I moved to the Ottawa area a little more than a year ago. I grew up here, leaving the city as a teenager. I tell people that I have moved “to” not “back to” Ottawa simply because, after a nearly 30 years’ absence, I spent very little of my adult life in the Nation’s Capital. The Ottawa I knew as a teenager isn’t representative of what exists today. And besides, growing up in a verdant suburb attached to an orphaned segment of its famous greenbelt certainly didn’t afford me the opportunity to appreciate the diversity of the city’s various neighbourhoods. As an architect, urban designer and former magazine editor, I have enjoyed many opportunities to visit Ottawa at various points in my career, such as when I was a member of the City’s Urban Design Review Panel. From an urban planning perspective, Ottawa fascinates me: Managing the “imageability” of a city strongly connected to its natural environment is a challenge, notwithstanding the need to address its various ceremonial routes and institutions required of a national capital.