Ottawa must get better. That’s what came out of the City Debate at SAW Gallery after the Jan. 25 screening of Urbanized, a film by Gary Hustwit about how cities around the world cope with competing interests and disparate visions.

If the urbanists in the room were looking for a debate to kick off the SAW City Debate series, they didn't get much of one. In one corner was the Ottawa Citizen’s Andrew Cohen. In the other, the Globe and Mail’s Barrie McKenna. Both wrote controversial columns about why Ottawa's not a great city (see Cohen here and McKenna here. When they hit newsstands, both pieces attracted quite a bit of attention.

Cohen and McKenna are both native Montrealers, both returned to Ottawa after stints in Washington and both seemed to agree: Ottawa is a good city, not a great city.

McKenna cut the nation's capital some slack after watching Urbanized, which includes a claim that in Mumbai, there's one toilet for every 600 people. By comparison, said McKenna, “Ottawa’s problems are small and fixable.”

But they are many—a “catalogue of complaints,” according to Cohen—and many of them are decades old. Why did the city subject the NHL to suburban exile at Scotiabank Place? Will anyone please fix Sparks Street?

Among the evening’s gripes and goals:
 

• Cohen asked why the Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian embassies get pride of place on Sussex Avenue.

 

• McKenna said the federal government’s decision to buy the old Nortel campus on Carling Avenue is an urban planning disaster, because it ships workers out to the suburbs without a viable transit option.

 

• McKenna said the city should: build light rail that connects Gatineau and Ottawa (run by a single operator); move trucks away from the Byward Market; transform Metcalfe Street into a tree-lined boulevard to Parliament Hill; construct a roof on Sparks Street; and move Scotiabank Place downtown.

 

• Cohen’s fixes included a new central library; a covered Byward Market (akin to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market); a Museum of Science; a National Portrait Gallery; a campaign for public art; and a joint Scandinavian embassy at the former Canada and the World Pavillion.

 

• Cohen on Ottawans’ complacency in the face of the OC Transpo bus strike: “In Paris, they’d burn down the Hotel de Ville.” He said outrage is a “foreign emotion” in Ottawa.

 

• McKenna is willing to give up his parking spot on Parliament Hill. He said the parking for media and staffers alike should be turned into a park.

A final thought from the audience: an attendee named Liam from Toronto said he came to Ottawa for a party, and hasn’t left two years later. His assessment? Cohen and McKenna were demonstrating a self-loathing that is part of Ottawa’s problem.

Photo by Pier-Luc Bergeron via Flickr.