On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Watching this as I job-search and write and otherwise network...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08wpjlVFtKo

You remember this poll?

Decided to go with an option unpicked to date by anyone: Stumptown Vol. 4: The Case of the Cup of Joe. Greg Rucka wrote it, he helped me out with some research on something I co-wrote a little over twenty years ago, and a lot of his stuff's entertained me over the decades since then. So he gets a little more of what I can spare, effective today. I pick the book up on Saturday.

Other titles I'm either reading, re-reading or trying to make time for right now, whether by my own finances or with the public library's help:

• Glimpses of Cumberland Township - For the Honour of Our Ancestors - Cumberland Township Historical Society
• The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent
• Star Trek: Discovery - Wonderlands by altariel
• Obscure Ottawa by Ray Corrin
• Earth by David Brin
• Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power (Yes, she's a Biden appointee nowadays.)
• Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen
• Draplin Design Co. - Pretty Much Everything by Aaron James Draplin
• This Day in Vancouver by Jesse Donaldson
• How to Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier
• On Property by Rinaldo Walcott
• The Library Book: An Overdue History of the Ottawa Public Library by Phil Jenkins
• Trumpocalypse by David Frum
• Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks
• Cartographic Grounds - Projecting the Landscape Imaginary by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim

Another incomplete list, and I'm not going to be able to get to all of them, anymore than I managed with the March 2021 list.

I make no guarantee as to whether I'll be able to finish reading all of these, and several are loans from the local library.

• As I Walked About - A Collection of Walking Columns from the Ottawa Citizen - Phil Jenkins
• Star Trek: Picard - The Dark Veil - James Swallow
• The Information - James Gleick
• Glimpses of Cumberland Township - For the Honour of Our Ancestors - Cumberland Township Historical Society
• In Defense of Housing - David Madden and Peter Marcuse
• Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - Douglas Rushkoff
• Cartographic Grounds - Projecting the Landscape Imaginary - Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim
• Thunderbird - Jack McDevitt
• Tracing The History of Your House in Ottawa - City of Ottawa Archives
• Packaged Toronto - A Collection of the City's Historic Design - Matthew Blackett, Wayne Reeves and Alexandra Avdichuk

The first time I ever spotted any of their locations was when when I was passing through the Laurel/Loretta intersection on my way from somewhere else to another elsewhere. I think the Laurel Street site was their first ever.

Someone of you remember a more recent image of Blair Station's interior, one of the sites along the O-Train network where they've agreed to rent space from OC Transpo and/or the Rideau Transit Group, I think.

Getting back to a theme discussed before: backing down from dreams is a thing that Ottawa seems to do a lot of.

There’s a bit of evidence for that theory that most people are likely to ignore in their daily travels throughout Centretown. If you’ve ever looked at the north-facing side of the eastern tower of the World Exchange Plaza, you might have seen it without noticing yourself. Inside the shopping-mall portion, the first three floors before they closed up the six-screen movie theatre on the third to refit it into office space, it’s slightly more difficult to ignore.



There’s this staircase on the north side that goes up from the food court on level two. The space that it leads to serves as a greenhouse now, but it was originally built to be the vestibule connecting the World Exchange to the Sparks Street Mall. There was, in the original plan, an enclosed, elevated walkway that would allow foot traffic between the World Exchange and Sparks Street. If there’s imagery of that aspect of the plan online and viewable by the public at the moment, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I don’t know why that part of the plan went by the wayside, but the vestibule – with then-functional doors – was part of the finished building. The walkway never happened.

There’s similar stories across the city. The five-screen theatre that was supposed to be the third floor of the last real expansion of the main building at Place d’Orléans Mall, for one. The unbuilt portions of Moshe Safdie’s original design for the expansion of what used to be Ottawa City Hall and is now the Diefenbaker Building at the north end of New Edinburgh and Lowertown. The freeway network imagined by Jacques Gréber and company that we now see still only pieces of, aside from the Queensway. Probably more than that missing from this particular narrative.

Since we already have two books in a series entitled Unbuilt Toronto, thanks to author and historian Mark Osbaldeston, we can begin to imagine the contents of such a book focused on the dreamed-of-and-still-unmade ideas for Ottawa. We need such a book, just as we need a proper historical atlas of the region. There are at least three different models we could consider for that book that come to my mind, and all three of them need more time and either ink or bandwidth than we have time for right now to explain and debate properly.

Hopefully, in my next writings on the subject, I can revisit those three models of historical atlas properly. Preferable, the books that I’m thinking of will be in hand as well. Especially in the case of an in-person discussion.

spacingottawa_feed is now a thing here on Dreamwidth. If you're interested in urban infrastructure in Ottawa-Gatineau...

Random stuff is random.

I don't work nights, but I do wonder about similar consequences resulting from other ways of achieving lack of sleep.

There's a project in Toronto devoted to rethinking Toronto's history and culture...through its street names. It's got me wondering about Ottawa now.

Re: Alternative maps of Canada...the Huffington Post noticed something of interest happening on Reddit devoted to that subject. What changes would you make to our national map if you were of a mind?

If anyone's got recommendations re: Canadian coursework along similar lines, let me know.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-001j-introduction-to-urban-design-and-development-spring-2006

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-027-city-to-city-comparing-researching-and-writing-about-cities-spring-2006

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-204-planning-communications-and-digital-media-fall-2004/

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/urban-studies-and-planning/11-302j-urban-design-politics-spring-2010