International Ideas Competition for a strategic development vision of Montreal’s Gateway Corridor
The Chair in Landscape and Environmental Design at University of Montreal (CPEUM) is pleased to officially launch an international ideas competition in urban design for the gateway corridor linking Montreal-Trudeau International Airport (YUL) to its downtown area (MTL) along Autoroute 20. The competition, entitled YUL – MTL: Moving Landscapes, aims to reinvent the landscapes that highlight Montreal’s international gateway corridor.
The CPEUM has been commissioned by the Ministère des Transports du Québec to coordinate the competition and the underlying collaborative planning process bringing together the main public and private actors responsible for this territory. The 17 km gateway corridor, which is mostly made up of transport infrastructures and brownfields, is witnessing a large number of development infrastructural projects, thus offering considerable urban innovation potential.
A reflection on Montreal’s gateway landscape experience
Initiated through a collaborative process between the main public and private organizations involved in planning of the gateway corridor, the call for proposals is extended to designers in order to upgrade the city entrance experiences according to a genuine territorial project. The resulting vision will offer coherent guidelines for the different interventions to come by ensuring a better-balanced interaction between transport infrastructures and the adjacent living environments.
The International Ideas Competition wants to seize this re-qualification opportunity to propose planning options to structure a coherent vision aiming at creating an expressive gateway based on Montreal’s identity as a UNESCO City of Design, a designation of which Montreal is celebrating the 5th anniversary in 2011.
The proposals should revolve along three work streams:
- An evolving and emblematic landscape project for the metropolitan area;
- A scenographic composition of the corridor experiences;
- A collaborative approach to sustainable urban development.
To attain this goal, contestants should reflect on design elements as much for the corridor as for the adjacent areas. As a result, the actors involved in the collaborative process will be offered various options to consider and to potentially integrate into their respective short, middle and long term operations.
About the Competition
The International Ideas Competition is anonymous, free and open to all planning and design professionals. It is held as a single-stage.
A total of $100,000 CAN will be awarded to and shared between 3 laureates.
Entries will be evaluated by an international jury chaired by Italian architect and urban planner Bernardo Secchi, along with:
- Pierre Bélanger, associate professor in landscape architecture, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Cambridge;
- Ken Greenberg, architect and urban designer, Greenberg consultants inc., Toronto;
- Florence Junca-Adenot, founder of the Forum Urba 2015, Université du Québec à Montréal;
- Anick La Bissonnière, architect and scenic designer, Atelier Labi, Montréal;
- Maroun Shaneen, ministère des Transports du Québec.
Registration and Submission Deadlines
To register, each contestant must fill out an electronic entry form, available at www.mtlunescodesign.com, and transmit it before 17h00 (EDT), on August 26, 2011. Only those duly registered will receive the competition’s official documents. Proposals must be electronically handed in before 17h00 (EDT), on October 7, 2011