Several housing developments are currently underway in Montréal incorporating community‑scale features, including walkable streets, lively commercial corridors, galleries and public spaces.

While building on infill sites already located in the heart of established cities offers many advantages, densification projects can also present complex challenges during implementation.

Drawing on my experiences working as an urban planner and teaching governance at the University of Ottawa, let’s examine emerging trends in urban development projects.

Building a neighbourhood

Several development projects currently underway in Montréal include multiple buildings as well as community facilities like parks, gardens, patios, terraces, playgrounds and sports or cultural centers.

So when did the practice of building several structures at once, together with shared community amenities, first begin? The goal of urban planning has always been to organize space, both public and private. But the balance between how these spaces are managed has been conceived in different ways, and has taken on different characteristics over time.

In North America, the commercial development of housing subdivisions expanded significantly after the Second World War. A new transportation technology came to the fore: the automobile.

Read more: Boomburbs: The rapid rise of Toronto’s northern suburbs

The proliferation of very low‑density housing developments from those years onward was a direct consequence of the widespread availability of cars. New York’s Levittown neighborhood is frequently cited as a key example of suburban development patterns and of the rise of housing construction as an assembly‑line process..

Suburban life was uniform and standardized, matching the mass-market approach to post-war housing. Homes were built the same for everyone, not customized for individual owners. Despite this sameness, people liked them, making them profitable and keeping developers focused on these types of houses for decades.

North American governments also encouraged developers to build suburbs by strictly enforcing zoning rules that separated housing from commercial areas and social spaces. The distances between these areas, and even to employment centres, often necessitated car ownership to get around.

In contrast, current developments in Montréal (including Canoë,........

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