A youth perspective on Leisure, livability, and Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park

Abstract

Residents of the Canadian Capital City – Ottawa − have been caught up in an intense debate about the transformation of Lansdowne Park, a multi-purpose city-run open space that is home to heritage buildings, an arena and stadium as well as several weekly and annual community events. In the last decade, the Canadian Football League (CFL) franchise and the south side of the stadium crumbled and then collapsed. In 2009, a group of local business owners presented the Lansdowne Live ! proposal to raise the CFL franchise and to build a large-scale hotel and shopping centre at the park. This proposal, the only one to be considered by the City Council, has become a lightning rod for debate about the park’s ‘potential’ and ‘real’ contributions to the livability of the city, the quality of life of its inhabitants, and the experiential environment for visitors. The transformation of Lansdowne Park has split the community, heritage supporters, sports fans, leisure experts, city planners, political leaders, and citizen advocates who have long worked together to contribute to the livability of the City of Ottawa. During a period of active community debate in 2009, leisure students at the University of Ottawa developed their own transformation plans based on the key issues revealed by the community discourse. Apart from being future experts in the field, the students are past, present and future stakeholders in whatever the park’s fate may be. A content analysis of the student briefs, informal review of their transformation plans and informal focus group discussions, reveals that the support and opposition for Lansdowne Park is directly linked to the livability of the city and that the youth perspective could inform the development of a solution for Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park.