Mega-mall project’s green light takes heat from planning experts
It’s nonsensical that the Town of Mount Royal, with just one per cent of the population on the island of Montreal, can impose the Royalmount project on everyone else, says a leading urban planner.
“I think it’s a question of democracy,” said Raphaël Fischler, dean of urban planning at the Université de Montréal.
In an interview Monday, he said the $2-billion project — expected to worsen traffic on the already congested Décarie Expressway and Highway 40 — should be sent back to the drawing board.
Fischler called on the Quebec government, the city of Montreal and the agglomeration council to halt Royalmount by requiring developer Carbonleo to pay for all infrastructure work necessitated by the project.
“I believe that the developer and T.M.R. can be brought to the table and forced to reconsider the project,” he said.
Fischler made the comments just three days before the agglomeration council’s standing committee on urban and economic development and housing is due to submit its recommendations on the controversial mega-mall.
“It’s the 11th hour,” he acknowledged.
In a written brief to the committee, Fischler said that allowing Royalmount to go ahead would be a mistake akin to the 1973 demolition of the Van Horne mansion in downtown Montreal — an event that launched the city’s heritage movement.
The Royalmount project is “an aberration in the management of Montreal’s development,” he writes in the brief.
It “goes against logic and good practices in the management of urban development” and even democracy that T.M.R., with fewer than 20,000 residents, has the power to approve a project that will have an enormous impact on surrounding municipalities and the highway network, he says.
The mega-mall would have “the intended effect, if not the explicit goal, of weakening existing main streets, shopping centres and theatres so this private project can make money. In a few years, it could undo decades of efforts to inject life into downtown and neighbourhoods” as well as decades of public efforts to have a thriving downtown people can reach without having to drive, the brief says.
On Monday, Fischler said the city and the agglomeration council have abdicated their responsibility to draw up a master plan for development in the area around the Décarie north of Jean-Talon St.
The Royalmount project puts the power of “planning part of the city” in the hands of a single, private developer, he said.
The same developer built the Quartier DIX30 shopping complex in Brossard and was involved in plans for a similar $1.3-billion project in Griffintown in the mid2000s, much of which was later scrapped.
Gérard Beaudet, a professor of urban planning at the Université de Montréal, said it is “not normal” and “very worrisome” that a small municipality and a single developer should wield decision-making power over a development with such far-reaching consequences.
He compared the project to the West Edmonton Mall and to some recently built mega-malls in developing countries, like one in Istanbul.
“It will be an impersonal mega-structure,” he said.
Beaudet said the project would not be easily accessible by public transit, despite Carbonleo’s promise of a pedestrian bridge from de la Savane métro station and a shuttle bus from the future Mount Royal Réseau express métropolitain (REM) light rail station.
“Every time you build this kind
It’s a question of democracy. I believe that the developer and T.M.R. can be brought to the table and forced to reconsider.
of thing, you reduce the share of public transportation,” he said.
Danielle Pilette, an associate professor and expert on municipal planning and finance at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said the project is unlikely to have been so easily approved if municipalities on the island of Montreal had not de-merged in the early 2000s. “That would have changed a lot of things,” she said, noting that it would have been up to the enlarged city of Montreal to approve the project.
“To block the process now, it would take an extraordinary political will and an extraordinary mobilization of elected officials in the agglomeration and the metropolitan community,” she said.
“The mayor of Montreal would have to oppose it very firmly,” she added.
That is unlikely, Pilette said, predicting that Mayor Valérie Plante would probably not make an issue of Royalmount, to avoid a rift with regional mayors.
As for the possibility that the government of Quebec might intervene, Pilette said the provincial transport department will probably lean on the developer to contribute to the cost of infrastructure work necessitated by the project, but is unlikely to require changes to the overall plan. mscott@postmedia.com