How protests put Ottawa’s capital-city flaws on display

From late January, when the first protesters’ trucks and cars piled into downtown Ottawa, to mid-February, when the Canadian government enacted emergency laws to remove them from the streets, Canada’s capital city of Ottawa was locked down. But it turns out, the reasons why the protests proved uniquely disruptive to the people who actually lived there were actually baked into the city’s very design. In the first episode of City Space’s second season, we look at how we design and choose capital cities, why capitals reveal the story of the country as a whole, and what Ottawa’s failures tell us about the broader Canadian project. Adrian speaks to Dave Amos, planning professor at California Polytechnic State University and the host of City Beautiful, a YouTube channel about urban design, about exactly how a capital city is built and what it’s meant to do. Plus Andrew Waldron, architectural historian and Canadian heritage conservationist, explains how the layout of Ottawa doomed the city to chaos when protesters occupied the roads and the core.