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Un-Built Ottawa 2

Un-Built Ottawa 2: More City-Warping Mega-Projects . . . that Never Happened
An "Artist's Impression" of an early proposal for Confederation Square.
An "Artist's Impression" of an early proposal for Confederation Square.

This walk is co-sponsored by Ottawa Architecture Week.

Click for info on Jane's Walk and the list of walks for OAW 2026.

In 2024, Jane’s Walk veteran Dennis Van Staalduinen led a tour for Ottawa Architecture Week called "Un-Built Ottawa." That walk explored the downtown sites of 13 mind-blowingly ambitious mega-projects that had been proposed, approved, and announced, but then failed to actually materialize. We heard the stories of a Milan-style Rideau Street plaza and a Parliament Hill fortress, plus a 17-lane cross-town Expressway, a downtown Skyway, a Georgian Bay Seaway, a Wellington Street subway, and lots of dreams of parks, ceremonial parkways, and obscenely huge parking-garages. For this updated and expanded sequel walk, Dennis will touch briefly on all of those projects from the earlier walk, with new images and stories from some brand-new research. 

But the focus for OAW 2026 will be more than a dozen additional mega-projects that Dennis can’t wait to share—with a special emphasis on ideas that would have radically altered Ottawa’s relationship with our waterfront spaces. These additional projects range from the somewhat-credible to the absolutely crazy. But all of them were completely serious proposals that were intended to solve a problem and/or confer wonderful benefits, and all were announced in the same breathless “transformational” language that we still hear from our leaders today. 

Let’s imagine them together! 

Location
Route

We'll meet at the south side of the National War Memorial in Confederation Square. From there, we will step into the past and envision how our city might be different today if each of these projects had been completed. The visualizing will take place around Wellington St. and Parliament Hill. We'll work our way Westward along Wellington along the top of the escarpment for the first part of the walk, then descend to river level toward the end near Richmond Landing / Lebreton Flats.


Accessibility: The walk will follow city sidewalks and paved pathways. Please keep your 'visualizations' tidy and free of construction debris ;>).



About the walk leader

Dennis Van Staalduinen is a local performer, community organizer, and an advocate for human-scale urban development. He loves discovering the hidden connections between cities, stories, and history. Over the years has led more than a dozen well-atended walks for Jane's Walk, including 'Sir John A. Macdonald Gets an Eyeful,' 'Necropolis Now! Monuments to Dead People,' 'Ghosts of Wellington Street’, and “Manifest Discrepancy, Ottawa’s Uneasy History With Americans.”.


Ottawa Architecture Week: Festival of Design and Imagination is an annual week-long festival that welcomes everyone to explore architecture, urbanism, art, and design in Ottawa. It is presented by the Ottawa Regional Society of Architects (ORSA) with the help of local volunteers and businesses.

Guide:

Dennis Van Staalduinen

When:
Date:Sun Sep 20, 2026
Time:2:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours
Language: English
Where:
Start: National War Memorial, Confederation Square
End:near the Supreme Court of Canada
Area:Centretown/Parliament Hill
Distance:1.5 kms
View in Google Maps
Accessibility:

The walk will follow city sidewalks and paved pathways.

Walker Sign-up

Signing up is not required for this walk. If you plan to attend, by signing up you will help us estimate the group size. Please submit your email and the number of walkers that will be attending with you below.

Gallery
An "Artist's Impression" of an early proposal for Confederation Square. Artist's concept of the view of Parliament from the Grand Metcalfe Boulevard. Canada's National War Memorial, Confederation Sq.
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