Welcome to the Community University Planning Play Area!
Do you love Montreal? This website is here to help you understand and maybe even affect urban change in your City!
At this junction in our cities history, this era of globalization, governments and public institutions are again investing massively in infrastructures and mega-projects. These mega-projects, while causing many problems to the communities in which they are situated, also represent opportunities to correct our city patterns of the future..if done carefully!
Channelling massive investments, these projects generate new real estate developments and the multiplication of services and businesses. But they are more often tuned to the race for prestige rather than towards the needs of local communities.
The economic pressures that underlie the speed of implementation and the profitability of these projects, as well as national policies, demographic and cultural changes have contributed to a greater marginalization of local communities, and more particularly of low-income populations.
Some of the direct consequences of mega-projects include:
Rent and tax increases
changes in character of the neighbourhoods,
displacement of residents,
more traffic and parking problems.
The political and economic impacts of the mega-projects on communities are often under-estimated and little discussed in the projects themselves, creating a gap between the investments and the needs: ultimately, the opportunities to use major investments to build sustainable and inclusive communities are lacking.
The works of the Community-University Research Alliances (CURA), through the “Making MegaProjects Work for the Communities” action-research initiative, propose to deepen the understanding of local and global mechanisms from which stem the development of megaprojects, and how the latter can operate better for the City and the communities.