Published in Tim Dallett ed. Driving the Ceremonial Landscape Gallery 101 Ottawa.
Copyright 1996 Rob Shields
Power and Procession:
Ottawa's Ceremonial Parkways
What is the history of the 'parkway' - this a strange form, a hybrid of landscape architecture, Victorian park and transportation planning. The ceremonial parkways and promenades constructed in Ottawa take the form of access roads, ceremonial routes, and linear parks in which the automobile is integrated with nature and with pedestrians. Is the notion of a parkway more properly understood as a 'riverside parkway'? They hark back to the local historical geography in which rivers were travel routes. Trails sometimes followed riverbanks, but the historical reality was of portage trails that connected navigable waterways. The Rideau Canal in its Ottawa section was different in that tracks for horse-drawn barges and maintenance roads along the stone embankments were in place from the beginning of the Canal's history.
The main Parkways - the Queen Elizabeth Parkway and Colonel By Drive - are an embellishment of the long 'waterfront' of the Rideau Canal, which has only partly been extended to other waterfronts (the Ottawa River) in the Capital. Thus, there is no systematic process of 'park-ification' of river frontage of the significant Ottawa and Rideau rivers: the logic of the Parkways lies not in what they border but what they connect: key ceremonial sites such as the Parliament Buildings where the theatre of state is 'enacted' and liminal sites of arrival and departure such as the airport.
What of the social history of such promenades? The parkway as a landscape form appears to have been a common response to the planning of movement through waterfront parks. The first controlled access automobile route that sought to harmonize with the surrounding landscape was the Bronx River Parkway completed in 1923.(1) It appears at Niagara Falls in one of the very first state parks laid out in the mid 1800s by the Niagara Parks Commission. There it appears adapted from the promenades of fashionable European and American spas and seaside resorts where a 'Marine Promenade' or Parade fronted onto the beach, often raised up on a seawall. This provided a broad transportation artery which was primarily conceived of as a space of display and of what John Urry has called The Tourist Gaze(2). These were places to see and be seen, to manifest one's presence in a centre of social and cultural power, a centre of conspicuous leisure and consumption. Even where there was a single focus of interest, as at Niagara Falls, there could be a promenade along the river, leading to that point. Through the 1920s and later in the 1960s, this promenade was progressively widened and re-functioned as a bus tour and automobile artery for tourists. Indeed, at Niagara, counting cars replaced counting tourists or their expenditure.(3)
Dimendberg has also argued that road building is an essential element of modern economies and systems of control. Surveying the Autobahn projects of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, he finds a similar fascination with nature, speed and the gaze as at Niagara:
An older centripetal space based upon the scale of the human body no longer adequately describes this new lifeworld of the automobile and the freeway, whose poetics of distance, speed, pleasure, and technologically mediated solitude still await their exegets and historians. Commonly submerged in histories of urban political economy and "real" transportation needs, the fantasies and desires stimulated by centrifugal space delineate the qualitative lived experience of social transofrmations too frequently rendered invisible by quantitative analyses.(4)
The Ottawa Parkways were a similar implementation of this planning concept that had reached it maturity by the 1960s. In line with the 1967 Canadian Centennial, a programme of 'embellishment' and improvement of the Canal as a tourist and ceremonial space was commenced. The peculiarity of this programme was the removal of train tracks in a symbolic erasure of one of the crucial technologies which allowed Canada as a nation to meet the challenge of its far flung provinces and distantly scattered population: the railway. In the place of the railway came a automobile route on each bank with relatively few intersections and a landscaped verge with footpaths to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists.
Ceremonial Motion
To discourage its use as an everyday transportation corridor, the parkway was marked off from the local traffic system by the relative lack of street access and later by restricting its use by commercial vehicles and a system of one-way traffic flows on streets giving on to the parkway. This enshrines it status as a ceremonial, that is, symbolic and special route which connects not blocks of intersecting streets but the downtown - and specifically governmental -core with a set of administrative 'campuses' built in the late 1960s, and finally with the airport. A ceremonial route was provided for the sovereign and for visiting state dignitaries to move in a formal procession from the airport to the parliament and to any other necessary state offices. Such a processional-route must seem odd to any arriving dignitary. Most states design large squares for military display (Tien-a-min Square is an example), or wide avenues for pompous motorcades (the Champs Elysees, not to mention the Mall in Green Park, London are examples). The Canadian state drives its dignitaries though a simulation of nature.
History - official History with a capital-C-for-Canada - flows along the Ceremonial Parkways. It is the route for the restless twirl of the sovereign's waving hand past and future. The Parkway is the place for Papal kisses: a stage set for some future assassination, a site of cheers and flag-waving, of funereal state motorcades, the best route for invading armies... the stage on which the past and future history of 'Canada' might be represented and even enacted.
Sunday Driving
Despite its relatively restricted speed limits and selected access points, the parkway was never totally cut off from everyday life. It provided an obvious route for commuter's and the concept was quickly appropriated for other key transportation routes. The parkway as a piece of transportation infrastructure intersected directly with the North American appropriation of the family car and particularly with the expansion of car ownership int he post-Second World War era. The parkway was an ideal site for 'Sunday drives': leisurely - notoriously slow - promenades in the car with distracted drivers paying as much attention to the passing sights as the passengers. Especially, when seen through a car window, any landscape is reduced to an image, similar to a film passing by. Such images are often taken up in metaphoric constructions in which attention is diverted from signs of the operation of power - the power to construct a landscape and to give it a new, symbolic meaning. All such landscapes are thus ceremonial landscapes in one sense or another.
By the 1970s, the parkway had also intersected with growing interest in health and exercise as a jogging route and cycle path. This allowed the enjoyment of the park-like landscaping along its length by using a practice very different from the Victorian concept of 'a stroll in the park' which circled back onto itself or simply turned around and around a central monument in a small city park. The use of bicycles by leisure cyclists and commuters alike has remained firmly ensconced within the leisure model.(5) The European integration of the bicycle into rationalized transportation planning by providing bicycle lanes separate from pedestrian sidewalks has not appeared in Ottawa where a wild mix of skateboarders, roller-skaters, cyclists, joggers and pedestrians compete for space on pathways no more that 3 metres in width at the maximum and often half of that for significant stretches.
It is also significant that few nodes where people congregate have emerged along the 5 to 6 kilometre length of the Rideau Canal in particular, except at designated points where restaurants have been planned and licensed by the National Capital Commission. Unlike similar, linear open-air spaces (one thinks of the famous boardwalk in Venice Beach, California or the beach itself on televisions Baywatch), there is little 'spectacle' to be observed along the entire length of the Canal. The Parkways are thus masterpieces of the 'canalization' of social life and of intentional social control... achieved by lucky accident and good gardening.
The Parkway provides a controlled visual and urban experience to drivers and passengers very similar to cinema.(6) 'the traveller sees the objects, landscapes, etc. through the
apparatus which moves him through the world. That machine and the motion it creates become integrated into his visual perceptions.'(7) But, as Henri Lefebvre warns, in a now famous comment, our perception of reality is distorted and manipulated as a result:
The person who sees and knows only how to see, the person who draws and knows only how to put marks on a sheet of paper, the person who drives around and knows only how to drive a car - all contribute in their way to the mutilation of space...the driver is concerned only with steering himself to his destination, and in looking about sees only what he needs to see for that purpose; he perceives only his route, which has been materialized, mechanized, technicized, and he sees it from one angle only that of its functionality: speed, readability, facility. ...Space is defined in the context in terms of the percpeiton of an abstract subject , such as the driver of a motor vehicle, equiped with a collective common sense... Thus space appears solely in its reduced forms. Volume leaves the field to surface, and any overall view surrenders to visual signals spaced out along fixed trajectories laid down in the "plan". An extraordinary - indeed unthinkable, impossible - confusion arrises between space and surface, with the latter determining a spatial abstraction which it endows with a half-imaginary, half-real physical existence. This abstract space eventiually becomes the simulacrum of a full space (of that space which was formerly full in nature and history).(8)
In other words, the Parkways are examples of the replacement of public space with circulation space: they are to be enjoyed by moving through the spaces rather than primarily used for interacting or meeting other people. In fact, to meet an acquaintance, even when walking along the Canal, can be a nuisance for, unlike the Victorian promenade, one is out for exercise in a circulation space, not out to stop and talk as one might once have.
Power-Tripping
What is the distraction of the parkway landscape which allows these different modes of transport (car, bicycle, foot and roller-blade) to blithely ignore each other in such close proximity? The first, superficial, answer to this question is: the landscape or landscaping itself. One is distracted by the water, the flowers and trees and other sights. But the most beguiling attraction which distracts one from the hubbub of activity or the rumbling of passing cars lies elsewhere. The Parkways offer an unusually satisfying 'passage' through a space in which nature is disciplined and precisely controlled: here and there the grass grows taller, but only as decreed by the picturesque conventions of landscape architects. The Parkways thus offer a vicarious experience of power: the power to move through the landscape in a smooth, sovereign passage, a journey from here to there which glides without concern through a land which is domesticated and docile. In the memorable words of one writer, it is a land, 'there, just for us.'(9) Similarly, Henri Lefebvre commented in The Production of Space:
the power of a landscape does not derive from the fact that it offers itself as a spectacle but rather from the fact that, as mirror and mirage, it presents any susceptible viewer with an image at once true and false of a creative capacity which the subject is able, during the moment of marvellous self-deception, to claim as his own.(10)
By extension, we can make sense of - make intelligible - this hybrid of transportation planning, the automobile industry, cultural leisure practices, state gardening and symbolic rituals by understanding it as a condensed analogy of movement through the continental landmass. The dominant theme is of movement is a metaphor for domination of the landscape and climate of Canada. Thus, on the 'stretched' stage of the parkway is enacted a process of travelling over a wilderness and topography that has been subdued. This is a fundamental ritual of the Canadian state which has been taken up within the daily life of local residents. Even the water travels quietly in a controlled hydraulic flow. Sovereign power is demonstrated through this 'miniature' in which a harsh and forbidding continental landmass is re-cast (or 're-spatialized') as a gridded territory to be moved across rather than a wilderness to be hacked and climbed through. This wilderness is represented by the landscaping of both masses of tulips and picturesquely-indigenous trees, bushes and rocks. The parkway is a representation of a model relationship to the territory and landscape of Canada. Just as waterways provided the first route of penetration by which this land could be mapped, named, conquered and taken, so the Canal provides the last route in which this process is celebrated at the symbolic heart of the sovereignty of the state. The power of the state thus rests on its demonstration of its power over and control of its territory. This symbolic manifestation makes the power of the state tangible, real in the micro-moments of everyday life and everyday landscapes. It turns state power into an landscape-spectacle of flower-power tulip blossoms.
In this interpretation, the greatest 'power trip' the Canadian government has to offer its most honoured guests is this: a symbolic and technology-assisted promenade through a wilderness beaten back 'just for them'. Tourists and residents vicariously experience this sense of mastery in their everyday use of these Promenades: it is one of the pleasures of Ottawa's ceremonial parkways. And, whether you deny or indulge in the experience, you too are there, a conqueror moving over a dominated landscape. In the 'gesture' of moving over a subdued and controlled landscape, the colonization of Canada and the domestication of its topography is re-enacted. The history of settlement and penetration into the native lands of North America erupts into the present moment, short-circuiting the barriers of forgetfulness, ignorance and hostility which insulate everyday life in its banality from the realities of power, exploitation and competitive domination. The ceremonial parkways remind us of the contamination of our everyday spaces - home, cottage, country lane and flower bed - by the history of imperialism of which we are all inheritors.
Notes
1. S. Giedion Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition 5th ed. rev. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1982). 823-33. I would like to thank the members of the 'Reading the Capital' Group of the Centre for Research on Culture and Society at Carleton University, which met from 1990 to 1992, where these ideas were first presented, Gallery 101 and Tim Dallett for his suggestion of Edward Dimendberg's excellent article which makes points very similar to these for the case of the interwar German autobahn.
2. John Urry 1990. The Tourist Gaze (London: Routledge).
3. See the chapter on Niagara in Rob Shields 1991. Places on the Margin. Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge).
4. Edward Dimendberg, 'The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways and Modernity' in October 73 (Summer 1995). p.136. He also notes that, like the case of Parkway, 'Forbidding billboards and advertisements along the roadside (and even at its service stations), the Autobahn creators envisioned an aestheticized space, a theme park for the automobilized subject, in which nothing would come between drivers and the experience of the German landscape....
For the pastoral landscape experiences by German drivers was no less elaborately constructed than the road itself. Autobahn routes were carefully selected for their physical beauty through a system of ground surveying and aerial reconnaissance. Monotony was eliminated by rolling curves built so that no straight segments of the roadway was longer than eight kilometres [sic]...' (pp.106-7).
5. In his book Capitalism and Leisure Theory (London: Tavistock 1985), Chris Rojek points out that leisure is 'legitimated pleasure', sharing a root, lex, with the words 'legitimate', 'legislate' and 'law'.
6. Dimendberg p.107. He goes on to translate from Hans Lorenz: 'New images continually reveal themselves to the driver. The driver experiences the spaces of the landscape with its exciting succession of narrow and spacious' ('Die Mitarbeit der levendigen Natur' in Die Strasse 8 (1941) p.289).
7. Wolfgang Schivelbusch The Railway Journey trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books 1979). p.66.
8. Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1991) p.313.
9. In a sense, it calls out, interpellates us, saying 'Take me, I'm yours.' This characterizes the colonizing relation to the North American Landscape. H. Murray, 1988. 'Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space', Future Indicative. pp. 71-84. See also Benita Parry, 1987. 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Oxford Literary Review 9:1-2. pp.27-58.
10. Henri Lefebvre p. 189.