Challenger Cities Salon - Montreal edition

​Culture, Infrastructure and the Trouble with Becoming Like Everyone Else

​Every other North American city is trying to become Montreal. But is Montreal trying to become every other North American city?

​Montreal has almost accidentally preserved what other cities are spending fortunes to recover ... affordable creative space, genuine street life, cultural friction and a bilingual identity that resists easy branding. The question is whether that's a culture, a policy or just an accident waiting to be corrected?

​Some say Montreal has lost some of its swagger ... the city that built the world's biggest comedy festival, a global creative economy and a reputation for mischief has, somewhere along the way, gotten somewhat cautious, or at least less audacious.

​But swagger alone won't save it. Culture needs infrastructure to survive as in those affordable rents for the people who make the work, outlets for the work to find an audience, transit and connectivity that bring the right people in without turning the city into a backdrop for everyone else's holiday.

​The trick is calibration. Good cultural cities are just out of the way enough. A little friction can be a feature. That doesn't mean a high-speed rail line to Toronto would be bad, it means the question isn't whether to connect, but how to connect without smoothing away the texture that makes Montreal worth connecting to.

​In the room:

• ​Greg Lindsay - futurist, on what the screen economy hasn't yet colonised in Montreal, and whether the city knows it well enough to protect it.

• ​Jacquelyn West - cultural place developer, on what it actually costs to keep creative space alive, in both languages.

• ​Andy Nulman - co-founder of Just For Laughs and PACT, on what Montreal does when it stops being afraid.

• ​Mathieu Grondin - Global Nightlife Advocate and First Nightlife Commissioner in Canada

• ​Phil Tabah - Founder and Publisher of TheMain.com, redefining local media publications

• ​Plus others TBC - somewhere between media, civic technology and hardcore infrastructure.

​Salon format, small room, no panel, or slides, and expect polite disagreement.