Temporary Urbanism in Pandemic Times—Disruption and Continuity of Public Action in Montreal

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Montreal and its boroughs quickly deployed temporary facilities aimed at sharing public space and promoting active mobility (cycling and walking). This so-called strategy of “temporary urbanism” is common to North American cities from the spring of 2020. Several inventories of such measures demonstrate this. However, few of these databases open up the black box of the decision-making processes and levers that the actors have implemented to deploy this urbanism. Thus, the chapter is devoted to these processes, explaining the Montreal case in detail. It reveals the main characteristics of Montreal’s public action. As such, it highlights the local particularities of it, considered at the same time as agile, a source of numerous conflicts but also very adaptative. To conclude, we emphasize on two dimensions. First, the pandemic demonstrates that Montreal public actors had resources to respond to the crisis, rooted in action routines but also in a capacity for innovation. Secondly, that this incremental dimension of temporary urbanism is now considered by public actors as an opportunity to implement sustainable changes, in the longer term, through the deployment of a “transitory urbanism”.