Parking (Ottawa, Ontario)

Free car storage.

As the nation’s capital and a personal favourite place to visit; Ottawa, Ontario provides an interesting study into how we allocate and use space in urban environments.

In the dense core where our political representatives work and the head of state resides, much of the available land is dedicated to the housing and use of single occupancy vehicles. This is not unlike most urban centres across North America.

What’s interesting is that for the majority of the day, and certainly throughout the evening, these spaces are inanimate representations of what we may value most about the places we inhabit. Although it is not a secret why so much space is devoted to vehicles and not to other, more communal uses; taking a moment to seriously consider how society has chosen to use our limited space brings up many questions about how we may define place versus space.

The following photographic study asks for greater consideration to be given to how we use and allocate the space in our cities.