Montréal vs. Toronto: Which is more creative? part 2 … (maybe it’s Portland!)
Well, as suggested from yesterday’s post … Montréal isn’t the first city to have to deal with the question of bad infrastructure from the past. The question is, how will we decide to resolve our issues?
I hinted that perhaps (i.e., for sure) Toronto is going about the same questioning in a far more open, transparent and interesting way. What I didn’t say is that there are already many examples from the US that could give us (and Toronto) some guidance.
One of them being Portland, which is already leaps and bounds ahead of Montréal in terms of the innovative urban planning department. Some photos…
Before:
After:
That’s right. In Portland, they actually had the nerve to rip up pavement and put down…GREEN! (omg). And, they ‘smarted up’ in the mid-1970s! yet somehow for Montréal (and Québec) this sort of option would seem much too utopist.
One person’s utopia is another’s 1973, I guess. From the Landscape + Urbanism blog:
“There was a shift in local government in the late-’60s. It went from a good-old-boy network to a much younger generation of politicians,” explains Ballestrem. Urban planning historian Gregory L. Thompson wrote that when one young politician arrived in Portland in 1973, the politico noted that everyone had a copy of anti-freeway handbook Rites of Way tucked into their hip pocket.
Great to note, though, that is wasn’t all politicos that were running the show, but also the renowned citizen participation that Portland is still so admired for:
When the state began buying up land next to Harbor Drive to widen the waterfront freeway in 1968, a citizen alliance against the expansion found open ears at city hall and the governor’s office. Old-school traffic engineers said closing the freeway would be a disaster, but Governor Tom McCall, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, and County Commissioner Don Clark heard the citizens’ opinion that most car traffic could be rerouted to the city’s newly built freeways, like the I-5. Throughout the summer of ‘69, Portlanders organized “consciousness-raising picnics” to rally people against Harbor Drive. Three years later, a governor’s task force declared that the low-traffic, 30-year-old road should be ripped out and replaced with a park.”
…the park is not one of Portland’s best. If it were done today, I would hope they would create something far more amenable to biodiversity. But, still not bad for a bunch of land that was once a highway…
For more details on the project, and others in the same vein go here.
via: Landscape + Urbanism
