Centre Sanaaq is a library and piece of civic infrastructure built to absorb a lot at once: books, performances, community programming, digital tools, social services, and the daily reality of the neighbourhood around Cabot Square.

Opened in 2025 on the former Montreal Children’s Hospital site, the Ville-Marie hub brings together a performance hall, exhibition space, mediatheque, recording studio, culinary lab, urban agriculture area, and a café run by L’Itinéraire. Its collections and programming reflect the district’s cultural mix, with Indigenous presence given particular weight in both the name and the centre’s broader mandate.

What makes Sanaaq notable isn’t just the range of services, but the way the place was shaped through consultation and continues to run through participatory governance: a public building designed to be used, argued over, and shared.