Montreal City Weblog

Kate 18:48 on 2024-04-09 Permalink Reply  

• Ephraim 11:23 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  So the only green spot in the area, with a lovely view of what I have renamed “Pont Pauline Marois” (CNR Wellington Bridge). I named it after here because it goes nowhere, doesn’t do much and yet is going to cost us money anyway. (How much did it cost to shut down Gentilly? Supposedly $1.8B and we are already talking about starting it up again)

• qatzelok 12:06 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  The proposal’s model features a 40-story tower right next to the beach.
  Do people really want to swim in the shadow of a giant tower?

  Why not distance that tower more from the water and public park?

  Or is that tower there to demonstrate that the real estate mafia cares very little about the quality of the environments that they leave behind? ie. “We will build gigantic towers next to beaches and just try to stop us! We got Grffintown just the way we wanted it to be.”

• Spi 13:04 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  @qatzelok the shadow that building would cast is mostly only an issue in the morning as it’s on the eastern side of the basin. Past noon-1pm the beaches would be completely clear of the buildings shadow.

• su 14:02 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  That huge building looks like it could create quite a windtunnel on that beach!

• bob 14:23 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  The end product will be more sterile than that render. If this is the pitch, I can only imagine the soulless barrens that will waste this opportunity – much like the other development downhill from downtown over the last fifty years – the levelling of Burgundy, the bizarre bedroom suburbs, the ticky tacky high rise condos. How is it that urban planning has gotten worse over the last century, as if not a single lesson has been learned from the vast landscape of failures that surround the livable, human neighbourhoods that were built well over a hundred years ago. It’s like, “hey, let’s model the built environment after those experiments on rats that made them literally murder and eat each other,” “let’s design a building that houses 750 people such that none of them need ever know any of the other 749 residents exist,” “let’s make sure there is no commerce so that people will drive literally across the street to Costco – maybe Walmart will put in a store across the lot from it,” “Let’s put grass on whatever is left over and call it green space, and make sure that there are trees and sidewalks and boulders on any strip of land large enough for sports”

  Shall we start a betting pool on how many of the promised 1000 “affordable” units? One bet on the number they claim, and another on the actual rent of an “affordable” unit.

• Kate 17:45 on 2024-04-10 Permalink

  I’ve wondered this often, bob, but haven’t formally studied urban planning. It’s clear that Montreal’s successful neighbourhoods have come about piecemeal over time. How do you replicate that kind of organic development? Can you do it deliberately?

  And to respond to your betting pool: a lot will depend on who gets into power over the next couple of years. Nobody else seems to remember it, but there was a point when the city, drunk on neoliberalism, sold off a lot of its properties that could have been used for public housing. That could easily happen again.

• MarcG 09:15 on 2024-04-12 Permalink

  I wonder what the quality of the water is like, presumably there’s no swimming in the Lachine canal for a reason.

• carswell 10:44 on 2024-04-12 Permalink

  @MarcG Have read that the problem with the canal water is two-fold: runoff and discharge from industrial operations along the canal and, the bigger concern, overflow from the sewer system. There’s also the issue of all the crap that’s settled on the bottom over the decades, during many of which the canal was a convenient dump.

  The water in the Lachine harbour at the west end of the canal is usually clean enough to swim in (the city’s planning to put a beach there). Maybe the flow of water into and out of the basin is sufficient to dilute any nasty stuff in the canal water? Or maybe the pollution sources are finally being tamed?

• bob 22:27 on 2024-04-12 Permalink

  @Kate – There is no way to replicate organic development. Organic development is contrary to everything that this clot of developers and spseudo- para- semi- governmental institutions do for a living. Ideally, the city would put in the streets and services, declare some area a park, zone the rest, and make sure that no single developer could get more than, say, ten percent of the whole. The people who manage these things are business school idiots. Not enough money in doing anything well or right.

  Also – what will end up there will be nothing like these renderings. This is pr. It will be like if Griffintown made a colony.