Just outside Belleville, about halfway between Ottawa and Toronto, is a small town called Batawa. It’s a former factory town that might, at first glance, look just like any other town in rural Canada. Make no mistake about it though; big things are brewing in Batawa. Sonja Bata, the former president of Bata shoes, which was at one time the town’s primary employer, has made sure of that.
“The whole concept of Batawa is to create a rural community that is sustainable,” says Bata. “In other words, to use all the new concepts that we have for sustainability, like heat pumps and solar panels, and incorporate this in a small community.”

Lofty Goals for New Community
The Batawa Development Corporation is the organization assembled to meet these objectives. It currently holds over 1,500 acres of land in the region. The goal is to transform that into a self-sufficient community, complete with roughly 1,000 residential units and, in the process, develop a new model for Canadian rural communities — one that is sustainable and grows in harmony with its natural surroundings.
The Batawa Development Corporation has enlisted the help of a number of sources, including Carleton University, to develop that model. Twenty-seven architecture and industrial design students spent the summer creating new design plans for the town.
The students have been canvassing the local community, collecting their input, and incorporating that into their plans. To Bata, chairman of the Batawa Development Corporation, it’s essential that the hopes of the locals be reflected in the final product.
“I’m a great believer that the people who live in a place must cooperate fully, otherwise they aren’t going to maintain it,” notes Bata. “They must feel that it’s their little town, it belongs to them and they created it. We need that cooperation from the whole village together.”
One of the project’s stated goals is to make the new Batawa a sustainable model for rural communities. Bata says the community will be looking to achieve a silver LEED rating. Among the steps which will be taken to achieve this, one is building the neighbourhoods with economy of space in mind. The thinking is that if the neighbourhood is built tighter, it will reduce the need for automobile use, and by extension the overall carbon footprint of the community.
Bata has also put a strong emphasis on the fact that the homes to be built in this community should have a natural and creative architecture. As former chair of the National Design Council, it should come as no surprise that architecture was a main focus of Bata’s. To that end, David Sisam was commissioned to develop a preliminary design concept for the homes one that meets the needs of the project, but still blends with the existing homes in the community.
These goals, however, must be weighed against what the market will bear. Bata believes there is a market for the homes she’s building amongst Toronto-area professionals who do most of their work from home. She also understands, however, that with the market still in the throes of recession, they will need to be careful not to price themselves out of the market.
“Economically, this isn’t the time for a development, but I’m really not doing it for the sake of a development. I’m doing it as an example of how one could go about developing this rural community structure,” Bata says.

A Work in Progress
The redevelopment of Batawa has been a long time coming, and something of a labour of love for Bata. But she’s persisted on because her vision for the region has compelled her to.
Now, it seems that vision may be close to coming to fruition. The Batawa community has recently secured some key funding for infrastructure projects, the plans for the town have been drawn up, and a builder, or builders, will likely be chosen soon.
One of the question marks still surrounding this project is what to do with the factory that lies at the heart of the town. The factory, which once served as the engine of the Bata Shoes empire, now sits dormant. Initially, the plan was to convert it entirely into multi-family housing units. That plan has since been revised slightly.
“At the moment we are working with Carleton University, they might actually use two floors as classrooms for the university,” says Bata. “So you may have three floors as apartments, and two floors as laboratories and classrooms.”
The Batawa dream has come a long way to get to this point, and still has a long way to go. But if even half of the good intentions and big ideas swirling around this little town come to be, Canada may have a brand new model of what a rural community should look like.