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http://gehlarchitects.com/blog/hurray-for-smart-montrealers/ HURRAY FOR SMART MONTREALERS! Over the last couple of months I have written about the different aspects of smart cities, the pros and cons, the dos and don’ts. The outcome of these musings suggests that we ought to discard the idea of a smart city for the sake of promoting smart communities, in which smartness is a tool for benefitting and improving the local social sustainability. However, within this approach lies a fundamental challenge: how do we actually make communities engage with and take responsibility for the shaping of the public realm, using tools and methods they have never known before? Enter Montreal. Montreal uses pilot projects to kick-start the regeneration of the urban spaces. A vacant parking lot on the outskirts of Downtown was turned into an urban beach thanks to the local organization l’ADUQ. Public Life in Montreal To understand the social life of Montrealers, one must first understand the basic history of the city’s public spaces. During the era of modernisation, more than 1/3 of the downtown core was demolished to make way for massive super-complexes embodying offices, car pars, underground malls and cafes. In the industrial suburbs, thousands of housing units were torn down to allow vehicular traffic an easy access into the city. These “renovations” were carried out in less than two decades, but they still managed to methodically get in the way of public life. Since then, the city has taken a completely different approach to urban planning, superseding even today’s hype for attractive, green and lively metropolises. “My colleagues and I, we based our entire careers around reconstructing the city from where it was left after the 1970’s and 1980’s demolitions (…) we want Montreal to be a network of public spaces.” – Wade Eide, Montreal Urban Planning Department, private interview July 15, 2014 Throughout the year, Montreal hosts hundreds of events that all contribute to a lively and active public life. Today, the effects of Wade Eide and his colleagues’ efforts are absolutely visible in the streets and squares of Montreal, which have indeed been transformed into a coherent experience of activities and life. The most remarkable part of this transformation is the effect that it has had in the mentality of the citizens (or maybe it was the other way around?): in Montreal, the city truly is for its people, and people care for and participate in public matters to a degree that I have rarely seen. I believe, because of this mentality, Montreal has a serious chance of actually fulfilling the vision of a smart city built for and by communities. The steps of Place des Arts serve as a public space, popular with everyone on a sunny day. The Montreal Model Montreal’s outstanding mentality for public participation has – luckily – also been recognized by the current smart Montreal’s front-runners, mayor Denis Coderre and Vice-President of the Smart and Digital Office, Harout Chitilian. In their campaigns for a smarter Montreal, they enthusiastically encourage the citizens to voice their opinions and share their ideas: “This ambitious project of making a smart and digital city will take advantage of new technologies, but above all it will draw on the collective intelligence to create a specific Montreal model. I count on you, Montrealers to give your opinions on the various forums that are available to you. I invite you to participate today. The floor is yours!” – (translated from French) Denis Coderre, Mayor of Montreal, 2014 Focus on citizens is visible in the public space. In this project residents of Montreal share their unique stories in a virtual exhibition. As part of the public participation process, the city has developed a web portal, “Faire MTL” (Make Montreal), where Montrealers are offered the chance to contribute to, comment on, collaborate with and follow 180 tangible projects that are to be implemented over the next couple of years. The ambitious plans also include the creation of physical spaces for innovation and co-creation, along with the use of public spaces as living laboratories for the growing smart communities. The fusion of a genuinely open and inclusive government and the natural participatory spirit of the Montrealers, makes Montreal a key player to follow in the game of defining how future (smart) cities could be shaped and function at the hands of the citizens. Every summer Sainte-Catherine Street (the city’s commercial high street) transforms into a pedestrian street, allowing citizens to walk, shop, eat and enjoy the city life. Find more about Montreal’s projects here. August 25, 2015 __ Camilla Siggaard Andersen sent via Tapatalk

STATISTICS CANADA April 20, 2015 1:34 pm People in Vancouver and Toronto least satisfied with their lives: StatsCan Man under umbrella in Vancouver Vancouverites report being less satisfied with their lives than residents of other Canadian cities, according to Statistics Canada. Maybe it's the rain? Jonathan Hayward / The Canadian Press Residents of Vancouver and Toronto report being less satisfied with their lives than people in other Canadian metropolitan areas, according to a new study published by Statistics Canada. Researchers asked the residents of various census metropolitan areas to rank their overall life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 was “very dissatisfied” and 10 was “very satisfied.” In Vancouver, the average score was 7.808, followed closely by Toronto at 7.818. People living in Canada’s most-satisfied metropolitan area, Saguenay, gave an average score of 8.245 out of 10. The differences are larger when you look at the percentage of people who rate their life satisfaction as a 9 or 10 out of 10. In Sudbury, 44.9 per cent of residents ranked their overall life satisfaction that high. In Vancouver, it was only 33.6 per cent. When it comes to people who were comparatively unsatisfied with their lives – giving themselves a score of only 6 or less, there are again significant differences between cities. 17.1 per cent of people in Windsor, Toronto and Abbotsford-Mission ranked their life satisfaction at a 6 or less. Only 8.6 per cent of people in Saguenay gave themselves such a low score. To figure out what accounts for the differences, researchers tested various hypotheses. They found that people who are married or are in good health tend to rank their life satisfaction much higher than others. Unemployed people are more likely to have low satisfaction, and richer people higher satisfaction. However, the report states, these personal factors don’t seem to account entirely for the variation across metropolitan areas. The researchers note that smaller communities with a population of less than 250,000 tend to report higher average life satisfaction. Also, when sorted by city size, metropolitan areas in Quebec tend to be at the top of the list: Montrealers are the most satisfied among individuals in Canada’s big cities and most likely to report life satisfaction of 8 or higher, Sherbrooke and Quebec are at the top of the mid-size communities, and Saguenay and Trois-Rivières at the top of the smaller metropolitan areas, according to the study. Although the Statistics Canada researchers don’t definitively say why this is, they point to other research that suggests levels of trust and social connections in local communities have an effect on people’s life satisfaction, as does income relative to one’s neighbours and economic inequality. sent via Tapatalk

$14B in projects ready to go: Municipalities BY MIKE DE SOUZA, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE JANUARY 14, 2009 12:21 PM OTTAWA - More than 1,000 municipal infrastructure projects worth nearly $14 billion are “shovel ready” for job creation from coast to coast, according to a new list unveiled Wednesday by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The list represents an inventory of projects that are awaiting funds to start and was compiled following weeks of extensive consultations by the federation and its members. The federation says many municipalities have put these projects on the backburner, but could launch them this year and create thousands of jobs if money was available from the different levels of government. “The municipal world is ready to co-operate with the provinces, territories and the Canadian government to (tackle) the economic problems of Canada,” said Sherbrooke, Que., Mayor Jean Perrault, the president of the federation, during a media conference call. “The construction phase of an infrastructure project creates most of the jobs and getting projects underway this spring is crucial to offsetting the economic slowdown.” The projects include new investments in roads and bridges, waste management, buildings, public housing, water and waste water treatment facilities as well as public transit for cities and communities that are home to more than 19 million people across the country. The federation has been urging the Harper government to fast-track transfer payments from a new infrastructure program so that municipalities can get started on the projects and begin putting people to work as part of a stimulus package for the economy. Municipal officials have complained that there is too much red tape and administrative delays in getting the money flowing into their communities, but federal Transport, Infrastructure and Communities Minister John Baird has pledged to speed up the process by reducing red tape. Perrault said the funding should be modelled after the federal gas tax transfer which provides federal money for cities based on the size of their population. He also argued in favour of reducing double environmental assessments of new projects by both the federal and provincial governments explaining that many of the projects on hold in their list would not put Canada’s environment in jeopardy. “The environment is important. There are mechanisms and rules that we must follow,” said Perrault, “but what we told Prime Minister (Stephen) Harper and John Baird to reduce the red tape and that if there were environmental studies that overlap, why not have just one and ensure that it’s propitious.” Conservation groups and the NDP have both criticized the federal government for musing about reducing federal environmental assessments in favour of a single review of some of the smaller infrastructure projects. Baird said on Tuesday that the gas tax transfer program worked well since it did not require federal environmental assessments to operate. © Copyright © Canwest News Service Voici la liste des projets : http://www.fcm.ca//CMFiles/FCM%20Shovel%20Ready%20report_list%20En1KDL-1142009-4963.pdf

Montreal heritage activist celebrates Order of Canada honour Last Updated: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 | 1:27 PM ET CBC News Montreal heritage defender Dinu Bumbaru is being recognized for his local efforts with a national honour, the Order of Canada. Bumbaru, director of Heritage Montreal, was among the new members of the order announced Tuesday by Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean 'Somehow this is a recognition from the highest authority in the country that communities count.'—Dinu Bumbaru, director of Heritage Montreal Bumbaru was walking on Mount Royal when he heard that the list was announced with his name on it. "It is a big beyond reach. You don't feel that you deserve such things," Bumbaru said. The citation from the Governor General states that Bumbaru was nominated for his leadership in promoting, protecting and enhancing the historical and cultural heritage of Montreal, including the preservation of world heritage sites. Bumbaru said the honour is important because it recognizes the work in communities across Canada that often goes unnoticed. "Somehow, this is a recognition from the highest authority in the country that communities count," he said. "In the days of climate change and social crisis, we tend to feel the big issue is the green and the greed of people. But we see the greatest achievement of mankind is the city where people actually live." Bumbaru has a degree in architecture from the University of Montreal and a degree in conservation studies from the University of York in England. Since joining Heritage Montreal in 1982, he has become one of the city's most vocal defenders of community preservation, including during the recent debate over the redevelopment of Griffintown southwest of downtown. Céline Dion, investment guru honoured Quebec TV personality Suzanne Lapointe will be named a member of the Order of Canada. (CBC) Other Quebecers honoured Tuesday included singer Céline Dion and Montreal investment guru Stephen Jarislowski, who both become companions of the Order of Canada. Businessman Claude Lamoureux and dancer Louise Lecavalier will become officers. Quebec television personality and singer Suzanne Lapointe will also join the order as a member. The newest additions will receive their insignias at a ceremony at Rideau Hall at a later date. The Order of Canada, the country's highest honour, recognizes citizens for outstanding achievements or for exceptional contributions to the culture of the country. Established in 1967, the award has been presented to more than 5,500 people.

Have Some Champagne With That Brisket? Montreal is just bubbling with Jewish culture November 08, 2007 Kathy Shorr Jewish Exponent Feature Ever since the Parti Quebeçois came to power three decades ago, bringing with it greater nationalism and stricter language laws favoring French, it's been easy to feel uneasy about Jewish life in Montreal. The Jewish community has shrunk from a high of about 120,000 before that 1976 election, to just under 100,000 now. Many who left were the younger, well-educated postwar generation of Ashkenazi descent, who had been educated primarily in English. (Barred from attending the Catholic, French-speaking schools, they'd attended the English-speaking Protestant ones.) But come to Montreal today, and you'll find a Jewish world that feels more vital than many American communities with comparably-sized communities. You can see live Yiddish theater, visit a new world-class Holocaust center and sample kosher restaurants serving everything from Chinese food to Moroccan chicken tagine. The Jewish community in Montreal is one of the most traditional in North America. According to a report by B'nai B'rith Canada's Institute for International Affairs, the community has a remarkably low intermarriage rate (less than 7 percent) and a remarkably high rate of religious observance (50 percent keep kosher). At roughly the same time that wave of Ashkenazi Jews left, about 20,000 Sephardic, French-speaking Jews arrived -- most of them coming from North Africa, especially Morocco. And with a continuing influx of Jewish immigrants, including as many as 10,000 Russian Jews in recent years, the city has maintained a vibrant Jewish culture that is now about 25 percent Sephardic. In Search of 'Duddy' Visitors looking for signs of Jewish life have several sections of the city to explore. Anyone interested in history will want to go to the Mile End neighborhood, the setting for Mordecai Richler's famous novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Just east of Mount Royal Park is a five-street-wide area between the Avenue du Parc and the Boulevard Saint-Laurent -- the Jewish neighborhood for much of the first half of the 20th century. The old neighborhood was increasingly abandoned after the war, as Jews started to make their way out to the suburbs. But Mile End is still home to a large Chasidic community. And it still looks a lot like it did when Richler wrote about going to Tansky's store for a package of Sen-Sen. The rowhouses remain, with their outside staircases and little balconies. And some of the old haunts, like Moishe's Steakhouse and Schwartz's Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen, are open for business as usual. The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre People come to Moishe's for the best steaks in town, while Schwartz's long, narrow dining room teems with crowded tables of patrons ordering sandwiches piled with smoked beef. Several blocks north is the St. Viateur Bagel Shop, celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is open day and night, 24/7, and regularly wins the prize for best bagels in Montreal -- as much for the atmosphere as for the bagels themselves. You can see the flames coming out of the wood-burning brick oven, and watch the bagels being pulled out on a long-handled tray and then dumped into a long, sloping bin. They still use the same recipe from 100 years ago -- hand-rolling the bagels and dropping them into boiling water for five minutes before baking. And forget about cinnamon-raisin or chocolate-chip bagels: It's sesame or poppyseed, and that's it! For a completely different scene, head west out Côte St. Catherine Road to Snowdon, a neighborhood of duplex and split-level homes, where many Jews moved after the war. There, you'll find a small campus of Jewish community and religious organizations and cultural groups. The Segal Centre for Performing Arts at the Saidye Bronfman Centre mounts plays of both general and Jewish interest, including an annual play in Yiddish. Montreal has the largest Holocaust-survivor population in Canada; across the street from the Saidye Bronfman are the Jewish Public Library and the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, with 5,000 square feet of exhibit space. The library sponsors all kinds of lectures, readings, films, and live-music and other events for both residents and visitors. A few blocks south of Côte St. Catherine Road is the commercial Queen Mary Road, which feels something like the way Mile End must have felt a few generations ago. There are charcuteries (delis that specialize in meats) where everything is labeled only in Russian, with vats of sweet-and-sour cabbage and trays of whole smoked fish and caviar. There's Israeli fast-food at Chez Benny and kosher pizza by the Snowdon metro station. Cell phones ring, voices chatting in French and Arabic more often than in Yiddish. Yes, indeed, Jewish life in Montreal has changed, but remains alive and well. For more information, go to: www. tourisme-montreal.org.

Montreal's Jews aren't going anywhere By Yoni Goldstein The history of Russian Jews in Montreal, Canada, began more than a century ago, when a coalition of Jews and Christians in the city raised funds to help Jews escape from the Russian empire in the wake of an onslaught of pogroms triggered by the assassination of czar Alexander II, in March 1881. There are widely varying estimates on the current size of the Russian Jewish community in Montreal: The local Jewish federation believes there are fewer than 10,000 Russian-speaking Jews in the city, while Russian community officials claim the actual number is more than double that figure. In either case, a community center and a Russian-language biweekly newspaper attest to the fact that Russian Jews have established a vibrant community in the city (whose total Jewish population is about 100,000). Of course, as in virtually every city outside Israel where there is a Jewish presence, life for the Jews of Montreal is not without challenges. The city has been home to some minor-league anti-Semitism in the past, and the province of Quebec is proving to be mildly hostile to anyone who can't speak in French and isn't willing to learn how. But the biggest threat to Montreal Jews, the Quebec sovereignty movement of the 1970s and then later, in the early-1990s, has more recently lost favor in the eyes of more Quebecois than ever before. Now is a good time to be a Jew in Montreal. Apparently, Nativ, the formerly clandestine organization that since the 1950s has shared responsibility for bringing Jews from what is now the Former Soviet Union to Israel, and Israel's minister of strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, don't agree. According to recent stories in Haaretz and the European Jewish Press service, having apparently run out of Jews still living in the FSU to bring to Israel, Nativ is planning to make a new push in North America to recruit Russian Jews there to make aliyah. Target No. 1: Montreal. It's a peculiar strategy: aiming to do business in a country that has two significant, settled communities of Russian Jews (the other being Toronto, where some 90,000 live); a country that is safe for Jews and where Jewish communities have long prospered; and a country, moreover, to which disadvantaged immigrants flock and where they are welcomed in droves, where they can experience multiculturalism and inclusiveness. When you're trying to convince people to leave peaceful, thriving Canada for a better life in the Middle East, you know you're in trouble of some kind. The only ones that look bad in this story are Nativ and Lieberman. The decision to recruit in Montreal is, at best, misguided. Worse, it demonstrates that the brand of covert immigration missions that were Nativ's bread and butter between the 1950s and 1990s is no longer needed. For 30 years, the organization was solely responsible for assisting countless Jewish escapees from the Soviet scourge, but that very important work is now finished. Jews who, under the hammer and sickle, were unable either to express themselves Jewishly, or to leave for someplace else where they would be free to do just that, are now at liberty to choose where they want to live, including Israel. In fact, Nativ's decision to choose Montreal's as its first stop in North America proves just how out of touch the organization is. (Already in Germany, Nativ has provoked a protest from Jewish communal leaders because of similar efforts there to lobby Russian-immigrant Jews to depart for Israel.) According to estimates from the city's Jewish federation, 80-85 percent of Russian Jews living in Montreal actually moved there from Israel. These people have already been the beneficiaries of Nativ once, and yet, at some later point, they decided that Israel wasn't the right place for them after all. There's no reason to think that they would consider moving back now, no matter how hard aliyah-liaison officers try to convince them. Nativ's venture into Montreal is doomed to fail because the organization's brand of cloak-and-dagger aliyah recruitment simply isn't suited to today's Jewish global village. Its employment of old-style Zionist tactics, which depict the State of Israel as representing the final stronghold against a world of Jew-haters doesn't connect with people anymore. There are, after all, other perfectly suitable homes for Jews. Montreal is one of those places. Perhaps the time has come for Israel in general to reevaluate its relationship with Diaspora Jewry and acknowledge that there are other places in the world perfectly suited to Jewish living. Once it takes that first step, the next job would be to recognize that the overall relationship between Israel and the Diaspora must change. Instead of looking at the Diaspora as a temporary home for those Jews who can't or aren't ready yet to make aliyah, Israel should invest in forming bonds with Jewish communities around the globe. Nativ, which has been reorganized and reportedly has a fat new budget, might even consider investing some of its cash in making those communities healthier, much in the same way those communities have long invested in the welfare of Israel. Montreal's Russian Jews aren't going anywhere and neither are the vast majority of Jews - Russian-speaking or otherwise - in North and South America and Europe. The sooner the Israeli government realizes that fact, the sooner it can begin to forge a new, symbiotic relationship with all the Jews outside Israel who are quite content to stay right where they are. Yoni Goldstein is an editorial writer at Canada's National Post, and a columnist at the Canadian Jewish News.