Wishlist: suggestions for a better community

• Social processes.
• Urban design.

Social processes

• Consultation database and online patient history. Provide the tools and make it mandatory for doctors (general practitioners, specialists, etc.) to maintain a database of all patient consultations. Currently many doctors keep written notes and large paper files on each patient. Given the unreadable scrawl that most doctors use to try to record information, these notes are hard to decipher and could take hours for a doctor to review a patient's history. If all the information were in a database, the base itself would require the completion of certain fields and ensure that any information is readable and searchable. A doctor could within minutes retrieve a specific information item. The doctor, and society, could also use the database to search and compare histories and help advance knowledge and diagnoses.

Urban design

• Provide large-scale visual focal points for the city. Design apartment/condo buildings that stand out in high visible clumps around the city such that the entire clump looks interesting. Now each building has its own symmetrical design, making the clump of buildings have no character or focus. Instead, shape the individual buildings so that the whole clump looks like a single attractive item: with boundaries, edges, focal point - like a castle or church or official edifice. Make each clump attractive and noticeable from a distance - as one unit.
  Benefits:
• Enable intersections to focus a neighborhood. Redesign old, and design new, intersections so that they become the focus of the neighborhoods nearby: modify the 4 corners (building edges) so that the complement each other, add green areas, trees, benches. A circle of stores (especially in suburbian intersections). Walkways into/out of the nearby community. For busy and large suburban intersections, build underpasses with stores, and route traffic around rather than straight through (like in Europe).
• Empower satellite communities. Smaller communities around Ottawa, like Cumberland, Manotick, Stittsville, etc., have their own council, tax base, so that they can determine their own destiny and not have to waste (and it is a waste) time trying to convince people on the other side of the amalgamated urban area of the viability of some decision that only concerns the individual community.