[Mille Sabords]

The Devcore proposal was terrible for several reasons: (1) it treated the entire Lebreton area as a series of "sites" with no urban fabric between them - and the flashy tourist attractions were basically standalone buildings on top of a gigantic parking garage; (2) very weak residential component, segregated to the south along Albert, with none toward the river; (3) poor north-south connectivity - in effect, Lebreton would've been sliced into two very disconnected areas: the Wellington corridor with its tourist attractions; and the Albert corridor with its residences; (4) a car museum? really? (5) a bunch of other flashy, easy-to-render, feel-goody things that were by and of themselves not "wrong" but, again, shown as "sites" independent of an urban fabric, or in abstraction of one, (6) the arena was too close to one of the stations, not between the two, and way too self-contained - again, not part of a restored city grid and not even trying to be "of the city" but very much a "pod" on its own.

It's a snazzy, snake-oil-salesman approach to redeveloping a piece of land that is one-third the size of downtown Ottawa. It's tugging on the easy heartstrings without doing any of the real heavy lifting in true city-building. It delivered a bunch of g-spots, independent of each other and interchangeable but without any real connecting tissue. And above all, it's basically a car-centric design posing as the opposite.