[117] URBANISMO E METROPOLIZAÇÃO (24): GRANDE MONTREAL, CANADA - METROPOLIZAÇÃO DE 82 MUNICIPALIDADES [Citiscope; english text]
In the Montréal área [Canada], 82
municipalities begin to think and act as one
Rocky path
to regionalism
Montréal Mayor Denis Coderre presides over the regional governance
body known as the Montréal Metropolitan Community, or CMM. (Ville de Montréal)
Era of solidarity [The
PLAN]
New challenges
The Montréal
Metropolitan Community takes in the core city and its many suburban
communities. (CMM)
Innovative
tools for metropolitan governance
In the Montréal área [Canada], 82
municipalities begin to think and act as one
Source: Citiscope; By Flavie Halais; October 2,
2015
Flavie Halais is a freelance
journalist based in Montréal who covers cities and international social issues.
See more at:
MONTREAL, Canada —
“Greater Montréal is definitely a great place to live.”
That’s from a website
promoting Canada’s second largest metropolis to foreign investors. Greater Montréal. The local businesses and
political groups behind the site are marketing not just the city of Montréal
itself or any one of its affluent suburbs, but the entire urban region. In
French, it’s Grand Montréal.
It hasn’t always
been this way. Locals here sometimes have a hard time grasping what “Greater
Montréal” is all about. The core city, with its office towers and dense walkable
neighborhoods built on a European model, doesn’t have much in common with its
sprawling suburbs and the car-based lifestyle they entail. In the past, local
leaders have been unable to collaborate on common projects, such as finding
funds to build adequate transportation to the suburban Mirabel airport, which
closed and had to be demolished.
Local leaders in Canada's second largest metro area increasingly talk of ‘Greater Montréal’ — and mean it.
(Henryk Sadura/Shutterstock.com)
But this is
slowly changing. For the first time, mayors of the entire region and civil
society groups are working from a common plan to turn the metropolitan area
into a thriving and sustainable urban center. They’re applying best practices
from abroad and inventing their own tools for sound regional governance.
Advertising “Greater Montréal” to global business is just one way that plan is
being put into action.
The new thinking
in the Montréal region underlies an important meeting taking place here next week.
Mayors and urban experts from around the world are gathering to discuss how to
share and strengthen models for governing metropolitan areas. The resulting Montréal Declaration will feed directly into the agenda for
Habitat III,
the United Nations’ once-every-20-years conference on cities, to take place
next year.
The stakes are large. By 2030, some 41
metropolitan areas around the world will be home to more than 10 million people
each.
If those metropolises are to grow in a way that is healthy for their people as
well as the planet, local leaders within these regions will need to see past
jurisdictional boundaries and work together to solve common problems.
Rocky path
to regionalism
About 1.7
million people live within the city of Montréal, which is located on an island
in the St. Lawrence River. More than a dozen suburban municipalities share
space on the island — a few of them are even surrounded by the city on all
sides. Many more small suburban municipalities are located on the north and
south shores of the river. Add it all up and you have a total of 3.7 million
people living in 82 municipalities, spread across a territory that is roughly
3.5 times bigger than New York City.
There have been
efforts to consolidate local government within this area. But they have been
very contentious.
In 2002, the provincial government of Quebec
forced all 28 municipalities on the island of Montréal to merge into one
mega-city.
The hope was that a larger city would create economies of scale and allow for
more efficient delivery of municipal services.
Montréal Mayor Denis Coderre presides over the regional governance
body known as the Montréal Metropolitan Community, or CMM. (Ville de Montréal)
Some of the
wealthier municipalities absorbed into the city protested. They complained that
their services would get worse, not better, under the merger. They also didn’t
like sharing their tax base with the city. The provincial government allowed a
referendum on the merger. Fifteen municipalities on the island voted to regain
their independence; a dozen opted to remain in the bigger city, having
benefited from revenue sharing and increased services.
The “de-merger”
in 2006 revealed a profound cultural divide between neighboring communities, as
well as irreconcilable differences on tax and budget issues.
While the
merger/de-merger controversy was playing out, the seeds of a more lasting
change were being planted. In 2000, the provincial government passed a law
allowing the creation of a metropolitan organization to facilitate the
management of regional services such as transportation, public housing,
infrastructure, planning and environmental protection.
The Montréal
Metropolitan Community, or CMM, was
created soon after. It’s governed by a council presided by the mayor of
Montréal (currently Denis Coderre) and comprised of 27 other mayors from the
metropolitan area.
Each
municipality must contribute financially to the CMM’s yearly budget
(CAD$119 million or USD$90 million for 2015) to help maintain and develop services.
Era of solidarity [The
PLAN]
The CMM didn’t have a big impact right away.
The body had limited powers and the mayors could not agree on a vision for the
metro area. That began to change about five years ago, when the region began
facing a slew of challenges that municipalities couldn’t address on their own.
Those challenges included decaying infrastructure, a sluggish economy, and an
exodus of families from the island to the peripheries. Through the CMM, the region’s mayors started working on the first-ever
regional development strategy for the Montréal metro area.
It was called
the Metropolitan Land Use and Development Plan, or PMAD.
And it was centered on three key areas: economic development, environmental
protection and transportation. Suzanne Roy, mayor of Sainte-Julie, a suburb in
the south shore says the PMAD was part
of an effort to make all of the Montréal region more attractive and competitive
on the international scene. “It wasn’t easy, but we learned to work together,”
Roy recalls. “We went from an era of parochialism to one of solidarity.”
Adopted in 2011
after an unprecedented series of public consultations, the PMAD was quickly touted as a remarkable
consensus between mayors with vastly different priorities. The plan sets
ambitious goals for the next 20 years, such as raising the share of public
transit trips in the region from 25 percent to 35 percent by 2031;
concentrating 40 percent of planned urbanization around transit nodes; and
protecting 17 percent of the territory from development and environmental
degradation. A provincial law was later passed to turn the PMAD into a binding document. This means
all municipalities that are part of the CMM are obliged
to respect the PMAD’s
objectives in their own planning efforts. As Florence Paulhiac, Chair of the
In. SITU research center at the Université du
Québec à Montréal, says, “It’s a huge step forward for the region.”
Among the
flagship projects included in PMAD is a
“green and blue belt” connecting green space, natural parks, rivers and
protected buildings by a network of bike paths, public transit and waterways.
That includes a new 143-kilometer (89-mile) bike and pedestrian path going from
west to east. Félix Gravel, a consultant with the Conseil Régional de
l’Environnement Montréal, an NGO promoting
environmental protection and sustainable development, says the path is a symbol
of the plan’s big ambitions. “Crossing a metropolis by other means than the car
has never been done before,” he says.
New challenges
Rethinking transportation is at the heart
of the PMAD, which embraces the concept of
transit-oriented development to channel urban growth. This means generating
holistic and high-density development complete with jobs, services, housing and
access to public transit in selected urban centers. The CMM is currently supporting the
development of 17 transit-oriented development pilot projects with a CAD$1.7
million (US$1.3 million) grant to municipalities for
preliminary studies. But thePMAD makes way for a huge number of such
projects — up to 155 of them across the region.
Paula Negron
says this might be one area where the PMAD is overly
ambitious. “It’s too much for a region of 3.5 million people,” says Negron, who
co-heads the Observatoire de la mobilité durable, a research center on
sustainable transportation at the Université de Montréal. “It’s difficult to
have a structured metropolitan plan when you have so many areas to focus on.”
She also fears the PMAD’s
economic strategy is too weak to ensure that new jobs will indeed flow to the
new development nodes rather than Montréal’s downtown.
The Montréal
Metropolitan Community takes in the core city and its many suburban
communities. (CMM)
There are other
challenges. Data sharing is one of them. For example, all the planning around
transit-oriented development has also raised the inevitable question of how
much car parking should be allowed in these zones. According to Félix Gravel,
the CMM is blocked by a general lack of information being shared
between municipalities, public agencies and private companies. “The lack of data is blatant,” Gravel
says. “Municipalities don’t know how many [parking spaces] they’re offering,
and how many they should offer.” Some efforts are being made to open up data at
the metropolitan level, he says, but this requires a cultural change that may
take time to accomplish.
Another hurdle
to implementing the PMAD is financing,
particularly for transit. All the new development plans rely on the
availability of robust transit services. But chronic under-financing of transit
agencies by the municipal, provincial and federal governments will make it
difficult to accommodate new users. “The network is now saturated in certain
sectors, and the demand is constantly growing,” says Florence Paulhiac. “Transportation
agencies don’t have enough money to ensure the maintenance and expansion of
their network.”
Innovative
tools for metropolitan governance
In spite of
these challenges, local planners are enthusiastic about tools put in place by
the CMM to help local governments reach the
goals set by the PMAD.
Among them is a detailed guidebook aimed at municipalities, boroughs, planners
and promoters to help them implement the transit-oriented development plans.
Another is a biennial report outlining progress made on PMAD objectives, and actions taken
by municipalities.
Then there is
something called the Metropolitan Agora. It’s a day-long public meeting organized
once every two years, in which elected officials, city workers, planners and
civil society groups are invited to come together and reflect on the
metropolitan experience and showcase innovative projects that align with the PMAD’s vision.
The Agora has been credited as one of the CMM’s most interesting tools for dialogue and collaboration
between all stakeholders, especially municipalities; it’s also a way for the CMM to educate the public on the plan and gain
its support on core issues. The
next Agora takes place on Monday October 5.
When asked how
the 82 mayors came to align on a common vision, Suzanne Roy says mutual respect
is a crucial factor. “The only way we succeeded in creating the PMAD, is when the
different sectors didn’t feel threatened anymore. For instance, we didn’t feel
the center wanted everything for itself, or the suburbs wanted everything for
themselves. It’s all about creating a balance,” she explains.
Disagreements
still occur — plans for the extension of a highway in the north shore, as well
as for a new mega mall on
the island of Montréal, have been heavily criticized for going against the PMAD. But a
general consensus has emerged in the region around urban sustainability. Even
the mayor of Laval, a sprawling city north of Montréal that used to epitomize
suburban living, has become a staunch proponent of environmental protection and
public transit.
Now, mayors from
the region are lobbying for an even bigger role for Greater Montréal as a
political entity. They say the metropolis needs more autonomy from the
provincial government of Quebec to make its own decisions when it comes to
managing the environment, immigration, economic development, housing and
transportation. The proposal could be voted on in the next few months by
Quebec’s parliament. This has already sparked a debate about what kind of
political system and institutions could take on such a mandate, as the CMM isn’t structured to do that.
As Montréal
Mayor Denis Coderre said last year, “A real metropolis should have the autonomy
to decide on its priorities.”
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