Montreal has a choice to make: design itself to be a car-friendly American city, or a pedestrian, bike and bus friendly European city.

In the Plateau, where the debate over parking has been raging for several years between the Green party and store owners, both sides could learn from Europe.

The city of Zurich found that when cars were banned and the street was turned into a pedestrian zone with trams, foot traffic increased 30-40 percent, actually helping local business.

Source: New York Times

While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

A nice article featuring Marci Babineau and her urban farm. If you ever wondered how much food you could grow in a front or back yard, or how to keep urban chickens, this article is a good source of information.

Source: Montreal Gazette

On the sidewalk in front of Marci Babineau’s house, I craned my neck to see if I could spot the birds.

In the backyard, just beyond her root-vegetable garden and several fruit trees, a chicken stretched out a wing, then ruffled her black feathers back into place.

Not exactly what a passerby would expect to see on a quiet, tree-lined street minutes from downtown Montreal (I can’t say exactly where; more about that later).

But it’s what urban agriculture enthusiasts across North America would like to see – micro-farms where city dwellers could produce fruits, vegetables, eggs and honey, milk from goats, and meat from rabbits.

Some Montrealers have already enthusiastically embraced the growing urban agriculture movement, which took off after Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn two years ago.

Chickens are pecking away in Montreal backyards, bees are buzzing around hives in industrial areas, lettuce is growing in container gardens downtown, and the Lufa Farms rooftop greenhouse near Marché Centrale is producing enough fresh produce to feed more than 1,000 people a week.

It’s not easy, though. Municipal bylaws ban most island residents from keeping livestock, like chickens, and bees, and people are more used to seeing grass in front yards than tomatoes and peppers.

Still, if urbanites, who rely on food grown dozens, even thousands of kilometres away, want to try to become as self-sufficient as possible, how would they do it?

Using my own yard as a test case, I set about to find out.

Themes:

• Sustainable development (history, theory, concepts, and approaches) and its implementation in urban areas
• Approaches to socio-territorial development in Montréal
• Plans for sustainable neighbourhood development by the City of Montréal and its partners
• Participatory democracy
• The city and nature
• Development, health, and sustainable development
• Macro vision of the sustainable city

Resource persons:

• Normand Brunet, associate professor, Institut des sciences de l’environnement, UQAM
• Saleema Hutchinson, project manager, education and citizenship, Montréal Urban Ecology Centre
• Sophie Paquin, urban planner, Direction de santé publique de Montréal
• Marie-Hélène Armand, urban planning officer, Montréal Urban Ecology Centre François Miller, planning consultant, City of Montréal
• And others to be confirmed…

Registration:

Alexandra Coelho: 514.282.VERT ext. 256 – alexandra@ecologieurbaine.net
Maximum 22 people: first come, first serve!

Cost:

$25 (Meal included)

Location:

Institut des sciences de l’environnement at UQAM
President-Kennedy Building, 201 President-Kennedy Avenue, room PK-3210
(Metro Place-des-Arts)

Tuesday, 05 April, 09h00 – 17h00

We hope to see many of you at the Launch party of our Green Neighborhood Plan for Plateau East. Register by April 8th!

Several sites in the Plateau East are working to promote active transportation (walking, cycling and others) and increase the quality of life in the Plateau East.

The Green Neighborhood Plan proposes hundreds of courses of action in order to guide the district and the actors in the progressive development of the Plateau Area Green East.

Discover the upcoming changes for the neighborhood. See how our neighborhood will change!

> Project News: Read the Green Neighborhood Newsletter Plateau East. March 2011

The Green, Active, and Healthy Neighbourhoods project in the Plateau-Est, or Green Plateau-Est, aims to redesign streets and public spaces in order to prioritize walking, cycling, and other modes of active transportation. The project, launched in June 2010, involves a series of participatory activities for citizens during which design solutions for the following priority sites will be proposed and discussed.

> Mont-Royal Avenue East
> Key destinations for neighbourhood youth
> The Masson district
> The STM and Ford district

The project is made up of three phases (Understanding, Exploring, and Deciding). The Green Neighbourhood Plan for the Plateau-Est will be launched in Phase three. The launch is scheduled for mid-april 2011; the exact date will be revealed soon.

Do you wish you had more green space in your neighborhood? Are you motivated and willing to improve the quality of life in your alley? Join us!

The Éco-quartier NDG is launching our first forum on green alleys in NDG. Greening projects can only come to life thanks to the will and participation of alley-way users and owners, while encouraging a vibrant community. Learn how to engage in this exciting movement and share your vision for your alley! Bring your neighbours!!

Wednesday, 26 January, 7:00PM to 9:00PM @Coop la Maison verte,, 5785, Sherbrooke Street West

If the major issues surrounding sustainable urban development are an everyday concern for you, don’t miss the Ecocity World Summit 2011, in Montréal, August 22-26 @ the Palais des Congres.

This major international conference will address a number of themes at the heart of ecocities: climate change, ecomobility, governance, the economy, built environment, etc.

The Ecocity World Summit is the opportunity to present research projects and achievements which will help governments, researchers and industry professionals meet the challenges which they face in the quest for a healthier and more sustainable world.

This is a reminder that the deadline to SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSALS is January 31, 2011.

Please click the links below for details on the conference themes.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ECOCITY »»»
ECOMOBILITY, URBAN PLANNING, PUBLIC SPACE »»»
GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRACY IN THE ECOCITY »»»
ECONOMICS OF THE ECOCITY »»»
HEALTH AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT »»»
BIODIVERSITY AND URBAN AGRICULTURE »»»

The original plan to repair the Turcot interchange that connects the 20 and 15 highways was heavily criticized last spring. This “new” plan doesn’t make any improvements and is a step in the opposite direction. Here’s why:

First, $3 Billion to re-build a small piece of highway is insanity. It’s double the price of the original plan and it seems like a great way to keep construction workers busy forever, at taxpayer expense.

Second, the plan fails to address the biggest complaint of the current Turcot interchange: the community south of the 20 is separated from the rest of the city, in effect creating a slum.

Third, the plan calls for several factories to be removed to make way for the new road, but there is no funding to do so!

Finally, if the plan is executed on time (highly doubtful based on past projects), the interchange will be ready in 2018 – just in time to experience the full effects of peak oil. They are planning for a road that will not be used at 100% capacity because the price of oil/gasoline will prohibit many drivers from using it.

I imagine that $3 Billion could buy us a nice train from downtown to the airport, but that wouldn’t be as politically advantageous.

Source: CBC News

From Walking Turcot Yards:

Apply the Actual Reality Formula (ARF) for major Quebec construction projects and you will end up with a modest completed in 2020 at a cost of 7-10 Billion dollars. And 43,000 jobs created is a pretty sweet deal, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why the Quebec Liberal Party is so deeply beholden to the construction industry.

The government says there will be less expropriations as though they are born again urbanists! Don’t buy their spin. They are trying to bypass the fact that for at least 7 years people living near the project will have to live in a construction zone nightmare.

Architect's rendering of Lufa rooftop gardens

Now, this is progress!

Again, Montreal leads the world in sustainable solutions. Other worldwide firsts include CommunAuto car sharing and Bixi bicycle sharing.

Growing veggies in a population-dense, urban area, year-round is a great idea and should especially appeal to the many “foodies” in the city who are particular about their greens.

Source: Montreal Gazette

A new way of designing cities – away from the car-dependent suburban model – is urgently needed as gasoline gets more and more expensive. TOD is a fancy way of saying: build housing near public transportation hubs.

Source: Caia Hagel, Future Living, Edition 9

Transit oriented developments (TOD) is not a term in Europe (editor’s note: or North America). Small geographical areas, surplus populations, and the unique opportunity after 1945 to “rebuild a bright new world” has made vertical, multi use, mixed income, train dependent, often architecturally innovative building, a natural phenomenon. A similar phenomenon is true in Asia.

In Australia, the traditional urban organisation has followed the “American Dream” model of the 1950s. That is horizontal sprawl across a vast landscape, resulting today in either leafy suburbs featuring large houses and large cars, two or more to a family, which link them to the city via congested highways; or, more detrimentally, suburb ghettos where poverty and social problems resist growth. The British colony cities of North America, Australia and New Zealand were built around dependence on cars, gasoline and oil, and homogeneity.

But this model is proving itself obsolete. On the one side, long traffic jams and commute time, high oil prices and ecological mandates have made the cost of living of this old model both economically unviable and ecologically unsustainable. On the other, perpetuating isolated pockets of lower income and culturally specific living circumstances isolates an aspect of society that through greater integration can foster movement, interaction, safety and prosperity. So what Europeans and Asians have had to implement to survive population explosion is catching on in Australia as a future thinking model of better living.

TOD is the proposed answer to this. They are multi use, mixed income vertical buildings whose axes are a well serviced rail line and communal green spaces that encourage walking, cycling, community interaction, and diversity.

Highlights of the plan include funding for:

• more bike paths
• green promenades through the most densely populated sectors
• charging stations for electric cars
• curb-side pickup of kitchen compost for buildings with less than 8 units (sorry apartment dwellers!)

Source: Montreal Gazette