I must admit I misinterpreted the headline. "Wait! This is the era of post offices? How wonderful! Why has nobody told me?"
Martinez Ferrada said the federal government is looking to support downtown revitalization through several agencies, but there are also opportunities to rethink the core purpose of downtowns, creating new ways to bring people back without relying on office workers.
“One of the opportunities that we see is for those cities to develop kind of a new stream of how can we use downtown cores,” she said.
[…]
Montreal’s Morizio said the long-term solution may be to re-establish downtowns as a place for social connection rather than just going to an office.
She said Montreal has begun installing pedestrian-only streets to create public spaces, but such projects are costly and not applicable everywhere.
“People aren’t going to come to work more than two or three days a week ? So, I think to be able to counter that, what we need to do is we need our commercial streets to almost be our third place,” she said, referring to a familiar public spot that people can go.
“Besides our dwelling and where we work, we need a space where people can come and connect. That’s a lot of what we lost during the pandemic.”