“If you build it, they will come,” Kevin Costner hears in the classic field of dreams released on the screens in 1989. The character embodied by Kevin Costner, Ray Kinsella, then undertakes to build a baseball diamond in the middle of a field in Iowa. This metaphor sums up the development of Quebec cities since that time: entire neighborhoods have sprouted in fields or natural environments and hundreds of thousands of people have settled there.
At the heart of this phenomenon is a dynamic that is well known throughout North America and which is summed up by the expression “drive until you qualify”, i.e. to achieve the legitimate dream of being an owner, young families must settle further and further from the center of town, where prices are more affordable. Under an appearance of freedom of choice hides in fact an absence of choice: young households are forced to adhere to the only model offered, to live ever further away, to own a car per adult, and to spend more time in traffic every day. only in family. The average Quebec household now devotes 20% of its disposable income to transportation, more than to food (16%) and barely less than to housing (24%).
At the urban level, this major trend has fueled urban sprawl and reinforced dependence on the automobile, which means that the automobile fleet is growing at twice the rate of the population in Greater Montreal, where traffic congestion has become endemic. Recent observations tend to show that working from home exacerbates the problem by allowing new owners to settle even further away. If 70% of children went to school on foot in 1975, they are only 30% today. We are a long way from the time when the children came home to have dinner at noon. Today, they stay at daycare until 6 p.m., while their parents stress out in traffic jams.
Quebec is currently experiencing three simultaneous crises: a housing crisis, and more particularly its affordability, a mobility crisis, with an oversaturated road network and an ever-growing car fleet, and a climate crisis, fueled by the explosion of emissions in the transport sector. These three systemic crises can be largely resolved by changing the paradigm in the development of our cities, and finally offering a real solution to “drive until you qualify”.
More and more voices are rising to rethink the way we develop our cities, and move from a quilt of disparate projects and anonymous condo towers along our highways to planning real affordable, serviced by public transport and benefiting from local services.
Among them, that of the mayor of Laval, Stéphane Boyer, recently put into play a proposal for a car-free neighborhood in a book published in September 2022.1. The proposal, which would have been considered outlandish just a few years ago, was received with great interest in one of the most car-dependent cities in Quebec.
Another of these voices is that of Laurence Vincent, of the Prével group, who has the deep conviction that it is possible to build complete, mixed, affordable living environments, equipped with local services, parks, greenery, meeting spaces2. Low-carbon and resilient living environments, where the quality of life is superior to that of these dreary and anonymous neighborhoods where the car is king. By building these environments, we not only develop a neighborhood, we create real communities. By talking together, it was clear to us that as soon as we offered this option, people would come to it. Here it is, our new dream field, the one that gives life to this socio-ecological transition to which we aspire. All of this is within our reach, but to do so, the financial, regulatory or other obstacles that prevent the creation of these living environments must be removed.
The climate crisis does not only involve sacrifices. It is a unique opportunity to transform our ways of doing things to improve people’s quality of life. We can bet that citizens will stop resisting change when they realize that the solutions to the climate crisis will benefit them. These neighborhoods are not dreams. They are real and can be built now. Build them, and people will live there.