On the occasion of the City Talk on the Future of Suburbia, opening the 11thseason of this joint program between Héritage Montréal and the McCord-Stewart Museum, we put a few questions to Gérard Beaudet, professor of urban planning, author, former president ofHéritage Montréal and recipient of the Prix du Québec Ernest-Cormier. His thoughts refer in particular to his latest book Banlieue, dites-vous ? La suburbanisation dans la région métropolitaine de Montréalpublished by Presses de l'Université Laval in 2021.
Montreal's suburbs, understood as a territory of residential escape, originated in the mid-19th century. What are the key moments in the development of the metropolitan suburb from its roots to today?
The New Town of the Scots (1840→) must be considered the first suburb defined as a territory of permanent residential escape. But it was in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th that several elite suburbs were created (Westmount, Outremont, Town of Mount Royal, Hampstead, Pointe-Claire, Saint-Lambert). These were residential enclaves "set back" from the industrial suburbs [1], which were almost all absorbed by Montreal before the stock market crash of 1929. The development of the commuter train and the electric streetcar, as well as the spread of the automobile among the bourgeoisie, greatly facilitated the emergence of these enclaves, which often had restrictive urban planning regulations.
The second great wave occurred after World War II. It was the democratized suburb of the American Way of Life, the single-family home, generalized motorization, the highway, the boulevard and the shopping mall, the segregation of functions and the industrial park characterized by low-profile buildings. This suburbia, decried since the 1950s in some circles, is not yet qualified as sprawl. Characteristic of the Glorious Thirties (1945-1973), it underwent some adjustments in the wake of the first oil shock (1973), without really being called into question. Although the demographic growth rates of the first post-war decades faded, the suburbs nevertheless continued to flow happily into a continuously expanding metropolitan area.
The place that this suburb occupies in the metropolitan imagination and landscape obscures the fact that the housing crisis that raged in Montreal from the 1920s onwards, and that grew worse with the crisis of the following decade and the Second World War, pushed many households from working-class neighbourhoods to try their luck where often unscrupulous landowners and developers proposed improvised subdivisions, generally without services (sewer and water) and where the streets remained dirt for a long time. Such subdivisions can be found at the end of tramway lines, for example in Montreal-North or in Tétreaultville, on the South Shore (Laflèche, Saint-Lambert annexe, Mackayville) or at the bridgeheads on Île Jésus (Pont-Viau, Laval-des-Rapides, L'Abord-à-Plouffe). Realms of self-building, these sometimes very modest suburbs (they are called Shack Town in English Canada and in the United States) are progressively provided with services, but retain several attributes that testify to the precariousness of their birth. On the South Shore, Ville Jacques-Cartier remains the archetype.
The third great wave began at the end of the last century. The older suburbs (the neighbourhoods on the north side of the island of Montreal, the municipalities on the west and east sides of the island, Longueuil, Laval) were becoming increasingly autonomous, particularly in institutional and cultural terms. The number of large real estate complexes is increasing, some commercial uses from previous decades are disappearing or migrating to new peripheries, while residents are negatively perceiving these transformations. This dynamic, which I summarize as "the suburbs are fleeing from themselves", is growing as the territories of the suburban suburban imagination are being pushed further and further away from the center of the agglomeration. If Longueuil (the metro hub) and Anjou (the area around the shopping center and Jean-Talon Street) launched this dynamic of localized redefinition of the suburb, Brossard (Solar Uniquartier) and Laval (downtown) are now proposing a completely different variation.
Does the Montreal suburb have something that distinguishes it from other Canadian metropolises, such as Quebec City and Toronto for example?
The suburbs of Montreal - and Quebec - share many of the characteristics of the Canadian-American sprawl suburb. The large number of competing municipalities, the assumption of the costs of servicing subdivisions and the consequent presence of a large number of small entrepreneurs, as well as Quebec's lag in urban planning legislation, do however reflect the specificities of the Quebec suburbs. In the Montreal area, new residential spaces remain modest in size - less than 3,000 homes, often no more than a few hundred - compared to the United States or Ontario, where some developments total more than 10,000 homes. This small size, combined with strong inter-municipal competition, also explains the absence of civic cores, although many urban plans from the 1950s and 1960s did provide for them. Nevertheless, Montreal's suburban landscape has many of the attributes of the ideal post-war residential suburb.
It is recognized that the Montreal suburbs have a diverse architectural heritage. However, you note that the recognition of heritage interest does not ensure its sustainability. What are the heritage challenges facing the suburban municipalities and satellite cities of the Greater Montreal area? What are some of the flagship projects that have been completed or are being considered?
Greater Montreal is dotted with old cores, architectural ensembles and isolated buildings whose age, attributes and state of conservation have earned them recognition as being of heritage interest. This recognition does not guarantee their durability, as shown in recent years by several deplorable cases of demolition. Nevertheless, their preservation is generally self-evident.
The same cannot be said of the suburbs as a heritage. While some post-war buildings have attracted the attention of specialists, notably a number of churches and signature houses, the bulk of the built environment in the suburbs has not attracted much interest, at least until recently. What can be presented as modest modern heritage is nevertheless slowly emerging from anonymity. The fact that several of these complexes have reached the venerable age of some 60 to 70 years is certainly a factor. Inventories refer to them[2], citizens' associations devote various initiatives to them, and requests for the adoption of site planning and architectural integration programs (SPAIP) are multiplying where real estate pressures are felt to the detriment of the integrity of built environments.
The seizure of opportunities by developers, the search for new sources of financing by municipalities and the injunctions to densify have created, in recent years, fertile ground for the emergence of a sensitivity to the heritage value of certain parts of the post-war suburbs. The fight led by citizens of Longueuil to counter the demolition of modest houses in favor of the construction of apartment buildings has given great visibility to a dynamic that was taking place in many suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. The phenomenon is reminiscent of what happened in the 1970s in Milton Parc, when citizens combined demands for housing rights and heritage rights to counter the aims of a large real estate developer.
These initiatives suggest that arbitration modalities will have to be defined to allow the articulation of the imperatives of densification and heritage concerns. However, it is certainly not by qualifying single-family homeowners as privileged, as some have done to challenge the regulations limiting the transformation of Shoe Box type homes or to invalidate the heritage argument invoked in certain municipalities where densification is rejected, that the public debate on the heritageization of the suburbs will be advanced.
In recent years, some municipalities have shown leadership and adopted master plans in order to respond to the issues of densification and the consolidation of a local commercial fabric. Can you elaborate on this aspect?
The leadership shown by a few municipalities, such as Longueuil, Terrebonne, Boucherville, Brossard, Sainte-Catherine and, more recently, Laval, cannot hide the fact that most municipalities still give priority to accompanying developers, to the detriment of exercising true leadership. The densification underway in the suburbs is less the consequence of the adoption of the Metropolitan Land Use and Development Plan (MUDP) than the result of the adaptation of the real estate market to a transformation of demand attributable, among other things, to the aging of the population, the desire of long-time residents to make the transition from single-family homes to apartments within a limited perimeter, and the difficulty of young households to access property. The poor urban design that characterizes many of these blocks and their emergence away from public transit access is evidence that municipal leadership is not forthcoming.
As for local services, the least that can be said is that they remain negligible overall, particularly because of the very high mobility of residents, for whom proximity is based on automobile accessibility, even where density would justify, at least in theory, the presence of local shops and services.
How do you see developments such as the Bois-Franc district in Saint-Laurent or the Cité de Mirabel project that you studied and that are inspired by Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)?
The presence of transit-orienteddevelopment (TOD ) and pedestrian-oriented development (POD) attributes does not guarantee that the desired objectives will be achieved. Dependence on the automobile and the absence of local services discourage utilitarian pedestrian travel, while the poverty of public transit supply, both in terms of connections between origin and destination and in terms of the quality of service in terms of frequency and range of hours, undermines the TOD strategy. This is incidentally what I argue in my other book published by the Presses de l'Université Laval Public transit tested in Greater Montreal's suburbs.
Designed according to the principles of New Urbanism, Bois-Franc is one of Montreal's most car-dependent neighbourhoods, despite the presence of access to the metro and commuter train. The City of Mirabel is a good example of sterile densification, insofar as automobile dependence reigns supreme. From this point of view, the distribution of TOD lozenges on a map of the metropolitan region constitutes an urban planning-transportation articulation strategy that is totally ill-adapted to the reality on the ground, with a few exceptions.
source: https: //cmm.qc.ca/documentation/cartes/cartes-thematiques/
Your book, published in 2021, concludes with a "covidian postscript". Can you share with us some of your thoughts about the immediate impact of the pandemic on the metropolitan area and its revealing effect on certain underlying trends? And since then?
The immediate impact was a valorization of the suburbs that revived the hygienist discourse that had encouraged their birth and development at the end of the 19th century. The first suburbs were in fact the result of escape trajectories driven by a social and health hygienism. It was necessary to move away from the city to be safe from the evils - real or imaginary - that characterized it. But the mobility we enjoy today has also made it possible to escape far away, which had long been a distinctive feature of the holiday. Neo-rurality has thus experienced an observable boom. There is nothing new in all this, but the discrediting of the city has been amplified.
The popularity of telecommuting and home-shopping has also grown as a result of the pandemic. While neither of these is immediately a suburban affair, telecommuting is often better suited to the suburbs because of the larger, more affordable housing available there. It is difficult to predict what will happen to it. The fight against climate change and, more specifically, the reduction of GHGs attributable to transportation could, if concrete and binding measures are adopted, accentuate certain trends related to the pandemic, for example by encouraging a reduction in car travel and, consequently, the pursuit of telecommuting, insofar as public transit is not immediately a viable alternative. On the other hand, online shopping has already had a serious impact in the suburbs, as evidenced by the thousands of closed or recycled U.S. malls, as well as the redevelopment projects of several malls in the Montreal metropolitan area.
One thing is certain: the suburbs have not said their last word. If only because it is home to half of the metropolitan population and its profound transformation, if it takes place at all, will be spread out over a few decades.
In our October 26 City Talk, Suburbs: Modern Heritage in an Era of Sustainable Development, our guests will speak on the following question, among others: In an era of anti-sprawl and climate change, how can we recognize the suburbs and adapt or densify them without denaturing them? What do you think?
It must be recognized from the outset that the problem is extremely complex. The pavilion ideal is still very much alive, as shown for some time by the resistance to densification in Longueuil, Boucherville, Saint-Bruno, Saint-Lambert and in several other municipalities. And as shown by the residential choice of a large proportion of young families ready to move further away to make the dream of a single-family home a reality.
The desire to preserve a familiar living environment, the resistance to changes that could affect property values, the misunderstanding of the concept of density, the lack of confidence in elected officials who defend "controlled" densification, and the recognition of the heritage value of certain neighbourhoods are all factors that contribute to a position that is not very favourable to the transformation of the suburbs.
Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the lack of vision and of an urban planning and development policy is undermining attempts to produce a more socially, economically and environmentally acceptable settlement. And it is certainly not by multiplying the number of highway projects, by leaving the reins on entrepreneurs who seek to seize the slightest opportunity, regardless of the impacts generated, and by short-circuiting metropolitan governance in public transit - in favour of an indefensible business plan - that we will succeed in assuming in a socially acceptable manner the imperative of a necessary revision of our collective relationship to the metropolitan territory.
Finally, if you had to suggest to a foreign visitor a short list of suburbs to visit, which ones would you choose?
Town of Mount Royal, Ville Jacques-Cartier sector of Longueuil, Nuns' Island, Saint-Bruno, El Rancho district in Duvernay, Solar Uniquartier in Brossard and the Montmorency metro area in Laval. These suburbs or sectors of suburbs materialize the great diversity of metropolitan declensions of this phenomenon over a little more than a century, with a particular emphasis on the post-World War II period and on two current achievements.
To learn more about the next Urban Exchange, this Wednesday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. - Suburbs: Modern Heritage in an Era of Sustainability: click here.
THE SUBURBS: MODERN HERITAGE IN AN ERA OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Wednesday, October 26 at 6pm
Born in the optimism of the post-war period as an example of planned urbanism focused on "better living", our modern suburbs are getting older. Some have gained in heritage value. Many are reinventing themselves. At a time when the fight against urban sprawl and climate change is at stake, how can we recognize suburbs and adapt or densify them without denaturing them?
SPEAKERS
- Lucie K. Morisset, professor at theÉcole des sciences de la gestion de l'UQAM, and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage
- Nathalie Martin, Assistant Director, Urban Planning Department, Ville de Laval
- Guy Vadeboncoeur, Ph. D., FAMC, Vice President, Société de développement culturel de Terrebonne
Don't forget to book now to attend the event online!
[1] The term suburb here has an administrative connotation. These are municipalities separate from the central city, generally created by the local elites to promote the development of land. The municipality acts as a sort of lever for financing the development of land.
[2] These include the 2005 inventory of the entire island of Montreal by the Service de la mise en valeur du territoire at Ville de Montréal , and the 2013 inventories by L'Enclume for the municipalities of the Longueuil agglomeration. The obligation for municipalities to produce inventories could encourage the identification of other suburbs of heritage interest, even if the amendment to the Cultural Heritage Act limits the scope of these inventories to buildings constructed before1940.
