Quote:
Originally Posted by Uhuniau
Central Ottawa has some of Ottawa's best, and best-used green spaces, including Dundonald, Minto, and St. Luke's parks. Yes, most of the big, federally-owned "green spaces", with the exception of Confederation Park, are useless grass.
However, apart from measuring against the arbitrary and meaningless guidelines for how much park space a population is supposed to have, central Ottawa has plenty of park space. Ottawa needs more urbanity, not more grass. It needs better buildings and better enclosed spaces, not edge vacuums and ceremonial nothings. Pyongyang has lots of big ceremonial open spaces for them that are into that sort of thing.
That's a feature, not a bug. Ottawa has the same amount of park space, or more, given its area and population, just chopped up differently.
I do not take it as self-evident that there is a set point of parks that a city needs or that its population is somehow entitled to, and I despise greenspace-fetishism in every form.
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I'm not looking for more "greenspace" - central Ottawa has lots of "greenspace" (lawns of federal buildings, lawns of parkways, the CEF, Rideau Hall lawn, giant cemetaries, Hurdman, Lebretton, wasteland on the side of the highway). What central Ottawa lacks is parks that support activities other than grass admiring, flag admiring and MUPing.
Tiny neighborhood parks with one or two potential uses are nice, and the other cities I have mentioned have such tiny neighbourhood parks as well. But in addition to those, most cities have large parks that support a wider variety of activities and act as a destination.
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