West Island - Geography

Geography

The West Island is an informal term for a large territory of low-density middle and upper-middle class housing, low and medium density commercial sectors and vast industrial operations roughly constituting the Western third of the Island of Montreal. As such there are no precise boundaries, but rather a fundamentally similar cultural and societal identity. The West Island is not a city, but rather a collection of independent cities, towns and villages in addition to several borough of the City of Montreal that share an intimate relationship and identity with the citizens of Montreal, and yet have also developed a unique common identity and strong sense of local character. Again, for this reason it is difficult to say exactly which communities constitute the West Island, though it is largely understood to mean all communities, independent or otherwise, developed on the island of Montreal West of Highway 13 and 32nd Avenue. Some would argue the communities of Saint-Laurent, Lachine and LaSalle, in addition to the Western off-island communities, such as Vaudreuil-Dorion, Hudson and the four communities of Île Perrot should be included in which communities define the West Island, given the common threads of settlement and factors determining their development.

The environment and climate of the West Island is almost identical to that of Montreal, and is affected by the same ecological conditions, namely, it is a large open plain of wide plateaus and marshland. The West Island is surrounded by the other islands in the Hochelaga Archipelago as well as Lake of Two Mountains and Lac Saint-Louis and their inter-connected rivers and creeks. The territory was largely agricultural from the 17th century into the mid-20th, when it was then quickly developed into a sprawling network of bedroom suburbs. The West Island has numerous large tracts of uncultivated land, some of which are protected parks while in other cases they're merely the fallow fields of former farms, waiting to be sold to residential property developers. Other portions of land have been designated for the construction of a highway to connect the 40 with the 440, through Kirkland, Pierrefonds, Ile Bizard and Laval, but the plan has gone nowhere. A significant portion of the Northwestern corner of the West Island is so sparsely developed it constitutes the last portion of Montreal's pre-settlement ecosystem. Though agriculture on the island is limited to the Macdonald Experimental Farm, the remnants of farmland in Senneville and Pierrefonds are likely to be developed into low-density residential housing. Conserving the remaining segments of local island wilderness has become a focal point of West Island politics over the course of the last thirty years, and is point of common concern.