About Making Mega-Projects Work for Communities:

Our community university partnership brings researchers and community leaders together to ask some Big Questions:

Under what conditions and through what mechanisms can mega-projects contribute to the construction of sustainable neighbourhoods?

The cooperation between universities and communities is fundamental to the elaboration of answers to the problems of infrastructures and mega-projects: this cooperation is based on the principle that local populations have a better understanding of the needs of the communities and the impacts of infrastructure on their mode of life, while the universities are able to offer an expertise that goes beyond the purely economic or geographical interests.

The Community-University Research Alliances are present in six large institutions in Montreal, and benefit from a diversified academic team and an extended community network, enabling them to have expertise in municipal policy, sustainable design, economic development, affordable housing, social mixing and participatory governance. Each CURA acts with regards to established partnerships between the communities and the academic institutions to better meet the needs of the community groups: thus, the academic side of each CURA is specialized from one university to another.

The services of parallel urbanism of CURA are especially interested in infrastructures and megaprojects of the Montreal metropole: “Making Megaprojects Work for Communities” is an action-research project seeking to understand how new, large-scale public facilities, or “megaprojects”, can impact communities and the city at large. The project is supported by the Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).