Vancouver has vowed to become the greenest city in the world by 2020.

A family walks in a tree-covered square in downtown Montreal Friday, August 13, 2010.Concerns about the environment have topped opinion polls for the last five to 10 years and now people and cities are acting on those concerns.

Vancouver has vowed to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. New condos in Toronto are going up without any parking spaces. Regina is doing away with one-way streets to improve public transit access in a revitalized downtown.


And in Montreal's trendy Plateau Mont-Royal borough, Mayor Luc Ferrandez is doing his best to bring a little more country into the city.

“We're looking at streets and asking ourselves, ‘Is it really useful',” he said in a recent interview. “We've identified about 20 streets that are not useful, that can be taken out and retransformed into green spaces.”

Concerns about the environment have topped opinion polls for the last five to 10 years, says Pascoal Gomes, a spokesman for Montreal's Urban Ecology Centre.

But in ever-increasing numbers, people — and cities — are acting on those concerns.

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