For a good ten years, we have heard quite regularly about the new constructions that have contributed to the relative and recent prosperity of downtown Montreal. I am not a scholar, politician or architecture critic, but as an urban planner and former civil servant who was closely involved in overseeing downtown real estate projects from Jean Doré to Valérie Plant, I wonder a lot about the good faith of these harsh criticisms.
At the end of the 1980s, downtown Montreal looked like a Swiss cheese with so much vacant land, and its almost monofunctional land use included fewer residents per square foot than a suburb like Lorraine on the North Shore. . It was in this context, and with a view to enhancing the economic and cultural heart of Quebec, that the Doré administration adopted, in 1990, the Master Plan for the Ville-Marie borough, inserted two years later in the first of urban planning in Montreal.
Unfortunately and for various reasons unrelated to this plan, during the following decade there was virtually no development in the city center except for a few public or state-funded projects. Private developers only started to take an interest in the city center from the 2000s.
Changes in his time
For example, between 2008 and 2021, in the borough of Ville-Marie alone, we observed private investments of more than 32 billion dollars (in construction costs) and the addition of approximately 33,000 dwellings! Thus, this real estate boom, which several critics have decried, nevertheless corresponds, despite a fifteen-year delay, quite precisely to the achievement of the objectives and orientations of the 1990 master plan.
It should be noted that the promoters of this catch-up are mainly from here and not, as in the 1960s and 1970s, foreign investors insensitive to the architectural quality of a city they did not even know, as demonstrated Henri Aubin in his book The real owners of Montrealpublished in 1977. In the same way, these recent constructions are almost all designed by a new and talented generation of local architects, of whom we should be proud.
Unfortunately, one seldom appreciates the changes of one’s time. At the beginning of the last century, vitriolic diatribes were common over the treatment of the decorative facades of new plexes in Montreal, which were perceived as a ridiculous ornamental one-upmanship. Our budding critics were particularly ferocious with regard to the “shameful” exterior staircases, which are nevertheless considered today as one of the main identifying characteristics of many old neighborhoods in Montreal.
I have no doubt that most of the new downtown buildings will be blessed with the censors of tomorrow, but for now those of today see it as nothing more than a forest of high-rise buildings. the “New Yorker” or a wall that blocks the view of the river from a given point on Mount Royal.