Quote:
Originally Posted by O-tacular
I feel terrible for Boucherville (where my family's from) for being absorbed by the blob that is Longueuil. Boucherville has one of Quebec's oldest vieux village. I think it's 300 y.o. Really neat to walk around it and see the tiny streets that are basically 1 lane wide and abut directly to the houses. There's a butcher / grocer there that my grandma would always send us to to go get la commande that's been there for generations named Mr. Provost.
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OK, a few points on this.
First of all, Boucherville is no longer part of the new merged big City of Longueuil. It was part of it for only a few years and when the Charest Liberals allowed for demergers, Boucherville became its own city again.
As for sprawly development in Boucherville, the smaller city did not need big bad Longueuil and did almost all of that on its own. It sprawled way before its short-lived merger with Longueuil and this sprawl has continued since it demerged.
We get this blame game in my City of Gatineau as well where people in the Aylmer sector (which also has a historic centre) complain that the merger is what brought on the sprawl, but in fact it was just as sprawly prior to the merger, and most of the sprawl that has been *allowed* by Gatineau was already in the zoning plans of the former City of Aylmer that Gatineau simply grandfathered. If anything, the new Gatineau is these days imposing a (slightly) more compact urban form than the old cities did.
Boucherville and Aylmer not dissimilar to many former small towns with historic centres near Toronto like Whitby, Brampton, Richmond Hill that have an old-style downtown surrounded by a ton of car-centric sprawl.
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