Last week a bunch of us were invitees to a “focus group” held by city contractors “THE PLANNING PARTNERSHIP”, out of Toronto.

Modest name that. Fancy multicolour business cards too, with irregular corners. Die cut. Oooooh.

The group encompassed a large number of planning professionals. They were slightly outnumbered by the Little Italy community invitees. The meeting started at 6.30 and the presentations    consultations    dialogue presentations went on til 9. It was a sort of slideshow of wonderful looking places. All elsewhere. That’s why it’s planning porn — beautiful but you can’t have it.

Drool and be frustrated.

Mind you, THE PLANNING PARTNERSHIP never claimed to have actually designed any of those places, so we don’t really know what they are capable of delivering. A fair number of the pretty pictures employed careful lighting and angles; having visited some of the sites over the last few years, the reality is always — just like porn — different from the expected. Indeed, they left Ottawa having taken a wonderful dappled shade picture of a micro-parkette in the ‘hood that is sure to grace their future slide shows elsewhere, illustrating what a wonderful neighbourhood they left behind here.

For pretty much every one of their ideas, we were able to mentally check off “that’s what we proposed X years ago and got rejected on”. By the end, I was wondering if they were channeling the readers’ suggestions from this blog and previous neighborhood charettes/charades.

Consulting Architects have one big advantage over community groups. Lots of money for graphic artists to produce wonderful charts and illustrations. For Carling Avenue, they showed raised planter beds down a wide centre median, planted with giant growing trees. Didn’t matter the city rejected this concept just two years ago, claiming if we want pretty, look to NCC lands, the City builds for utility.

But worse, the gods from the centre of the universe showed a map identifying said wonderful planted median as extending through the entire study area. And what of turn lanes (much of the median is actually narrow)? And what of the city plans to build new longer turn lands for the entire Preston-Booth section, reducing the centre median to a minimal paved curb?

And wait, Carling is 3+ lanes in each direction; their pretty pic showed just two. What happened to the third? Ah well, the city is reconsidering its transit priorities and maybe the need for transit on Carling will change.

Really.

Selling pretty pic of what you can’t have is still porn.

And those trees. Channeling local residents, they noted that the City only plants toy trees, not big ones, like Oaks and Chestnuts. So they provide a new tree schedule for the city, complete with pretty picture, height charts, canopy spread. Reminded me of long-ago  grade six projects with a little bit of content fluffed out with a lot of frames, borders, and decoration. And just where did they propose to plant these giant trees? Not in backyards, but in “public realm”. On width-challenged Little Italy streets? Well, maybe in the park or on the OTrain path (oops, community won that fight last year when we badgered the city into planting oaks, chestnuts, maples and other larger trees (lost on the burr oaks, walnuts, and butternut trees, though …) on the wide north part of the OTrain path. So that leaves the park on Beech.

Speaking of the OTrain, I asked about the unique Ottawa environment. You know, ice storms. Will the City permit large trees and branches to overhang the tracks? Some time ago I saw a City standards sheet for planting along the rail corridors, it drew a line up and way from each rail at a 45 degree angle. This was the sterile zone into which no plant material could stray, lest it one day fall on the wires or the tracks. Now if you apply that to the depressed tracks in the OTrain cut, you pretty much rule out anything much bigger than a lilac shrub in the corridor between the Qway and Carling. This doesn’t stop the City from showing “concept” pictures to the community showing abundant spreading trees beside the proposed tracks, and it didn’t appear to worry our consultants last week either.

They had the obligatory pretty porn pic of courtyard streets, you know, the house-wall to house-wall brick pavers. Landscaping that only occasionally shows up, and almost always on upscale private courtyards.  But when it came to actually seeing what they propose for our dead end streets, it was the standard sidewalk glued to the curb, parking, traffic lanes, etc. No room for the nice stuff. Did someone from the neighbourhood ask for more Cambridge Street-style Woonerfs?  Oops, better glide past that one quickly.

And how will the Consultants from the Centre of the Universe square the BIA demand for more parking with the consultants suggestion the little streets have only one-side parking permitted? Err, not enough time to discuss that here tonight, but “that’s a good one”.

My personal, gut feel after the porn show was it was George Dark Revisted. With all the same slights of hand. “Look at this pretty picture, don’t you want that! Let’s discuss.” Meanwhile, with their other than they are busy facilitating the wholesale replacement of the existing urban neighbourhood with megabuildings. The porn stuff is all “illustrative” of course; whereas the rezoning and deliverables to developers is always nailed down in law.

Is Walmart tried that “bait and switch” they’d be up in court right some fast. But it is par for the course for City planners and their consultants.

Most incredibly, the consultants top dog transportation planner loudly proclaimed he was ignorant of the proposed mews streets along the railway tracks, wasn’t aware of the Dark proposal, or what was wrong with it,  and gosh golly gee could we perhaps enlighten him as to what we might (mistakenly) believe was wrong with the idea? It was of course purely a serendipity that he had arrived at  the meeting with new proposals for inserting streets along the OTrain corridor. Purely coincidence. Must be such a naturally obvious good idea, eh?

Or was a red cape to keep the peons focused over here while the planners rearranged the neighbourhood over there?

At 8.50, the laptops slammed shut, the projector was unplugged, and and with much junior staff urgent whispering about having to get out by 9, the meeting unraveled.

Downward consultation: lots. Upward feedback, reaction, or identification of wants: token. But there was the audible sound of pencil ticking off the consultation  box in the PERT chart: DONE.

Done in.