Pour une approche urbanistique de la conservation et de
la mise en valeur du patrimoine bâti :
l’expérience du canal de Lachine à Montréal
For a few decades now, we are witnessing in the province of Quebec a multiplication of industrial wastelands. If those spaces represent predilection sites to urban redevelopment, their location in the core of the city encourages their reoccupation and their reconversion. However, their transformation doesn’t appear to be solely motivated by their emplacement but also by the historic interest that they arouse.  In this thesis we aim to determine how we can integrate urbanistic dimensions to the elaboration of a project which intends to preserve an old urban area. This thesis has for main objective to enlighten elements of an urbanistic perspective of heritage conservation. From the study of nine projects of heritage preservation located along the Lachine canal in Montreal, we question the contribution of the actual discourse on heritage conservation to the revitalization of old urban areas. We consider more specifically the morphological dimensions and the vocational activities of those projects. Our research is based on the following hypothesis: that the integration of heritage conservation issues to the transformation of the city results from the diversity and the complementarity of the vocational activities and from the different uses of the urban spaces. The study of those projects is conducted in order to identify how they take place in an urban project’s perspective. Constituted as a reaction to decontextualized urban planning practices, the notion of urban project is based on works related to the concept of urban heritage, specifically those of Gustavo Giovannoni and the Italian school of typomorphology. Because the projects that we have studied insist on a sectorial approach of the transformation of the old industrial corridor, and only on its integration to a regional scale of the organization of the territory, we can’t consider that they take place in an urban project’s perspective. We show how they differ from such an approach and how the discourse on heritage conservation developed in those projects forbids the integration of the Lachine canal corridor into local urban dynamics.
Urban planning Conservation Urban heritage Urban project Montreal Lachine canal