The new Banque Nationale building, started as a project before Covid created a glut of downtown office space, will be opening next month with a lot of sculpture work in various styles around the lobby.
Updates from August, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Do North American cities have too much sprawl to become 15‑minute cities?
steph
Keep promoting WFH and we can achieve 15-min cities easily. Employers should recognize the social costs to uselessly clogging up the streets (and public transport) making workers useless go into office spaces.
Chris
>Employers should recognize the social costs to uselessly clogging up the streets…
Those social costs are not paid by employers, and so they don’t really factor. See ‘negative externality’.
Robert H
The answer to your question, with a few notable exceptions that can be counted on both hands, is yes. As someone who prefers the city, I am well aware that mine is very much a minority preference on this continent. Even in the places where such a concept is applicable (as in the somewhat dated photo that accompanies the article depicting the Plateau near Parc Lafontaine), it’s only part of the larger agglomeration. Even most of Greater Montreal is built in this ubiquitous default style of low density suburbia: subdivisions of single family homes on meandering streets, laced by wide arterials and autoroutes lined with retail strips and office “parks,” big box stores, and a scattering of shopping malls and apartments among parking lots. It’s very much founded on the North American individualist ethos of spreading out into that vast abundance of space.
There are advantages and pleasures to be found in city life, but the general culture does not seem receptive to them. Instead, there are countless stories about wanting to get away from the noise, the dirt, the rat race of the town to this Brigadoon where one can breathe and hear the birds sing. As the article suggests, it’s more realistic to aim for the 30 minute city, but even that will be a struggle when even modest attempts to densify such as a 5 storey apartment building adjacent to a suburban REM station are met with firm NIMBY opposition by neighbouring homeowners.
Any progress will be slow in coming and hard won. Ultimately, beyond comprehensive changes in zoning and great improvement in public transport, we need a cultural shift. Perhaps, that has already started.
Chris
>…countless stories about wanting to get away from the noise, the dirt, the rat race…
And the noise, dirt, and rat race are themselves in no small part due to the automobile too. A vicious cycle.
Ian
Agglomeration doesn’t help the sense of neighbourhoods, nor does centralization of services. This move has been played out across living areas from townships to cities. Local cities only exist when specificity is not only allowed, but encouraged. Homogeneity is one of the goals of ethnonationalism, for instance.
Meezly
Without having read the article, I think it’s more about a city’s zoning laws than its sprawl because isn’t mixed use development synonymous with 15 minute cities?
Vancouver’s sprawl is physically limited by the ocean and mountains, and it used to have fairly restrictive zoning laws, which did not encourage walking and urban densification despite the ongoing housing issues. It think the zoning laws are more flexible now to encourage mixed use in certain areas, but it took a while.
I just remember my Vancouver cousin visiting Montreal some years ago who studied urban planning, and was impressed with our mixed use neighbourhoods, esp. the Plateau.
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Kate
La Presse tells the heartbreaking tale of what it’s like to be evicted from one’s home, then evicted again from a homeless encampment. It’s a dossier by Quentin Dufranne, who also attempts to explain the encampments, now that a UN rapporteur has emphasized that housing is a right, and evicting people from their encampments is a violation of that right. Dufranne also describes some possible solutions.
When I was a kid I remember being told, or shown on TV, how families in cities in India would camp on sidewalks because they were so poor. And then later, reading guys like Dickens and Victor Hugo, about the vast gulf between rich and poor in the 19th century. And voilà, we have both these features here now! In 1967 we brought the world to Montreal for Expo 67. Now we’re experiencing the world and its many contrasts without even having to build a new island. With the heavy rain warning for Sunday, we may even get some new lakes and waterways!
JP
Yep, modern slavery, ever increasing homelessness…We now have it all!
Ian
Wait until you hear where the “capital” in “capitalism” comes from
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Kate
USA Today’s writer doesn’t dissimulate that he’s writing about Montreal as Europe on the cheap for American travellers.
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