Montreal Gazette - Urban congestion is attractive

(Op-ed by Raphaël Fischler, associate professor of urban planning at McGill, one of the urban planners offering recommendations for the future of the Port of Montreal and Norma Rantisi, a professor of urban studies in Concordia University´s geography department)

Wendell Cox's piece on the virtues of unchecked sprawl ("Urban Sprawl gets a bad rap," Opinion, June 1) is an ideological manifesto, not a serious piece of reflection on the future of our cities.

Its purpose is to make us believe that cities are simply engines of economic opportunity and that policies that intervene in market pro-cesses are doomed to cause economic pain and nothing else. The fact that cities are also communities and ecologies doesn't appear to matter to Mr. Cox. That public policies can help to mitigate the negative impact of market processes appears to be irrelevant to him.