This article is my personal opinion, and the ideas of some other residents in the Greater Avalon community. Check out my local Greater Avalon Community Association website: Greater Avalon Community Association.
Take the time to just imagine… how a compact mid-rise building with offices and shops in our neighbourhood could animate it.
Last fall, while trying to write an article about mixed-use buildings, especially one that includes ground-floor shops and offices, I realized a sad reality.
I couldn’t base my article on any building located in the Greater Avalon Community Association boundary, because there isn’t anything like that here. Not one. I had to go to our neighbours, the Bradley Estates Community Association, to find a mixed-use building.
Taking some time to think about the world, once again, while chatting over a glass of wine, the idea of what could be built in our neighborhood to make it more alive was born.
This discussion led me to think about the land in front of François-Dupuis, on the north side of Brian-Coburn. This land is currently vacant. I believe it belongs to a company that at some point wanted to build a commercial building there, which has not materialized. I think this would be the ideal time to plan for a mixed-use building at this location.
Before explaining this idea in more detail, here is some background. A census of the district’s shops was carried out in 2025. We already have, as an association, an excellent idea of what makes up our neighbourhood. Fifty-five businesses, including only those with commercial buildings, are in our community. Sixteen restaurants, fifteen services (hairdressers, dentists, etc.) and eight stores are located in the territory of the Greater Avalon Community Association. So there is already an interesting variety of shops. Among the missing items are: a bakery, a local café, a sushi (okay, personal taste!), and many others. By having this inventory, we can discuss or logically plan what is missing to make a complete neighborhood in which residents could easily get around on foot or on a bike, and have the option to leave the car at home when they choose to.
Let’s bring the conversation back to this potential future building. It would perhaps feature a bakery and a local café on the ground floor. I must say that in our discussions, we had several other ideas (spa, café, microbrewery, etc.), there was no shortage of options. Thinking practically though, office spaces would be wise because it kills two birds with one stone. We could have more people with the ability to work close to their homes, thereby reducing traffic. If it is the residents of the neighborhood who work there, within a radius of one to three kilometers, we are less likely to create parking headaches, can actually save space by adding less parking to the lot, and reduce local traffic. In fact, we are instead creating traffic on foot, which is nice for neighbourhood safety, the health of residents, and it makes the neighbourhood more lively.
This article aims to help people imagine what everyday life might look like with that missing element in the mosaic of our neighborhood, with a little ambition and vision. With a delicious coffee and a fresh-baked croissant, you can almost dream of being in one of these European neighbourhoods. Continue to build in more local destinations like this, and you get a community with the feel of a village, where families and neighbours are tightly knit, where people can greet each other in the morning while having their coffee (or smoothie, your choice!)
By doing a little research using the interactive map of the City at this location, we can see that this site is a Minor Corridor 2 zoning. Among the available options, a building with some office space, and including a café on the ground floor, would be a great choice. In an ideal world, I think of a government office building, because we know that the proportion of public servants is high in the neighbourhood. It could also simply be a shared workspace. The goal is for the residents of the surrounding neighborhood to work close to home and benefit from this amenity. This would fulfill several important neighbourhood functions all in one. We could expect to see less traffic (if some public servants no longer needed to drive downtown or even to the nearest shared workspace at Place d’Orléans), or simply rented office space used by local residents doing office work.
By creating a smaller parking footprint for this building, space is not wasted and there is much less traffic impact from a development like this. On the contrary, we could wake up a sleepy neighborhood. A travel distance of one to three km is easily accessible by active transportation. By placing this office building in the heart of a residential neighbourhood, we ensure that we have a pool of workers who can get there easily.
This is also a good opportunity to plan the surrounding landscaping judiciously. We know that we will soon lose a swath of land containing up to 165 different species of plants with the creation of a new neighbourhood behind the Francois-Dupuis Community Centre (E1 – South Orléans – Wall Road – Future Neighbourhood | Engage Ottawa). We could plan to include several strategic species to compensate for the loss of biodiversity.
So, are you interested in being able to walk or bike to work in your community, have your coffee and croissant in the morning, and talk to more friends and neighbours out and about?
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