Urban Imaginaries

Cities are geographies that cannot be grasped in their totality. They have at least as many meanings and configurations as they do inhabitants. Accessing even some of them requires imagination and creativity. It requires the understanding that cities are not only material, but also practiced, represented, and sensed. Each one of these dimensions is filled with infinite possibilities for a city to be, to be experienced, and to become.

As a term and concept, urban imaginary becomes a platform for exploring the city’s multiplicity of meanings. Urban imaginary speaks to the making and remaking of a city's public culture. It speaks of the processes that inform the place-based narratives that emerge both within the city and as a result of it. It promotes a reflection on the politics of the imaginary, on who can take part in them, and on who is represented within the city. How can we explore Ottawa as a city through this lens?

The Urban Imaginaries

Ottawa Project

  • "Urban Imaginaries Ottawa" is an art-design and research project that prompts reflections on what our city presently is while exploring some possibilities of what it could be in the future. 

  • The project is led by Carleton University’s Urban Imaginaries Lab (School of Industrial Design), and is supported by contributions from different local partners such as Carleton’s Communication and Media Studies Program, Ottawa Coffee House Arlington 5, and Project Project Collective.

  • A series of activities that will, alongside the local community, explore, counter-map, and reimagine the city. Among them, there are: soundwalks, urban walks, critical mapping sessions, creative workshops, and radio show episodes.

  • The project started in February 2022. It is an ongoing project. The first round of activities started between February and May 2022, and the second one between March and May 2023. Detailed information on next events will be posted here, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

  • Throughout the city.

  • We hope to explore overlooked situations and experiences, to unveil tensions and allegiances and the co-existence and agency of past, present, and future in the making of the urban experience, and to inform the making of futures for Ottawa.

  • The collective creation and discussion of new urban imaginaries for Ottawa.