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In this article we offer a reading of the history of public interventions promoting social mix as an element of housing policies in Montréal (province of Quebec, Canada), focussing on key moments and illustrative projects, which put the principle of social mix into practice at different spatial scales. However, on each occasion, implementing social mix is not so much a case of top down public policy as an improvised process negotiated between various actors around the issue of social housing. Social mix also tends to be linked less to preoccupations with social cohesion as to the objective of mixing housing tenures; thus, low-rent municipal public housing, cooperative housing and the broader concept of affordable housing all play a key role. Today, the notion of socio-spatial equity is invoked to justify promoting social mix, while its implementation depends heavily on the involvement of dynamic and influential community organizations.