WAT Longueuil
Longueuil, Canada
Invited Team
The project developed for Jacques-Cartier Boulevard operates a physical and symbolic reframing of the site. It aims to transform the boulevard by focusing mainly on its essential characteristics. With the perspective of a viable urban development, the project means to create a constantly renewed landscape for the people who use the boulevard at high speed as well as for those who rub shoulders with it daily.
The intervention suggests multiplying the uses of the boulevard, to make it an inhabited and appropriable place. While the peripheral lanes of the boulevard remain dedicated to the automobile, the establishment of a "green track" in the center, supporting alternative modes of transport, makes it possible to qualify this environment by modulating its linear treatment and by strengthening its connection to the scale of the surrounding tissue. At the heart of this "green track", a bike-sharing system offers availability to all citizens old bikes reconditioned and repainted in red. This mobile element, omnipresent in space, will become the icon of the new boulevard.
The occupation of the boulevard’s core leads to a renewed perception of the landscape. In its new configuration, the boulevard allows, fast, slow, short, and long journeys. Whether you are on the "green track" or its margins, the landscape constantly change and its intensity is modulated to the nature of its banks.
With L+P (Laboratoire + paysages)
Our first approach of the site was marked by a significant spatial experience: walking on the median of a section of the boulevard. The width of the median constitutes an exceptional spatial character. It offers space, so as to completely reverse the perception that one has of it, as much as a pedestrian or a cyclist, as from the passenger compartment of an automobile.
A new tram line located on the edges of the median ensures the north-south transit and the reunification of the districts separated by the rail network. In the middle of the median, a "green track" welcomes pedestrians, cyclists, and skaters during the summer. In winter the track is covered in snow and skiers, skaters, and maybe even dog sleds can enjoy it.
Tram stations are all moorings that connect the waterfront areas to the boulevard. Indeed, their positioning on nodes of the road network makes it possible to create continuities between the green track and the heart of the adjacent districts.
A bike-sharing system is set up at the center of the green trail. Red bikes, symbols of the re-appropriation of the boulevard, are made available to citizens. Anyone can enter the green trail area, borrow a bike, and then leave it where they want.
