Is there a solution?
We could say that downtown Sudbury used to be a vibrant and dynamic center and has become devitalized in favor of outlying neighborhoods and we could stress the fact that the urban area is sprawling at an alarming rate. We could affirm that people have left the city center to settle in suburban areas and that this peripheral movement is eroding the urban cohesion by altering the concentration of people, resources and knowledge. We could affirm that the road infrastructure is oversized for the number of inhabitants and that the auto¬mobile occupies an important place in the citizen's daily life, not to mention the long distances they must cover between work, home and leisure. We could once again bring up the economical burden for the public administrations to maintain these infrastructures. All those challenges are already well known from the authorities and correcting measures should be shaped out.
Reclaiming Downtown
We could say we have found the perfect solution; economical¬ly, socially and environmentally compliant. But the issues that Sudbury is facing are not unique, nor easily resolved. We have been analysing, monitoring and carefully searching the past and the present to find potential alternatives for the future.
We have found some ideas and concepts.
We prefer to call them strategies.
Those strategies are meant to be deployed at a territorial and urban scale. They involve the definition of new limits to redirect the energy into the urban cores, allowing new oppor¬tunities by consolidating people, resources and knowledge. This inner sprawl reconnects different urban areas in order to create cohesion and density. Thanks to a moratorium on the use of the land, the polycentric city will get back to its centers by reusing existing plots, voids, lands, buildings and infrastructures. The recent attempts to implement institutional projects in or¬der to rebuild the downtown area such as the Congress center, Public library, Place des Arts and the Junction are, indeed, inspiring interventions but, nevertheless, lack to address lar¬ger issues. To reactivate Downtown Sudbury, people have to live and work there in a more permanent manner.
(Competitor's text)
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