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You can't miss the bright blue trams of Montpellier. If you're walking through the Place de la Comédie, the one wide-open piazza in this southern French city's compact centre, the bullet-nosed streetcars are the dynamic constant in a place otherwise devoted to plein-air pleasures. They zip into the cobbled pedestrian zone with a grace that belies their bulk and release their exuberant crowds so close to the busy café tables that the fancy apéritifs seem to shake with sympathetic vibrations.

You can't miss the trams, but it's easy to do so. The waiters dashing into the square with their uplifted trays blithely skip over the tracks that separate them from their clientele, and it didn't take long before I was behaving like this carless place belonged to me as well. The greater good has won the day in Montpellier's historic centre, and there are no crazed drivers to compromise the traveller's drifting reverie. Released from the usual pedestrian preoccupation with personal survival, I ambled along in aimless innocence, pleased by pretty well everything I saw — gold-painted mimes cranking a donation-fed antique movie camera, a whirling carousel, the 19th-century opera house that seems straight out of Paris (minus the honking horns), an esplanade of chestnut trees and flower vendors, a space full of happy people who know that cities should be made for them and not the other way around.

The blue tram decorated with white swallows stole me back to reality with a combination of quiet and velocity that should be labelled hazardous to the escapist's health. But for a Canadian traveller trying on the pose of a French flâneur, even this onrushing doom prompted some urban dreaming.

I know we're supposed to go abroad to get away from ourselves, but some part of my itch to travel has always been accompanied by the urge to scratch away at the things that bug me about life back home. And once I'd dodged the tram racing through Montpellier's pleasure-centre, I thought back to my neighbourhood in Toronto and the years of fighting that went into the upcoming construction of a simple dedicated streetcar lane, which will still leave the automobile pretty well in charge: Now if only all the doom-sayers could come to Montpellier, surely they'd have to admit that all this economic activity disguised as rampant hedonism, all this absence of urban stress, was worth the risk.

How could you look at the success of Montpellier's urban experiment and not see a future worth sharing? In truth, I was just passing through Montpellier — from a suburban tram stop just past the biotech campuses that have made this city of 250,000 one of the knowledge centres of Europe, I planned to take a local bus into the remote Cévennes region of mountains, gorges and old silk-making villages. But after just a few hours spent getting lost in Montpellier's crowded centre, I could understand why 65 per cent of French people questioned in a survey had named this city as the place where they'd prefer to live.

For a visitor, the virtual absence of cars is paradise — not the sort of thing we could ever accomplish back in the real world, of course, but an unstoppable delight in this bar-filled biosphere where tables crowd into every square, flute solos seep out of the upstairs windows of the pale golden buildings and the sweet sound of conversation reverberates along the quieted winding lanes.

Starting from the Place de la Comédie at the south-east edge of the old city, I did little more than stroll, using the encircling tramline and car-filled ring roads as my boundaries. Apart from a few 19th-century shopping streets that tried to rival Paris with their broad boulevards, everything curves and narrows in a satisfying medieval maze. Not having to watch out for traffic, I could pay attention to where I was, and yet I kept missing the wine-bar by the Place Jean-Jaurès or the bustling covered market, the Halles Castelane, and ended up contemplating a mad toy store called Pomme de Reinette.

For 15 minutes, I took up sidewalk space itemizing the contents of the window display with its Astérix figurines, toy soldiers from the Napoleonic wars, commedia dell'arte puppets and the complete stage set from some pompous 18th-century play. I decided on the figure of the roly-poly Michelin man, flipping an omelette in full chef's regalia. But when I ventured inside the even more crowded store, the clerk told me it was too complicated to extract my chef from the window — the elaborate mise en scène was just for effect, for the entertainment of the passing crowd. I settled for a music box that plays La Mer, Charles Trenet's romantic ballad that was written about the waters just a few kilometres to the south long before Bobby Darin Sinatra-ized it as Beyond the Sea.

Details emerge in a city where the car doesn't rule: Menu-reading becomes a preoccupation, and not just because giving pedestrians their freedom stimulates the urge to eat (I counted seven thriving restaurants in the Place de la Chapelle Neuve on a balmy Saturday night, all of them being entertained, whether they liked it or not, by a mutt-accompanied troubadour wailing in the Spanish-sounding Occitan dialect). In most cities, you give offence when you suddenly stop to muse on duck confit, but here you're just another player in the urban ebb and flow.

There's more to Montpellier than my utopian version of mall-walking. For 25 years, the former provincial backwater was ruled by a rugby-playing socialist law professor of a mayor named Georges Frêche who had both the power and the personality to capitalize on its neglected advantages: As the home to one of the oldest universities in Europe with an extraordinarily diverse student population of 60,000, Montpellier has a head-start on such prized urban values as liveliness, creativity and tolerance. The medical school where Rabelais once studied has long been an important research centre, and even the bedraggled but still pleasing Jardin des Plantes, a formal public park just beyond the fortress-like cathedral, started off as a 16th-century healing garden. Centuries of picturesque decline might have been Montpellier's fate in that typical French-provincial style, but then IBM kick-started the urban revival by locating its French headquarters here in the 1960s just when the city was being thronged by refugees from the unrest in colonial Algeria.

Frêche got down to work, investing public money in ways that wouldn't go down so well in North America, demolishing apartment blocks that displeased his aesthetic sense, preserving the centre from both opportunistic developers and the combustion engine, transforming an army parade ground into a vast mixed-use habitat called Antigone designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill that can't help but astonish with its Greek-temples-on-steroids self-confidence. Like Montreal, its closest Canadian counterpart, Montpellier became the city of festivals, of Mediterranean cinema, guitar music, sacred music, jazz and modern dance — the beautiful 17th-century Ursuline convent that surveys the tramline at the north end of the old city is now home to Montpellier's world-renowned dance centre.

The idea of the knowledge economy may have turned into a political cliché, especially in those half-hearted cities that squabble over the incremental value of a streetcar lane. But Montpellier is the real thing: People want to work here and live here because it's a city of the mind in the fullest sense, where even the urban environment nurtures thought. As a result, the crass, desperate side of tourism barely registers — apart from next-generation hippies hanging around the squares with their grim-looking Alsatian dogs, there just aren't many people passing through. Those who come to Montpellier come to stay.

That was fine with me. I didn't need tourist entertainment. It was good enough just to watch other people getting it right.

GETTING THERE

Air France and Air Canada fly to Paris, where Air France flights connect to Montpellier. As well, budget-priced Ryanair flies from London-Stansted to Montpellier. There is a half-hourly express bus from the airport to the central bus terminal, which is beside the train station and five minutes' walk from the Place de la Comédie. Montpellier can be reached by fast train from Paris via Lyons.

WHAT TO SEE

Montpellier's hidden squares and busy narrow streets are a delight for the pedestrian on the prowl — wander along the Rue des Écoles Laiques (or Carriera de las Escolas Laicas in Occitan) and Rue de l'Université, and search out Place St.-Roch, Place St.-Come, Place Ste.-Anne, Place de la Canourgue and Place de la Chapelle Neuve as well as the more prominent Place de la Comédie. The Promenade du Peyrou, beyond the triumphal arch just to the west of the old centre, is a relaxing formal park with an ornamental water tower that overlooks an 18th-century aqueduct and the mountainous Cevennes landscape to the north. For fans of urban redesign, the vast Antigone complex just east of the Place de la Comédie is a must-see — the city's main concert hall, Le Corum, is nearby, at the north end of the pretty Champ du Mars. The Musée Fabre, the best of the city's few museums, is closed until early 2007.

WHERE TO STAY

Le Guilhem: Restored 16th-century house, near the cathedral; 18 Rue J.-J. Rousseau, 33 (467) 529090, www.leguilhem.com. Rooms start at $104.

Du Palais: 18th-century mansion in posh pocket near pretty Place de la Canourgue; 3 Rue du Palais. 33 (467) 604738

Hotel Royal: Economical, near train and bus station, and tramway; 8 Rue Magulone, 33 (467) 921336.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Much of north-central Montpellier around Rue de l'Université has the feel of a college town: Ethnic restaurants abound and there's no shortage of casual options among the Indian vegetarian restaurants, kebab cafés, student bars and youthful salons de thé with their quiche slices, yogurt shakes and chocolate brownies. For something more in keeping with the traditional idea of French food, try the hefty cheese-and-ham casseroles called tartiflette at the highly rustic La Ferme (5, Rue Four des Flammes, 33 (467) 66 45 61). Les Caves Jean Jaures is a lively wine cellar offering "cuisine du terroir" in comfortable but not stuffy surroundings (3, Rue Collot 33 (467) 27 33). The small but lively indoor food market, Les Halles Castellane, is essential entertainment for food-lovers (Place Castellane). Connoisseurs of fancy Michelin-starred creations will want to sample Le Jardin des Sens at the deluxe hotel of the same name just outside the city centre. (11 Avenue St.-Lazare).

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The tourist office is at the east end of the Place de la Comédie; www.ot-montpellier.fr.