Is This the Suburbs? First Impressions of Gatineau’s Agora Development

Special thanks to Cécile Lecoq for reviewing and contributing to this post. Cécile is a transportation professional, advocate and mother of two happily living car-free in Gatineau, Quebec. You can find her on Twitter.

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There is a growing movement to develop new suburbs to be more walkable and sustainable than their highly car-dependent predecessors. And yet, our suburban development model remains remarkably stubborn to change. So when I caught wind of a promising new development in an Ottawa suburb, I was excited to check it out.

Suburbia, Stubborn to Evolve

When my own neighbourhood of Greenboro in Ottawa was marketed to prospective buyers in the 1970’s, it was envisioned as “a new, totally planned community which protests against traditional housing concepts by creating an environment in which people may live, work, be educated, shop and play – and walk rather than drive”. While some unique elements were built, such as the extensive internal pathway network, this vision was far from realized and today the neighbourhood is highly car-dependent.

While Ottawa’s new Official Plan provides direction for the development of 15-minute neighbourhoods across the city, I was disappointed to learn that one of the greatest opportunities to do this – the area surrounding Limebank O-Train Station – will instead be developed with wide, fast roads and big-box plazas. While the City deserves some blame for not preventing these land uses, it’s clear the developers also lack ambition for anything greater.

Clearly we are still struggling to build walkable suburbs, and I’ve started to take a keen interest in how to actually accomplish this, including forming an advocacy group in my own neighbourhood, and exploring others to discuss their potential. So when I heard of a promising new suburb across the river in the Ottawa area, I knew I had to check it out.

Agora: “A Project Focused on the Human”

“LIVE. WORK. PLAY. A PROJECT FOCUSED ON THE HUMAN.”

Agora’s website includes bold statements like this one to describe the living arrangement to prospective tenants of its 600 apartment rental units. The development claims to offer an “avant-garde” living environment, with all the amenities you need right outside your door, a focus on alternative transportation modes, and a public square that “breeds discovery, fun and encounters between residents entrepreneurs and workers, from morning until night”.

Even the choice of the name Agora was clearly very intentional. Wikipedia tells me that agora means “market” in modern Greek and was a central public space in ancient city states. Talk about creating big expectations!

Located in the Plateau suburb of Gatineau, the development is advertised as being just an 8-minute drive from downtown Ottawa.

Site Visit

You can imagine my cautious excitement when reading a pitch like this. And yet, I was not disappointed! Arriving midday on a Friday via one of the new bike paths (about a 30 min ride from central Ottawa), I was greeted by an open plaza lined with continuous ground-floor retail occupied by restaurants, cafes, a spa, and even an electric bicycle shop. Above the ground floor were rental apartments, with balconies overlooking the space. I noticed posters advertising a weekly farmers market in the central gathering area, which even hosts public washrooms.

Wandering across the street, I found a beautiful new library full of people, bordered by a large playground and a community gardening area. Zooming out just a bit further, new multi-unit apartment housing was present on all sides of the development.

Recipe for Success

This development is very much in the “suburbs”, and yet it looks and feels so different. It feels like a walkable community. So what does this development do right that others can learn from? Here’s my seven takeaways based on my visit and further research on the development.

1. Residential above retail

This is such a no-brainer and we’ve done it for hundreds of years, and yet so many retail-focused projects fail to incorporate housing, like the Tanger Outlet Mall in Kanata. The 600 residential apartments above the retail at Agora, combined with the thousands of residents living within walking distance, provides built-in customers and ensures some level of activity in the public spaces at all times of day.

2. No multi-lane roads (or traffic lights!)

It’s natural for traffic engineers to look at higher levels of density and prescribe more roadway capacity, usually in the form of wide, fast, multi-lane roadways. These roads act as barriers to pedestrian movement, especially for younger kids and seniors. Intersections of two big roads occupy massive amounts of space and are generally miserable places to travel outside of a car.

The entire area surrounding Agora is served entirely by roads with one vehicle lane in each direction and roundabouts where these roads intersect, making the intersections easily crossable for people on foot. In fact, you have to travel almost a kilometre from the site to find the nearest traffic light. Higher-capacity multi-lane roads are still provided at the periphery, but within the community vehicles move at a human-scale.

3. Public amenities

Many new neighbourhoods provide some amenities but fail to provide a full range. Beyond retail, communities need libraries, schools, daycares, sports facilities, and more. Failing to provide these either excludes some prospective residents or forces them to purchase cars to drive elsewhere to meet their daily needs.

The entire site is designed to provide all the needs of a community. The developer is prioritizing the eventual 100 retail spaces for small business rather than chains, and businesses include a daycare, pharmacy, and health clinic. Across the street is a beautiful new public library, park, and community garden, and just beyond the site are two schools and a 26-acre park. The central plaza is designed to host a range of events and currently hosts a weekly farmer’s market.

4. Diverse housing options

Because multi-unit housing is illegal in most suburbs, areas slated for intensification are often under enormous pressure to provide as many housing units as possible, usually in the form of tall towers. This type of housing is appealing to many, but excludes others who want larger units or more outdoor space. When built exclusively, tower communities can also host very transient populations, as people enjoy the type of living for a few years and then decide to settle elsewhere.

Quebec in general is an exception to this dilemma, as the province already has a positive culture of providing a wide range of housing types in most communities. Agora is consistent with this: the 600 rental units range from “micro” to three bedrooms, and within a 15-minute walk of the site you can find everything from single-family homes to four-storey low-rise apartments with units of up to three bedrooms.

Providing a full range of options ensures that as people age, or as life conditions change, residents continue to have housing options within the community that matches their needs.

5. Developer-Driven Vision

From my experience, the developer’s level of ambition plays a huge role in a project’s success. While Greenboro was envisioned and sold by the City of Ottawa to developers as a walkable, mixed-use community, developers ultimately opted for single-use, fairly low density residential development, citing market conditions. In the other example I shared at the top of this post, Limebank Station, the City’s planning framework encourages and allows for dense, mixed-use development on these parcels, and yet the developers are more keen on making a quick buck on low-risk box-box plazas.

In contrast, Junic, the developer behind Agora, seems to be leading with a very strong vision, evident on all of the marketing materials but also in the built form itself. Within walking distance of Agora, the company has three multi-unit residential projects underway or recently completed, and the company’s president even has his own apartment in the Agora development.

6. Employment

For a community to feel “alive” it needs to have activity at all times of the day. A place designed for living but not working will vacate in the morning and feel very quiet midday. To address this gap, the development includes a co-working space, healthcare services, a real estate office, and the corporate offices of the development consortium. As part of the next phase, an additional 100,000 square feet of office space is planned.

Of course, the amenities also cater to the midday needs of the many public servants now working from home 2-3 days each week as well.

7. Car-sharing

When most of your daily needs can be met on foot, car-sharing can be a vital service that allows people to avoid buying a first or second car. Lower car ownership means less dependency on parking, which improves the affordability of construction. The developers subsidized a deal with car-share provider Communauto to guarantee availability of two car-sharing vehicles on-site when residents moved in, and ongoingly provide a free annual subscription to the service for all residents, so that people can form these positive habits from day one.

What’s Missing?

Achieving perfection is truly a difficult task and while Agora is one of the most model developments I’ve seen, there are some opportunities to further improve.

Higher order transit

Communities like this are perfect for serving with mass transit. With people’s day-to-day needs met with walkable retail and amenities, transit performs the remaining vital role of allowing people to travel farther without needing a car, especially to get to work. Communities with lower car ownership have less traffic, lower household expenses, and naturally have more people who walk and cycle to local destinations.

Today, Agora has no mass transit, and the bus routes available to residents are very slow compared to driving. Combined with a clientele skewed towards higher incomes and you’re likely to find most people choosing to drive to and from this site.

Fortunately, the municipality has plans in the next few months to supplement the existing bus service with a more direct routing to downtown, and in the longer term they have plans to build a tram line in future that would include a stop at the site and travel to Downtown Ottawa, though this project is not yet funded.

A supermarket

Groceries are an essential need for residents. While some may believe that it’s impossible to get groceries without a car, the reality is that when a grocery store is provided nearby, many people will choose to walk or bike there, making more smaller purchases in a week compared to the suburbanite’s monthly Costco haul. The Dutch understand this very well; look closely at the layout of a Dutch suburb and you’ll find full-size grocery stores embedded in neighbourhoods, spaced about a kilometre or less apart, placing most residents within walking distance of one.

Unfortunately, Agora’s retail offerings don’t currently include a supermarket, and the nearest is inside a big box plaza a 22 minute (1.8 km) walk from the site. At this distance (and with the supermarket plaza’s car-centric design), most people will opt to get in their car to pick up food.

Interestingly, a grocery store was planned as part of the development and there was one open there from March 2021 to October 2022, but the business was not successful, likely due to ongoing construction, the COVID pandemic, and reports of people having trouble finding the store. Hopefully one will return as part of the next phase.

Lessons for Elsewhere

As an observant urbanist, I’m most curious to know what tidbits of information myself and others can take from this to improve their communities. For example, we can’t just hope that all developers will change their views on development patterns. Here’s some things the public and municipality can control though:

• Zone for what you want, AND what you don’t want. Allowing mixed-use is great, but if you don’t restrict low-value uses like big box retail, you leave the door open for developers to make a quick buck on these developments instead of building something that aligns with city-building objectives.
• Design a street network that supports walkability. While multi-lane roads are great for moving cars, they form major barriers to walking. When a municipality is solely focused on widening roads to accommodate the car traffic of a new community, they fail to appreciate how a community’s walkability will diminish. The roads bordering Limebank Station in Ottawa will be posted at 60+ km/h, be multi-lane, and have limited crossings. Talk about boxing people in.
• Integrate public amenities. Don’t rely on the developer to provide everything that a community needs. Ensure that land is dedicated to public amenities like parks, libraries, daycares, and schools and then invest the funds to build these along with the development.
• Support good ideas. Of course, sometimes cities are fortunate enough to receive innovative or ambitious proposals that are developer-driven, and innovative ideas by definition usually don’t perfectly follow the established rules. In these cases, it’s important that municipal processes be flexible to allow these innovations to happen rather than drowning them in bureaucracy.

On the whole, Agora is a sight for sore eyes when it comes to new suburban development. While ambitious greenfield developments often fall short of their plans, Agora has managed to mostly achieve the construction of a 15-minute neighbourhood from scratch, and for that reason it should be high up on the radars of land use planners and transportation planners alike.

Our suburban developments deserve better, and Agora proves that with the right ingredients, better is possible.

Special thanks to Cécile Lecoq for reviewing and contributing to this post. Cécile is a transportation professional, advocate and mother of two happily living car-free in Gatineau, Quebec. You can find her on Twitter.