Breaking New Ground: Montreal—Mirabel International Airport, Mass Aeromobility, and Megaproject Development in 1960s and 1970s Canada

Abstract

In October 1975, Montreal—Mirabel International Airport opened to the travelling public. This article examines why the federal government and its partners embraced megaproject ideology to build Mirabel, how these multiple institutions formulated and negotiated their airport vision, and its subsequent impact on the local land and people. It argues that politicians and planners broke new ground with Mirabel, fashioning it as a site of and for mass aeromobility that would be much more than a new airport. Influenced by postwar pro-growth discourse, as well as developments at the city and provincial level, they settled on an unprecedentedly large airport that could expand well into the future jet age. To make this vision a reality, however, Mirabel’s boosters overlooked or deliberately disregarded the socio-environmental effects of an airport megaproject, choosing to impose a distinct aeromobile landscape that altered the character and identity of the local area. In the process, they endorsed a technocratic idea of development that accelerated jet age sprawl as modernized airports like Mirabel became more spatially dominant and disruptive within natural and built environments.

You’re Surrounded! Measuring the Enclosure of Airports in Urban Areas

“…The conclusion then paves the way for further ambitious research that could leverage the data sets and computer code released with this article and would require access to additional data sources. relationships to the adjacent city has been discussed in qualitative terms in research works focused on one or some specific case studies, such as Chicago (Cidell 2013), Montreal (Edwards 2016), Cape Town (Rink and Klaas 2019), and Paris (Subra 2004). The hot topics in the relationships between airports and populated areas especially include aircraft noise, but also air pollution, risk of crashes, property prices, employment opportunities, and smooth access and egress journeys from and to the city (Tomkins et al 1998;Daley 2010;World Health Organization 2018;Dong, Chen, and Chen 2020;Murakami and Kato 2020;Nieuwenhuijsen and Khreis 2020).…”