This is the final piece of 5-part series describing the Complete Community.
- The Complete Community: Beyond ‘Complete Streets’ – Part 1
- What’s In the Mix?: Nearby Amenities – Part 2
- The Payoff: Productive Communities – Part 3
- The Blueprint: How to Get There – Part 4
- The Vision: Conclusions – Part 5
Over the last four articles, we have taken a deep dive into the concept of the Complete Community. In Part 1, we defined a Complete Community as being full of essential destinations—the “why” for our “Complete Streets.” In Part 2, we explored its key ingredients: a fine-grained mix of local amenities and housing density. In Part 3, we detailed the massive payoffs: stronger social bonds, real family savings, and a more financially resilient city. In Part 4, we laid out the specific, actionable policy blueprint needed to legalize and incentivize this traditional model of neighbourhood.
This brings us to the final question: Why put this series together? What is the ultimate goal?
This entire framework is the central mission of The New Orleans. This project is animated by a simple but profound question: “How can we help Orleans position itself as a set of true viable communities in and of themselves, not just as a part of Ottawa.”
For too long, we’ve accepted the status quo that a suburb is just a quiet, comfortable, but car-dependent bedroom community. My aim is to challenge the assumption that this is a healthy way for a community to thrive. It’s a aspirational argument that we can and should evolve into something more: a community that is more financially resilient, more socially connected, more walkable, and more vibrant.
This vision for a “New Orleans” is the synthesis of everything we’ve discussed.
It’s a vision born from our shared frustrations with the myriad social, economic, and environmental impacts of a car-centric city. It’s a vision built on the proven model of mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods that we’ve seen in Part 2. It is a vision grounded in the hard-headed logic of fiscal responsibility—of building a place that can actually pay its own bills, as we explored in Part 3. And it’s an achievable vision, one that can be unlocked with the specific policy changes we laid out in Part 4.
By focusing on our hyper-local context—the wasted space of our vast, mostly empty parking lots or the maze of our disjointed, curvy streets that are only practically navigated in a car—we try to make these big, abstract urbanist ideas concrete and relatable. This project uses Orleans as a case study, but the lessons are broadly applicable to any post-war suburb.
Ultimately, this comes down to empowerment. The suburban design that fosters passivity and isolation was not an accident. It was the result of deliberate policy choices made decades ago.
If old choices created our problems, new choices can solve them.
This is the final, crucial step. The onus is on us, the residents, to demand that change. We must be the ones to advocate for the new zoning principles, the complete streets, and ultimately the communities we want to live in into the future. This series is a toolkit for that advocacy. The ultimate goal is not just to change the physical form of Orleans, but to change the way we see our own collective power to shape our community’s future.
See the rest of the Complete Community series.
- The Complete Community: Beyond ‘Complete Streets’ – Part 1
- What’s In the Mix?: Nearby Amenities – Part 2
- The Payoff: Productive Communities – Part 3
- The Blueprint: How to Get There – Part 4
- The Vision: Conclusions – Part 5
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