During the highly contested 2005 mayoral election, the incumbent liberal Mayor Bob Chiarelli (center-right) faced a stiff challenge from the center-left candidate Alex Munter. After a few weeks of campaigning, the issue of Ottawa’s planned and approved light rail project came to dominate the election.
Enter the background. In the run-up to the election, the liberal mayor had pushed through the light-rail plan through city council claiming the deal, and federal funding, would expire if not signed before an election. Munter, his main challenger, took exception to the details of the plan, and to the manor in which it was rammed through city council. This struck a cord, while most Ottawan’s supported the idea of light-rail, many shared Munter’s skepticism about the project approval process.
Enter the dragon. A small group of downtown businesses formed the Albert/Slater Coalition to fight the proposed dedicated light-rail project. Initially the arguments held little sway, but the well financed coalition was organized and resourced, and consistently on message: light-rail would kill downtown business.
Enter the good ol’ boy – Larry O’Brien. A relatively unknown, Larry O, came into the race. For most of the campaign he ran a distant third. However, his zero-tax increase promise and vow as protector and champion of the business class garnered more and more support (a timely pay-off a rival right-winger also helped). Larry O took on the claims of the Albert-Slater Coalition as part of his pro-business platform. Munter’s attacks on Chiarelli’s force-play softened Bob’s appeal to suburban voters, and combined with an anti-Munter wave in the last weekend of the campaign, Larry O, the unknown and business allies were swept to power.
As reported in an earlier piece, O’Brien was a relative newcomer to city politics, and seemed to have few ideas on how to approach complex policy issues. He had for example, no fixed idea about light-rail beyond his concern for the Downtown business owners. Larry O waffled and wailed about light rail, switching his position here and there. Finally, his worship decided he was against the project, brought it back for a vote in City Hall, and with support from the east, west councilors left out of the north-south route, and rural right-wing fringe councilors, the project was shelved. During this debate, the concerns of the Albert/Slater Coalition emerged as one of the principal reasons for shutting down the plan. The Mayor made it clear that a downtown tunnel would be the only option. City Council acquiesced and voted in favour of studying the proposal for a 1B$ tunnel.
However, it was never quite clear who this Coalition was. For anyone who has walked, bused, driven or cycled down Albert of Slater street they would know it is a major transit artery with very few destination shops. The streets are dominated by small restaurants, coffee shops and other services that cater to the lunch-time crowd from adjacent office buildings. Moreover, the transit lanes make it near to impossible to actually park on the streets. Far from a mixed-use street celebrated by urbanites, the streets resemble the modernist Faustian bargain lambasted by Jacobs in 1961 and Berman in 1982.
The question then is why these seemingly unimportant businesses were able to trump the interest of Ottawa’s large commuting class. How did their interest outweigh those of the entire city? How were they able to fund their campaign? Why were businesses which would seemingly profit from increased foot traffic (which light rail invariably brings along with it) be against such a project?
After the dust had settled on this debate, and the light-rail defeated in city council, the Mayor appointed a special advisor on transit (this despite the fact that the city already had a transit plan). Once this report and others made their way through the City’s bureaucracy, the city release its four options for transportation – none of which considered a surface rail component. It was clear that the tunnel option was being favoured by the selection criteria – an option favoured by his business allies. Pedestrian users were being shoved off the street in favour of a subterranean enclosure.
Enter WB. Walter Benjamin’s literal explorations of the city, in such texts as Berlin Chronicle, One Way Street and most famously his Arcades Project, offer the urban observer a way to see the city and to draw out the hidden and invisible city. Benjamin offers a dialectic of seeing the city. Benjamin urges the urban observer to turning the city’s past inside out by referring and juxtaposing images of the past. Each of these images is meant to rub like a friction against the readers own life world. Each of these images of the city, as fragments of modernity, emblematic of a representation of ideas, demystify the present.
Benjamin’s childlike curiosity and a topographical imagination were stirred by the wonders of capitalist modernity, including utopian urban renewal projects. While he wrote in the first decades of the 20th century, industrialization and capitalism was pushing the boundaries of progress, and technology was fetishized as the material expression of progress. Urban networks: sewers, water works, electricity were being introduced at a rapid rate in the city to control the power of nature in the city. Technology in itself would improve living conditions and social environments and lead to a better world. Networks marked a new aesthetic form and also showed the extreme promise of engineering science. Being connected to a network was identified with being connected to the future, to progress and to the possibility of a better society. Among these urban renewal projects, the filth of industrialization of the 19th century led to the development of underwater sewers. By closing off the drainage of waste, engineers hoped to clean up the mess of industrialization. In the case of sewers, it created a divide between the underground and above, between light and darkness.
As Benjamin noted, the transfiguring form one to the other the debris of the messy past is cleared out to form a new neat natural image, forming a new wish image. The old residue is cleared away to make way for the up-to-date green development. Yet, new wish-images, are more than a fantastic collective consciousness. New utopias exist both in the physical structures of buildings and in the ephemeral celebrations.
The downtown tunnel, at the monstrous cost of 1B$ is an enourmous project with much utopian appeal. This colossal bid-dig project will solve the cities downtown transit woes. Yet, the tunnel might also be seen is a subterranean enclosure, a capitalist sewer ready to catch the unsuspecting viewer, drawing off from the surface urban life and hiding it in the tightly regulated private space of the tunnel and office tower megalith.
For this an Ode to Larry O’, for “every-time he comes so near I just want to shout "let's hear it for my man."” The Downtown Coalition can sing “he's my loving one-man show… what he does, he does so well.” Indeed, let’s hear if for the boy. When you’re caught in the labyrinth of capitalist pleasure and tunnel fetishism you’ll only have to thank the boy - and his business cronies.
