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But beyond simply offering photographic evidence of the city’s growth, Transforming Ottawa explains the hows and whys behind the shaping and reshaping of Ottawa, particularly from 1950 to the mid-1980s. Subtitled Canada’s Capital in the eyes of Jacques Gréber, it explains how an urban planner from Paris came to have such an influence on Ottawa’s post-Second World War growth, what he intended and how it was implemented. For, unlike earlier city plans — major ones were undertaken in 1903, 1915 and 1922 — Gréber’s 1950 blueprint is the one today’s capital most resembles: The trains and industrial effluence have largely left the city core for the outskirts, while at the same time the verdancy we now hold so dear as beautifying also separates our neighbourhoods and makes Ottawa difficult to navigate without an automobile.

In other words, the Gréber Report’s implementation changed Ottawa greatly, sometimes for the better, but often not.

The historic photos were commissioned by Gréber, who was hired by then-prime minister Mackenzie King to create a city plan worthy of a national capital, on the sort of scale of a Washington or London. The feeling at the time was that, almost 100 years after becoming Canada’s capital, Ottawa was still very much a provincial town, and a growing sense loomed that it was time to make it more majestic.

Among Gréber’s chief concerns were the numerous railroad tracks running through town and the concentration of heavy industry in Ottawa’s core. His plan saw Union Station closed and a new one built on Tremblay Road, allowing Colonel By Drive to be built along the canal. But, Miguelez notes, the hope that those industries forced out of the downtown core and off the Ottawa River would relocate in the same direction as the station didn’t pan out. Many of them simply chose to relocate or consolidate elsewhere, largely eliminating the city’s blue-collar sector.