The New Orleans

This is awful. I hope they’re okay.

Seasonal traffic calming measures aren’t sufficient.

We need the city to invest in @schoolstreetsyow.bsky.social

Yes, totally. This is awesome. Seasonal veggies, basic staples for the most part.

I'd like a 100 mile food store. I'm very basic for food ingrediants. I'd like an alternative to major food chains. I'd like to be able to drop in for fresh meat and veg every 3-5 days. Or call for kid on bike delivery within a few hours.

Single home on big corner lot

Corner lot retail and community space with two affordable apartment units above

We need a “15 Minute City Community Land Trust that builds affordable+ walkable corner lot units.

Corner lot infill with ground floor retail with more floors

“Needs more neighbours”

You certainly don’t mean like this? 😂

I had to write a prompt that would write another prompt to get to my current mostly coherent output.

But we want to know what you think! If you had an infill project like this in your neighbourhood, what type of small business would you be most excited to work at, or feel comfortable with your kids working at, right close to home? Let us know below! 👇

It’s golden hour in autumn (look at those colors!), and the integrated community is already active. On the corner lot, with separate, well-defined entries, these small businesses are a perfect fit. This is about creating truly walkable communities.

For planners, developers, and communities, it’s the fastest, most effective way to see what's possible and align on a vision before a single brick is laid. This shot captures a perfect execution: a four-story building that respects its neighbours with careful setbacks and matching brickwork.

The easiest way to visualize this mixed-use infill concept—integrating apartments with a local market and yoga studio right in a suburban Ottawa neighborhood—was to get help from AI.

#UrbanPlanning #InfillDevelopment #MixedUse #WalkableCities #SmallBusiness #LocalJobs

✨New Post✨ Choosing a path for Orléans. 🏘️ Freeze housing and local shops, and we watch taxes climb while services vanish. Or, allow more homes + mixed-use spaces to stabilize our bills and fund the neighborhood we want. It’s decline vs. a village that pays for itself. 📉📈 #SuburbanVillage #Orleans

Flyer for the Eastern Ottawa Urbanism Club, which meets Tuesdays over lunch.

✨Introducing✨ the Eastern Ottawa Urbanism Club, a weekly (virtual) social gathering for fans of good city-making practices in the east end of Ottawa. Follow the link to get your invite, first meeting is March 3rd.

theneworleans.ca/urbanism-club/

How a Waterloo suburban neighbourhood is becoming urban After trying everything else, Northdale embraces a wholesale transformation in its built form.

Probably worth updating the story (any journalists interested?) but here's my writeup on how Northdale got on this trajectory from almost a decade back

✨New Post✨ Choosing a path for Orléans. 🏘️ Freeze housing and local shops, and we watch taxes climb while services vanish. Or, allow more homes + mixed-use spaces to stabilize our bills and fund the neighborhood we want. It’s decline vs. a village that pays for itself. 📉📈 #SuburbanVillage #Orleans

Thanks, will do

Very cool! I like the idea that it's convertible too!

Suburban Villages!! Any luck with mixed-use?

Comparison street view images of Sunview Street in 2009 and 2025. 2009 shows a pretty conventional suburban street with 1950s era bungalows. 2025 shows some of the same bungalows, but now there's a bunch of urban mid-rise apartment buildings around too.

I'm a broken record about how remarkable the transformation in Waterloo's Northdale neighbourhood is. If we could figure out a repeatable formula for mid-rise upzoning for low-car streets, we could achieve amazing things

I’ve also been thinking about this!

3. Re-establishing the commuter express routes, at least until the LRT east and west extensions are both fully operational and until we can safely run a full complement of trains and cars again;

4. Rejecting development sprawl that forces the City to provide bus services beyond the urban area.

Truth be told: follow this account to get to the heart of the matter: the real truths behind urban design, dispelling the myths and misinformation that affects how we think about our places. Give @urbantruth.bsky.social a follow and join the movement to make #PlacesForPeople

Like I've been saying!!
Suburban Villages!

This is good advice every day, assuming of course that your local city or suburb hasn’t been specifically and deliberately designed to make you essentially car dependent… #UrbanTruth

Food, Hardware, and Medical – Taking the Village Test – Part 2 Village Test Methodology +Village Test Methodology Note: This will be repetitive if I do an article for each type of amenity, so we're grouping. Today, we're covering Gas and Corner/Convenience Stores, Restaurants and Grocery Stores, Pharmacies and Medical/Dental offices, plus Hardware Stores. In this grouping of seemingly unrelated services and amenities, you'll find some groupings. Basically all of these categories have regular needs and are less likely to be 'luxuries'.

Local shops like this are an easy way to start making our suburbs feel more like a real village where you can actually get things done on foot. We could really use more of them around here. #ottawa #urbanism #SuburbanVillage

As if another reason to support Ottawa finally getting a bike share program was needed, but there you have it. Right @shawnmenard.bsky.social and @glengower.ca?

Congratulations @OCtranspo and current city council. You've made commuting so bad, we've decided to sell in Orléans and buy walking distance to work, even if that means my kids wear potato sacks from now on.

Ottawa could be in this list, but we can’t get out of our own way to actually implement the cycling infrastructure we have on the books.

A plan for cycling infrastructure isn’t cycling infrastructure. We actually have to budget for it and build it.

I like that! Like a tool library!

Great point, that sort of social gaming experience is totally lacking when everyone has online gaming in their home theatre room.

Oooh I forgot about a good deli! Adding that to the list!