As Ottawa prepares to make major investments in redeveloping its downtown core, there is a problem few seem to be naming: we are planning the physical transformation of downtown without a coherent strategy for the cultural economy meant to animate it.
Beneath the rhetoric of “arts-led” development lies a harder truth — Ottawa’s economic development institutions do not have a systemic plan to build cultural industries as an economic sector. What exists instead is a patchwork of organizations and municipal departments doing piecemeal work within a governance gap.
This matters because downtown revitalization is an economic and cultural project, not just an urban design one. As office vacancy rises and patterns of work change, Ottawa’s core will increasingly depend on experiences, culture and creative businesses to generate activity and value. Without intentional development of the cultural economy, new investments risk producing attractive spaces without the local economic engines needed to sustain them.
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The Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum offer more than beautiful spaces; they provide meaningful settings celebrating heritage, culture and design. An architectural landmark overlooking Parliament Hill
Over the past decade, the city’s arts and heritage bureaucracy has shifted away from industry-building toward recreation, programming and city-delivered services. This marks a departure from earlier approaches that framed culture as an engine of economic growth alongside community life. Organizations are now expected to professionalize, scale up and pay artists fairly while operating within largely static funding frameworks. Growth is encouraged rhetorically but constrained structurally.
Today, economic development formally “owns” tourism and creative industries, but it lacks staff with deep knowledge of Ottawa’s cultural industries landscape. Invest Ottawa — the city’s economic development arm responsible for attracting investment and helping businesses scale — has not had dedicated cultural or creative industry expertise since the Ottawa Film Office moved out in 2015. The people who understand how these industries work are largely in different silos, or outside city hall altogether. The result is a familiar municipal problem: the people who know the sector do not control the levers, and the people who control the levers do not know the sector.
Layered on top of this is Ottawa Tourism, a well-funded stand-alone non-profit supported by the municipal accommodation tax. Its mandate prioritizes attracting external events to fill hotel rooms, measuring success through overnight stays. What it does not systematically do is invest in building local cultural capacity — the festivals, venues, artists, nightlife scenes and creative businesses that make cities magnetic year-round. Local culture becomes a complement to tourism, rather than the infrastructure that sustains it.
Put together, the tacit questions become straightforward: who is responsible for growing Ottawa’s cultural economy and what is the plan? Across culture, economic development and tourism, significant public resources are deployed, yet no institution is clearly responsible for the long-term growth of cultural businesses. There is no shared theory of how local cultural production generates income, connects to tourism and investment or develops export potential. Grants, economic development tools and tourism marketing operate without alignment around a common goal.
We have a system that fails the very sector it claims to celebrate.
Why this matters for downtown
As Ottawa debates the future of its core — from vacant office buildings to reimagined public spaces — this governance gap becomes critical. Without alignment between cultural, economic and tourism strategies, we risk repeating a familiar pattern:
- Beautiful spaces with little local cultural identity
- Pop-up programming instead of permanent creative infrastructure
- Imported events instead of homegrown scenes
- Short-term activations instead of long-term industries
In other words, we may build a nicer-looking downtown without building one that performs economically or culturally.
The real gap is governance, not talent, not money
Ottawa has extraordinary cultural organizations, artists, producers, curators, venue operators and festival-builders. Taken together, culture, economic development and tourism control substantial resources. The gap is governance.
Cities that succeed in the 21st century — from Montreal to Berlin to Barcelona — treat culture as both a public good and a productive sector. They invest in local creators, nurture export potential, support festivals as anchors and align tourism around homegrown culture. Ottawa’s creative sector is increasingly sophisticated and internationally connected, but institutional planning still seems to invest and plan as if it is local recreation rather than a global industry critical to the success of downtown.
A different model is possible
A more strategic approach begins with better diagnosis. This is why Arts Ottawa’s Shared Ground initiative matters — not as a solution, but as the foundational research Ottawa currently lacks. Shared Ground treats culture as a spatial and economic system rather than simply programming, helping answer practical questions we still cannot:
What kinds of cultural activity can realistically move into redeveloped downtown spaces? Where do organizations have room to grow and where are they being displaced? What conditions allow cultural organizations to move from survival to scale?
There is also a question of tools. In Ottawa, the municipal accommodation tax is oriented almost entirely toward hotel-driven tourism. In other cities, similar revenues are used to invest more directly in local cultural economic development. That is a viable future option, but only if Ottawa chooses to treat culture as infrastructure rather than an added benefit.
Underlying this is a broader pattern in how cities grow. Smaller cities treat culture primarily as recreation. As population, density and talent increase, culture becomes a business ecosystem. Ottawa has already crossed that threshold. Until governance catches up, downtown redevelopment will remain misaligned with the cultural economy that should be driving it.
A challenge to the Downtown Forum
As the Downtown Ottawa Forum considers the future of the core, the question should not only be what buildings we want, but what kind of cultural economy and identity we are building to fill them.
Until there is agreement on who is responsible for growing the cultural economy — backed by real tools and resources — Ottawa will remain a city that enjoys culture, but fails to meaningfully benefit from it.
Kwende Kefentse is the principal of Memetic Media Inc. Group. He was the City of Ottawa’s first cultural industries development officer. He currently serves on the boards of the Ottawa Music Industry Coalition and the Ottawa Film Office.
