In the late-1940s, Ottawa was a vastly different place from the city we know today. In spite of being Canada’s capital for 80 years, the city was still relatively small (just over 270,000 people on both sides of the river) and retained much of its industrial roots—especially its position as an important centre for the logging industry—and maintained a haphazard collection of poorly-built “temporary” office buildings to house a civil service that exploded in numbers during the war.
Several plans had been prepared throughout the first half of the 20th century to beautify Ottawa, but all wound up falling by the wayside, due to the First World War, Great Depression, and changes in the winds of political favour. It wasn’t until 1950, after several years of study, that a plan that would ultimately lead to the transformation of Canada’s capital would appear: the Plan for the National Capital General Report, more commonly known as the Gréber plan, after its chief architect, Jacques Gréber.
Though Gréber, a Frenchman, was primarily known for his work in the classical Beaux Arts style, he was also clearly influenced by the modernist movement within urban planning, as pioneered by fellow Frenchman Le Corbusier and American planning czar Robert Moses. In their minds, the modern city should be defined by open spaces, monumental buildings, and above all else, wide, fast highways allowing drivers to whiz quickly across the city.
Of course, the post-war Ottawa conformed to none of these ideals. At the time, there were no modern highways, the city was a confusing jumble considered unfit for a national capital, and many of its most scenic aspects were dominated by railways, as in the photo at the top of this article.
As far as Gréber was concerned, the solution seemed obvious: Ottawa would need to thoroughly modernized, and would become more beautiful as a result. The city needed more parks, and industry would have to relocate to the edge of town. Rails would be torn up and replaced with shiny new boulevards, helping to form a vast new network of roadways in the capital. In fact, when browsing the photos of the model of the plan, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of some of the proposed roadways, such as this shot, looking from modern-day Hurdman Park towards Parliament Hill. As is typical of the plan, there are wide boulevards lined (at a distance) by monumental buildings and memorials, with sweeping curves and gigantic roundabouts, looking less like a downtown core and more like a suburban office park.
Ultimately, of course, Gréber’s plan was only ever partially realized. While much of the green space he envisioned eventually materialized, and most of Ottawa’s downtown rail network was removed, other aspects of the plan (like his extensive highway network) remain incomplete to this day. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing—few Ottawans today would be impressed with highways running along the current Nicolas Street and Preston Street alignments. In fact, the auto-centric nature of the plan makes it easy for modern urbanists to dismiss it with a condemning sneer, but the reality of the plan is a bit more complex.
In the light of our post-Jane Jacobs cities, it’s easy to see the Gréber plan’s shortcomings, but when you consider the fact that it’s very much a product of it’s time, it’s possible to realize some positives in Gréber’s thinking. The plan is actually quite complimentary towards Ottawa’s leafy and green downtown neighborhoods, and while the loss of rail infrastructure in the city core is certainly lamentable, Gréber clearly recognized that surface railway tracks are detrimental to the urban environment. Of course, the flip-side of this is the fact that he didn’t understand that highways could and would come to play the same role.
What’s also interesting about the plan is how much it romanticizes the national capital. Take, for example, this passage from opening of the history chapter :
“Capital of the largest country in the two Americas, Ottawa profiles, in sharp relief, against an azure sky, an imposing and sculptural outline of monuments, churches and dwellings that rise, tier upon tier, from the height of her hills. Unfolding before her, at the confluence of two rivers, is a landscape of unique charm in which the variety of aspects adds itself to the harmony of the vistas…”
Similarly poetic writing can be found scattered throughout the plan—clearly it was intended to be something more than just another dry planning document, it was meant as a vision.
Oft-criticized, perhaps the biggest failing of the Plan for the National Capital General Report is, quite simply, its lack of follow-up. In the nearly six decades since the plan’s release, the National Capital Region has done little more than drift along, vaguely adhering to its now outdated ideals. Maybe it’s time for someone to come up with a new vision for Ottawa-Gatineau, something based on modern concepts of urbanism and development that can take us into the 21st century.
In writing this article use was made of the excellent resources on the Gréber Report maintained by the Department of Geography at Queen’s University, Kingston.