21st Century (2000–present)

Quebec City Vision 2030

2015 · Canada · North America – Canada · Ecological, landscape-led, and resilience planning · Planned by Ville de Québec
Route plan of Québec City's structuring public-transport network: the tramway alignment from Le Gendre through Sainte-Foy, Saint-Roch and Charlesbourg.
Route plan of Québec City's structuring public-transport network: the tramway alignment from Le Gendre through Sainte-Foy, Saint-Roch and Charlesbourg. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Judicieux, via Wikimedia Commons

Core idea

Public transport + eco-districts

Why it matters

Historic city’s sustainability agenda

Description

A strategic vision adopted by the Ville de Québec in 2015 to guide the historic provincial capital towards 2030. It coupled investment in structuring public transport, later crystallising in the city's tramway project, with the development of eco-districts such as those on former industrial and riverside lands, densification of existing neighbourhoods, and protection of the UNESCO-listed old town. The plan framed sustainability and mobility as the levers of a compact, attractive mid-sized city.

Significance

Quebec City's vision typifies how heritage cities of the global North translated climate and sustainability agendas into mainstream municipal planning during the 2010s. Its significance lies less in formal innovation than in the coupling of eco-district development with a contested transit investment, a pairing that has structured local political debate over growth and car dependence ever since.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.