Description: As the city of Ottawa looks forward towards a new central library, drawing momentum from the plethora of architecturally stunning and urbanistically revitalizing libraries built across the country in recent years, we are invariably asked to consider what it means to build a library for the twenty-first century. While public consultations focus our attention on the future and what we might want a library to be, there is a conspicuous absence of thought given to the library as it is or as it might have been. The official public consultation asks: “If we build a new library, what else would you want it to be?” This question reflects an approach to place-making (and place-marketing) that prioritizes development and building something new. These future visioning exercises rarely engage with the existing landscape or with the presence of the past in contemporary culture.

Our aim is to offer a venue and series of exercises where we can collectively ask: “But what about the library… of our past?… of our present?… as a library?” When separated from the proposition of a new building for the future, what does the public discussion about the public library become? How can place-making help us hold the multiple and changing meaning of place and carry the past forward with us in meaningful ways? The first iteration was through the Cultural Memory Workshop, an Ottawa-based initiative that brings scholars and community members together to work through the presence of the past in the local context. Bringing together maps and the children’s game MadLibs, we created the MapLibs exercise that invites participants to move through while prompting them to be present through their embodied and sensorial experience of the space, and to reflect on analogous spaces elsewhere through memory.

Project team: Rebecca Dolgoy, Sarah Gelbard, Amanda Montague

Workshops offered as part of: Cultural Memory Workshop (March 2017); Heritage Conservation Symposium (April 2017); Jane’s Walk Ottawa (May 2017); (un)School/décole (March 2018); St Laurent Mall (May 2018)

Related publication: Dolgoy, Gelbard, Montague. “What about the library? Public consultations for new central libraries often ask all the wrong questions.” Spacing Magazine. Summer 2018. 22-23.