Village pedestrian area may be cut short
Discussions are afoot to crop the extent of the pedestrianized segment of Ste-Catherine that goes through the Village, effectively removing Berri square and its low-lifes from the ambit of the zone, although it sounds like the J’aime mon village guy thinks this is too simplistic a solution.
qatzelok 11:12 on 2012/03/08 Permalink
I guess the “theory” is that by maintaining car traffic, the area will be less attractive to homeless people and marginal youth. News flash: it will be less attractive TO EVERYONE. You can’t just isolate your hate for one demographic and call it “urbanism.”
Robert J 07:24 on 2012/03/09 Permalink
With the construction of the CHUM, Berri Square will become even more of a slum square. There is a concentration of monolithic institutional-type constructions in the area (UQAM, the old bus station and the Grande Bibliothèque as well as the government offices in Place Dupuis). Even though these are mostly positive institutions, they take up most of the space surrounding the square, having a negative effect on the variety of activities in the area. The UQAM construction in particularly is closed off and uninviting for passers-by (no obvious entrances oriented towards the square) and Place Dupuis doesn’t do much better).
A greater concentration of street level businesses on the North, West, and East, sides of the Square would bring a greater variety of people into the area. Note that I don’t think we should push out “low-lifes” out of public squares. In other major squares and parks (think Lafontaine, Mt-Royal, or Square St-Louis), families do not feel threatened by fairly high levels of “low-life” activity, because there are other kinds of activities concentrated in those areas (residences, street-level businesses). So we should work on installing businesses with street-level facades surrounding the square.
William 10:51 on 2012/03/09 Permalink
I disagree with Robert J’s assertations that a concentration of insitutional services equals social problems. There is probably no neighbourhood with a greater concentration of social service institutions than Cote-des-Neiges, and yet this neighbourhood doesn’t have a quarter of the problems of the eastern part of Ville-Marie. There are many factors at play, of which the passive concentration of the drug trade in the neighbourhood is probably the most important.
Robert J 11:57 on 2012/03/09 Permalink
A high concentration is not problematic as long as its accompanied with healthy commercial activity (and ideally some residential density). Côte-des-Neiges has a fantastic variety of small retail businesses, as well as restaurants, etc plus it is one of the denser central neighborhoods. Berri Square has hardly any commercial activity that is visible from the street level (they are mostly underground in Dupuis and the metro). Aside from Archambault (which is more of a big box store than a local business, it’s just big, single-use institutional complexes.
Just put some businesses with storefronts on the Square in some of those complexes and it would already be better off. But it’s not an easy problem to fix, because they’re there to stay…
No Parking, No Business 1: What if the other guy actually has a point? | World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities 03:38 on 2013/03/21 Permalink
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