Page "William Lyon Mackenzie King" Paragraph 24

King had a long-standing concern with city planning and the development of the national capital, since he had been trained in the settlement house movement and envisioned town planning and garden cities as a component of his broader program of social reform.

He drew on four broad traditions in early North American planning: social planning, the Parks Movement, the City Scientific, and the City Beautiful.

King's greatest impact was as the political champion for the planning and development of Ottawa, Canada's national capital.

His plans, much of which were completed in the two decades after his death, was part of a century of federal planning that repositioned Ottawa as a national space in the City Beautiful style.

Confederation Square, for example, was initially planned to be a civic plaza to balance the nearby federal presence of Parliament Hill.

The Great War monument was not installed until the 1939 royal visit, and King intended that the replanning of the capital would be the World War II memorial.

However, the symbolic meaning of the World War II monument gradually expanded to become the place of remembrance for all Canadian war sacrifices.