Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

10. A City on the Move: The Surprising Consequences of Highways

168 A City on the Move The Surprising Consequences of Highways Claire Poitras 10 In the second half of the twentieth century, highways—defined here as limited-access roads where vehicles can safely be driven at high speeds—had many environmental repercussions in peri-urban and rural areas, but they primarily affected ecosystems and agricultural and forest landscapes. In densely developed urban centers, the environmental issues associated with expressway construction must be seen in different terms. They raise questions of social and sanitary inequality for social groups exposed to the greater environmental hazards of polluting infrastructure like highways. The quality of life of people living beside highways and the massive forced relocation that the building of an expressway entails are also key considerations in the context of the urban environment. Recent research on the development of highway systems and the adoption of the car as the dominant mode of transport in Western cities and countries has highlighted the diversity of regional and national situations.1 For instance, in the American case, Owen Gutfreund has shown how the adoption of a national highway system construction policy led to a land use pattern in which travel is entirely dependent on the automobile.2 The establishment of a majority of new households and businesses on the urban periphery has had disastrous effects on the socio-economic vitality of central cities. Post–World War II A City on the Move - 169 development of cities in the American Sun Belt is inextricably linked to the expansion of the highway network and the resulting emergence of new forms of urbanization based on car travel.3 In other countries, such as England, Germany , France, and Italy, the construction of highways on a national scale did not inevitably lead to the decline of historical urban centers, although it did spark debate about their impact on the landscapes they traverse, define, and transform.4 The history of highways is also such that the players and the power relations that characterized them must be taken into account. Thus, the economic and technical imperatives of engineers and technical experts have often taken precedence over planners’ aesthetic and landscaping considerations. Furthermore, the history of planning and construction of highways has been marked by specific socio-political and territorial dynamics, depending on the environment studied. This chapter addresses three aspects of highway infrastructure as it relates to urban environmental study. The first concerns defining traffic problems in a metropolis with geographical characteristics that are considered major obstacles . In addressing this issue we must ask how Montreal’s expressway network was designed, what purposes it was built to serve, and which players supported its construction. We also need to know how the physical geography and urban space were addressed. The second aspect deals with the catch-up ideology that characterized the technical and political decisions of the early 1960s, when the governments of Quebec and the City of Montreal invested in the construction of highway infrastructure in response to the transformations taking place in the city, including the emergence of a new downtown bristling with skyscrapers and requiring easy access, and Expo 67, the World’s Fair exposition that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, many of them arriving by automobile . In a context in which the automobile appeared to be a means of solving the city’s congestion problems, officials had to determine which areas would be addressed first and what repercussions these decisions might have on the urban fabric and community life in inner-city neighborhoods. The third aspect is the new links connecting Montreal to its recreational hinterland. Three case studies of highway development in the Greater Montreal area show how new road networks transformed both the way of life in urban neighborhoods and Montreal’s recreational hinterland. Analysis of these cases shows that the programs developed by governments reflect normative visions of regional planning whose benefits and inconveniences are not uniformly distributed. On one hand, by creating jobs and fostering the establishment of businesses and households in new areas, expressway construction programs contribute to economic development and to the democratization of a subur- 170 - Claire Poitras ban lifestyle and access to leisure activities. On the other hand, highway system development disrupts local communities and the quality of life of those living in urban neighborhoods. Urban Expressways, Geography, and Political Dissension The highway system in the Montreal region was primarily built in the 1960s with the support of three...