Abstract
David Gordon’s Town and Crown: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Capital is an ambitious attempt to chronicle the development of the capital city on a site both isolated yet strategically located on the Ontario–Québec border. Spanning the time period from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, Town and Crown deftly illustrates the jurisdictional squabbles that have complicated land use planning as the profession came of age in Canada. Gordon’s main theme is the conflict between the federal government and the fledgling municipal governments of Ottawa, Hull, and the outlying townships of Nepean and Gloucester.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters, most of which are the length of the average journal article; three of the chapters devoted to the postwar years are significantly longer. The chapters are structured around key historical events such as the choice of Ottawa as the new capital (chapter 4, which spans the key years leading up to the Confederation in 1858–1867) and the Depression and wartime years (chapter 9, which spans 1930–1944). Each chapter ends with a brief “Reflections” section on the particular era, with recommendations on what the political figures or organizations could have done to reduce sectarian squabbling and produce a more legible plan for the city. Archival photographs, maps, and artwork greatly contribute to the reader’s understanding of Ottawa’s development from temporary townsite to metropolitan region.
Ottawa was first envisioned to be a military town, so the planning of its townsite was not considered critical. The settlement was conceived as a temporary construction camp, without the usual lots reserved for places of worship, schools, courthouse, farmer’s market, hospital, or other public needs typically seen in the town plans of British North America. While it should have been possible to set aside these lands, and regulations for the layout of towns in each township were drawn up in 1790, the colonies could not afford the costs of surveying and protecting them. Many of the lots were given away by the young provincial governments, so there was no revenue to offset the cost of town plans. The failure to plan for the transition from construction camp to town had a lasting effect as the town’s purpose shifted from one of military defense to the seat of government for the nation.
At the heart of Gordon’s thesis is that many current planning struggles in the capital region can be traced back to the lack of vision in its early development: its social divisions, its sprawling growth, and the destruction of its innate natural beauty. When Ottawa was chosen to be the capital of Canada in 1857, the desire to build a capital worthy of the new nation began to take precedence over local planning concerns. However, the town missed its chance to develop a vision that expanded beyond Parliament Hill and local politicians refused to implement even the most carefully researched master plans, allowing industries and private interest groups almost free rein. By the time the Town Planning Institute of Canada was founded in 1919 and a series of federal commissions had begun to plan new boulevards and parkways, the damage had already been done: key sites that would have contributed to more harmonious land use planning were in private hands, vast swathes of forests had been destroyed, and there were longstanding conflicts between the town, township, provincial, and federal governments. Even such significant decisions as choosing a site for the war memorial and rebuilding Ottawa’s city hall after it had been destroyed by fire were hamstrung by the inability of the key players to collaborate or build consensus.
It is astounding how the local governments could have ignored key planning issues that were facing most other municipalities in Canada and the United States in the late nineteenth century. While most new municipalities prioritized improving urban conditions, Ottawa, Hull, and Nepean and Gloucester townships resisted the implementation of even the most basic municipal services. Since the federal government did not pay property taxes or contribute to municipal expenses until the postwar decades, Ottawa lagged behind other towns in building critical infrastructure: its first water filtration plant was built in 1932, twenty-five years after Toronto had installed theirs. This lag, combined with the lack of even basic planning for health and safety, contributed to public health epidemics such as cholera and typhoid.
In the postwar era, when urban renewal and the destruction of historic buildings became the modus operandi, governance within the region became increasingly convoluted. Reactive planning became the norm; the National Capital Commission realized that they would need a regional strategy to plan lands outside of the Greenbelt in the early 1960s, but by that time the land had already been bought by speculators. But during the 1950s, a brief “golden era of federal-local cooperation in Ottawa” (213) arose. Jacques Gréber’s 1950 plan for the capital was the first master plan to be implemented, and Ottawa finally acquired new roads and parkways, a sewer system and sewage treatment plant, and a new city hall.
Gordon’s writing reflects the eighteen years of research needed to produce this detailed chronology of the town’s growth and development. The extensive archival research, as well as the Reflections sections ending each chapter, support the text’s somewhat normative tone. The Cast of Characters section provided as an appendix at the end of the volume provides more in-depth biographical information on many of the key players in the Ottawa drama, but leaves out influential actors like Charlotte Whitton, the city’s first female mayor, and the Commission of Conservation, who were instrumental in early planning to protect natural resources. The in-depth details about the key players and their conflicts can at times overwhelm the reader and contribute to particularly lengthy chapters, but they do support Gordon’s main argument.
The book focuses heavily on the physical and land use aspects of planning, spending far less time on issues such as ecological or social considerations, which is perhaps a commentary on the town’s priorities. For example, Town and Crown presents the social dimensions of planning in the region only when they are strongly linked to governance or the built form, and rarely mentions the women, charitable groups, or community activists who were often involved in urban reform in areas such as public health and housing at the dawn of the North American planning discipline. The early chapters on the establishment of Ottawa and Hull include a profile of the Indigenous peoples who populated the region and their roles in European settlement in the area, but after that there is no discussion of the Indigenous communities. There is some discussion of the vast forest lands in the area and how they were systematically destroyed during the capital’s years as a struggling timber town, and discussion of the establishment of the greenbelt in the postwar years.
This book will no doubt be well used by students in planning, history, political science, and urban studies. The strict chronology of the chapters makes it easy to select one for use during a class on a planning trend or practice specific to an era, such as urban renewal, but more difficult to narrow down a section on a topic such as the planning process. Town and Crown is an in-depth read for anyone interested in planning history, governance, urban design, or land use planning.