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In October 1975, Montreal-Mirabel International Airport opened to the travelling public. This article examines why the federal government and its partners embraced megaproject ideology to build Mirabel, how these multiple institutions formulated and negotiated their airport vision, and its subsequent impact on the local land and people. It argues that politicians and planners broke new ground with Mirabel, fashioning it as a site of and for mass aeromobility that would be much more than a new airport. Influenced by postwar pro-growth discourse, as well as developments at the city and provincial level, they settled on an unprecedentedly large airport that could expand well into the future jet age. To make this vision a reality, however, Mirabel's boosters overlooked or deliberately disregarded the socio-environmental effects of an airport megaproject, choosing to impose a distinct aeromobile landscape that altered the character and identity of the local area. In the process, they endorsed a technocratic idea of development that accelerated jet age sprawl as modernized airports like Mirabel became more spatially dominant and disruptive within natural and built environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land use. Parking management, which makes the link between land use and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin-destination (OD) surveys is helpful in understanding typical travel behaviour. This study processes car driver trips from travel surveys to develop vehicle accumulation profiles and derive theoretical parking supplies from the observed parking demand, defined as the maximal number of cars parked in an area at a given time. This research also provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the parking supplies derived from an OD survey to parking supplies estimated from public geographical information systems and field surveys. The paper shows that parking supply is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment must take into account regulation data (obtained from on-street regulation parking signs data) that modulates the availability of the raw parking supply according to different days and hours of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do we mean by « projet urbain » and what is new with this concept? Projet urbain refers to a European concept of planning which is understood in dissimilar ways by different authors, and it seems interesting to synthetise different points of view to create its definition, showing certain dimensions of this concept as well as certain deviations thereof. This paper examines the redevelopment of the Old Port of Montreal within this projet urbain concept. We want to show how the federal government has led a projet urbain for the port; and how its open and progressive planning, as well as the public's participation, has allowed an intervention which respects the site. However, the lack of collaboration between the various levels of government did not favour the conception of the project with relation to the environment. Finally there is a lack of follow-up on the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]