Tourism Infrastructure and Urban Redevelopment in Montréal

Over the past thirty-five years, few cities in North America have more energetically pursued tourism as an urban revitalization strategy than Montréal. The City of Montréal and the governments of Canada and Quebec have invested by conservative estimate nearly $7 billion Canadian ¹ since the 1960s to build an extensive tourism infrastructure in Montréal. In the 1960s and 1970s, the city hosted two international “mega-events,” Expo 67 (the 1967 World’s Fair) and the 1976 Summer Olympic Games. Since then, the city has built the standard infrastructure of contemporary tourism: a convention center, sports complexes, museums, theme parks, and a casino. Substantial public and private investments in hotels and entertainment “destinations” since the 1970s have filled out Montréal’s “infrastructure of play.”