Consultations coming for car-free neighbourhood on Blue Bonnets site!
18 Sep 2019
Montreal is promising the future housing project on the former Hippodrôme will "change the paradigm" for development, by no longer basing it on cars.
Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration promised Tuesday to hold public consultations before moving forward on an “audacious vision” for a car-free neighbourhood on the former Blue Bonnets racetrack.
“There will be a consultation before the development of the Hippodrôme site,” Éric Alan Caldwell, the executive committee member responsible for urban planning, mobility and public consultation, said Tuesday during the monthly city council meeting.
The 8,000-unit development will “change the paradigm” for development, by no longer “thinking of neighbourhoods as we thought of them half a century ago, when everything was based on access for cars,” Caldwell said in answer to a question by opposition housing critic Karine Boivin-Roy.
Boivin-Roy, the councillor for Louis-Riel in the Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district, asked whether citizens would be consulted on the plan after Plante revealed in a radio interview last week that the long-awaited housing project at Décarie Blvd. and Jean-Talon St. W. would be car-free.
“At the Hippodrôme, we will propose a neighbourhood without cars,” Plante said on Radio-Canada’s La soirée est encore jeune show.
Plante added that the ecological development would be a counterpoint to the future Royalmount project, a gigantic mega-mall to be built nearby at the intersection of the Décarie Expressway and Highway 40, an area prone to chronic traffic congestion. Since the future “lifestyle centre” is located in the Town of Mount Royal, Plante acknowledged that she had little power to demand changes.
In council, Caldwell said the Hippodrôme project would “be ambitious and appeal to citizens’ ambition.”
“It will be an audacious vision for a green neighbourhood, for an eco-neighbourhood based on sustainable mobility,” he added.
The Plante administration has said in the past that consultations on the Hippodrôme project will be held this fall. However, the city has not yet given a mandate to the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), said Anik Pouliot, communications director for the consultation bureau.
Over the past summer, the 46-hectare Hippodrôme site was used for an urban agriculture project. The Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough is also planting trees there and sponsoring a beekeeping project.
The Blue Bonnets racetrack, which first opened in 1872 in the Montreal West/Ville St-Pierre area, moved to the Décarie Blvd. location in 1907, after railway construction divided the racecourse in two. Montreal acquired the land in October 2017 and began demolition of the abandoned structures on it last year.
