Brossard

Brossard has no historic downtown: it built itself one. DIX30, opened in September 2006 on former farmland in the city's L sector, at the junction of Highways 10 and 30 — hence the name — was Canada's first lifestyle centre: not a mall sealed off from the world, but a grid of streets, sidewalks and aligned storefronts you walk in the open air, in any weather.

Twenty years on, the formula has stuck. More than 300 addresses across 2.7 million square feet: roughly 200 shops, some sixty restaurants, a cinema, a concert hall, office towers, a hotel and even an indoor surf wave. People come from all over the South Shore, often for the day, often as families, and sometimes for brands that exist nowhere else in Quebec.

The real turn came by rail. Since 2023 the REM's Du Quartier station has dropped visitors fifteen minutes from downtown Montreal, and the Solar Uniquartier project is stacking housing, offices and retail around it. The 10,000 parking spaces are still there — this is still the suburbs — but DIX30 is finally becoming what it was pretending to be.