Renderings of Canada Lands Company's Wellington Basin district in Montreal. The 8.5-hectare zone will include 2,800 homes, cultural and educational facilities, and at least four blocks reserved for pedestrians and cyclists.Supplied
A new neighbourhood is being born and there will be few cars in sight. Residents will walk home from a transit station or cycle up to their front doors. Many blocks will be entirely free of the chaos of vehicles. It’s a utopian form of urbanism that we can’t seem to build in Canada.
Except, apparently, we can. Montreal’s Sid Lee Architecture is working on the project in the city’s Sud-Ouest borough. Known as Wellington Basin, the 8.5-hectare zone will include 2,800 homes, offices, cultural and community facilities. The project is meant to start construction next year and take roughly 10 years to complete.
It will also feature urban design that is nothing short of revolutionary. The plan has two unusual characteristics: There are buildings of different sizes and shapes, and car-free public space forms the bones of the neighbourhood.
The plan should be a model for new urban developments across the country, such as the Villiers Island plan on the Toronto waterfront, which is shaping up to be an underbuilt, windswept mistake.
“This project started with ambition,” said Martin Leblanc, a partner at Sid Lee Architecture. “What is it we want to do with this stretch of land? There are no rules. Let’s create a dream and leave room for others to participate.”
The site is not exactly a blank slate – residents of the adjacent Pointe St.-Charles district have successfully called for public space and generous social housing in the development – but it still offers room to manoeuvre. It is mostly idle industrial land along the Peel Basin, steps from the Farine Five Roses mill. The federal agency Canada Lands Company acquired the old port lands in 2010 and is collaborating with the city and the borough on a new plan, which will clean up the site and provide new waterfront parks including a swimming area.
The Sid Lee recipe would be familiar enough in London or Frankfurt.Supplied
Crucially, the plan also minimizes cars. A single vehicular street cuts through the middle of the site; from here, roughly eight blocks of new buildings will be arranged along pedestrian-only streets that run north 200 metres to the waterfront. Parking will be centralized in two shared garages. If residents have cars, some will have to park them a block from home, which is common on the Island of Montreal.
The urban design also provides buildings of different sizes. “Usually, the master planning of new neighbourhoods leads to a lot of uniformity, both in the buildings and the kind of actors that build and operate them,” said Canada Lands executive Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes. “Here we made an intentional choice to have a more heterogeneous form: small, medium and large.”
Indeed, the plan’s 300,000 square metres of floor space are broken up into three high-rise buildings of 20, 26 and 40 storeys, a cluster of 12- to 16-storey buildings, and roughly a dozen smaller ones, as low as four storeys tall.
When Canada Lands sells or leases parts of the district to developers, this variety may have financial costs. Bigger sites mean bigger developers and less risk.
However, having smaller buildings in the mix allows not-for-profit organizations and smaller builders to participate. That idea is standard in contemporary European development, says Benoit Lagacé, Sid Lee Architecture’s director of urban design. “And why should we not build that way as well?”
Such an unorthodox attitude may have something to do with the design firm’s makeup. Sid Lee Architecture, led by Mr. Leblanc and Jean Pelland, is a branch of the Montreal-based advertising and marketing agency Sid Lee, and the architects have absorbed the larger firm’s emphasis on “deep, anthropological thinking about what people need,” Mr. Leblanc said.
They have arrived at an enticing recipe. If built according to the plan, this place will feel good. There will be 1.3 hectares of public space – just the right amount, properly framed by buildings and the waterfront. Cars are marginalized or pushed underground.
These principles are foreign in contemporary Canadian architecture. Federal, provincial and municipal governments tend to ignore them, but the Sid Lee recipe would be familiar enough in London or Frankfurt. With luck, Wellington Basin will survive the remaining municipal approvals, navigate the hurdles of development and set an example for Canadian cities to emulate.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the project comprises two high-rise buildings of 20 and 26 stories. The plan is for three high-rise buildings of 20, 26 and 40 stories. This version has been updated.