embraces New Urbanism, an urban design movement that promotes pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighbourhoods with narrow lots, tightly knit streets and a neo-traditional architecture of porches and pitched roofs.
Examples of CLC projects include Garrison Woods and Garrison Green, built on the former Canadian Forces Base Calgary. The third phase, Currie Barracks, is being built to LEED-ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Neighbourhood Development) guidelines. LEED is an internationally recognized, green building program.
Typical development, including New Urbanism, starts with laying out streets and blocks, Kuwabara says. “We started with landscape.” The aim was to regenerate and keep as many natural features as possible.
“Most developers don’t do it this way,” he says. “They preserve what they have to preserve, and then they just try to get as many lots in as possible. There’s always the bottom-line investment. To my mind they’re stepping back because it’s easier.
“They made it pretty clear to us that, even if we submitted, they wouldn’t pick us because they know we took a position on it. Everybody was saying the value was on the side closest to the river. I was saying, ‘No, the value has to be distributed throughout the entire site and you do it through restoration of the landscape.’ ”
Ken Greenberg, a Toronto urban designer with projects throughout North America and Europe, was also on the original design team. He says it would be a “terrible shame” if the project turned out to be a conventional suburban development.
Christophe Credico of the Manor Park Community Association says they hope to see meaningful public consultation, mitigation of negative impacts and “a world-class example of a modern, sustainable, mixed-use urban development.”
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Rockcliffe+development+back+planning+stage/6758304/story.html#ixzz1xUqexOaJ
Souce: The Ottawa Citizen
Article by: Maria Cook