Ape Rifle

Just in case you haven’t heard, a certain city in China will be hosting a major international sporting event in exactly one year’s time. The press, of course, is having its usual contradictory field day, collectively slack-jawed by the onslaught of unthinkably large mega-projects while simultaneously trying to balance the story with the usual talk of politics, labour conditions and environmental degradation. The one-year countdown point is apparently the perfect time to bash our heads in with the latest China Rising stories, which are fulfilling their annual obligation to sensationalism by rediscovering- once again - that the country is undergoing tremendous change. At this point, I’m just confused: is China rising more than usual? Are they talking about a general rise or one that is specifically confined to 2007? Is Beijing transforming more now than it was in 2006? or 2004? Do they have someone on the payroll counting construction projects to decide whether the change is substantial enough to run another China Rising story?

And for their part, Chinese officials are busy insisting that the Olympics and its grand spectacle not be politicized- well, at least not by anyone but them. Unfortunately, history is not on their side: the Olympics of the past century have been nothing if not a stream of political statements (think Berlin 1936, Munich 1972) and boycotts (Melbourne 1956, Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984). In this context, the agitation surrounding the first Chinese games is hardly something out of the ordinary. In a way, the Chinese government did it to themselves by positioning the event as a declaration of success for their still-quite-shaky development model. Throw a little hubris onto the scene, and the usual critics will come running- or alternatively unfold a banner demanding freedom for a certain disputed western region.

For seasoned China watchers, however, this is all old news. The growing instability of the Chinese development model is hardly the story of these upcoming Olympics, much less the actual athletic events or medal count. Rather, the main questions are: Will Beijing manage to pull it all off? Will this event manage to impress the world as intended?

My answer to both these questions, which might surprise some of my regular readers, is a cautious yes.

Naysayers, I believe, are getting muddled on the question of scale. Beijing, or China as a whole for that matter, does not need to solve all of its problems before next August- it merely needs to figure out how to sweep them under the rug for two weeks while the global media spectacle is in town. For example, much fuss has been made about Beijing’s sickening levels of pollution and permanent gridlock traffic- alleviating the root causes of these woes will take years, perhaps decades if ever. But Olympics do not last that long. The event’s success depends entirely on drastic short-term and temporary interventions which gloss over deep deficiencies rather than fix them, a game of image-making in which China is second to none.

Thus, the Chinese government doesn’t need to reconsider its pollution-intensive industrialization or questionable encouragement of private car ownership, it only needs to order them out of existence just long enough to produce the desired effect. Beijing has invested way too much of its reputation in the Olympics to have it shrouded in smog, and I imagine its officials will resort to some pretty drastic measures to ensure gorgeous blue sky next August. There has already been much talk about plans to massively restrict vehicle use in the city, control weather with cloud-seeding and so on, but frankly I would not be surprised if a decent swath of northern Chinese industry suddenly goes quiet next summer. The only realistic way of ensuring clean air for these games is a complete lockdown on industrial emissions in the region, and they will do it if they have to.

Of course, some will scoff at the sudden mysterious improvement of air quality during the Olympics (perhaps secretly wishing the event went on longer for the sake of their lungs), but this cynical attitude will have little impact on the spectacle at hand. This brings me to address the second question: will Beijing wow the world? Definitely. Hold on a second, you might be saying: what about all the massive evictions, demolitions and labour abuse that have paved this golden road? Shouldn’t the questionable means employed affect our judgment of the glitzy end? Personally, I do have trouble appreciating urban spectacles anywhere knowing they have left a bloody trail of corruption, exploitation and injustice in their wake (and let’s face it, China is hardly the only place in the world where this happens).

But I would gather that most people don’t bother to read about this stuff, or worse some might just simply not care. As much as we go on about sustainability, justice and cultural sensitivity, we are still a species deeply in awe of raw power and its manifestation in monumental structures. It is no coincidence that China and Dubai are permanent fixtures in the gushing press. These places have got it right: treating people like human beings might be nice and all, but it doesn’t impress anyone. When was the last time you were awed by a community meeting or a small, tightly-knit neighbourhood street? And so we get a continuous stream of world’s tallest buildings, world’s largest malls and instant monumental skylines, of mind-boggling demolition to raise towers which exude might. In the face of such brute, structural power, any considerations for the questionable practices which made these monuments possible quickly fade away. After all, how were the pyramids made? Beijing will deeply impress with its enormous skyline and engineering marvels, regardless of how or why they were built, with those pushed out of the way nothing more than ghosts unheard in the roar of flag-waving and Olympics crowds.

I do still, however, hope these Olympics are a success; not as any vindication for all the megalomania on the part of the government, but rather for the pride of the average Chinese person. On a whole, they’ve had a pretty rough ride throughout the 20th century and the 21st is fixing to be interesting, to say the least. So hopefully it will be their moment to shine, welcome the world with their deep hospitality, to cheer on their athletes and bask in some national pride. After all they’ve been through as their government cleans house for the event, they certainly deserve it.

Summer in Montreal is rarely, if ever, a time for serious thought or societal self-reflection. School’s out, there is a mandatory two-week construction holiday in July and thanks to Quebec nationalism we get two national holiday weekends. There is a festival of some sort or another almost every week and the drinks flow freely on the city’s many patios. Politics are a non-starter, with the parliamentary halls of Ottawa and Quebec City both conspicuously devoid of the usual partisan bickering. Even the media goes into silly season mode as people head for lakeside cottages or beaches in New England. The sun is shining and the weather is sweet, as they say.

But for anyone interested in urban issues, this summer has been somewhat less uneventful. Back in late June, the Quebec government announced a plan to radically overhaul the Turcot interchange, a towering spaghetti junction of crumbling concrete flyovers serving as one of the city’s major freeway interchanges. An urban landmark which comfortably doubles as an immense eyesore (as they so often do in this town), it will be demolished between 2009 and 2015 to make way for a more simple, ground-level interchange to the cost of more than a billion dollars. While commuters are likely already dreading the impending road chaos, those of us who think about the city as more than just a place to drive through can look forward to the opening up of a massive urban space, left for so long to the whims of derelict rail yards, vacant lots and graffiti artists.

Similarly, there has been an ongoing story in the local press about the crumbling state of Quebec’s road system, set off by an inquiry into a fatal highway overpass collapse in 2006. Just yesterday the city of Montreal announced it was barring heavy trucks from 9 road structures until they could be properly inspected, following the lead of the provincial government which has barred heavy vehicles from a total of 135 ramps, bridges and overpasses until they can be declared safe. This matter could now hardly be more timely given the catastrophic collapse of an interstate bridge dating from the same period in the United States.

Some of this infamous road infrastructure has already suffered the fate awaiting the Turcot interchange. The Pine-Parc interchange, a notoriously confusing, decrepit and dangerous tangle in the centre of town, has gradually disappeared from the cityscape over the past few years to make way for a simpler junction (basically bringing it closer to its original form before it was mangled with concrete). Other such projects remain in the conceptual or planning phase, such as the dismantling and burial of a major elevated expressway.

So what exactly is going on? Certainly, roads need regular maintenance: it is the rare place where you won’t find people complaining about the shoddy state of their transportation infrastructure, or blaming the government for it. I believe, however, that this crescendo of transformational projects has deeper roots than mere people-moving logistics or traffic flow. These stories, rather, betray a weariness with an increasingly outdated understanding of urbanity, a growing realization that what was once the future is no more. Quite simply, Montreal is slowly waking up from its turbulent affair with Modernism and feeling quite the hangover.

To give a little context, at this point it is important to move the narrative back to that infamous decade in which the overwhelming majority of Montreal’s current transportation infrastructure came into being: the 1960s. Apart from the wider socio-cultural shifts in many Western countries, Canada spent the decade coming into its own. Quebec, in particular, went through a dramatic shift: the 1960s saw it rapidly shift from an insular society dominated by Catholicism to an increasingly self-aware, thoroughly secularized society.

As the province’s largest city and Canada’s pre-eminent metropolis at the time, Montreal basked in the limelight. It hosted Expo ‘67 in the 100th year of Canadian confederation, a much-celebrated event remembered as the country’s ‘coming out’ party to the extent that its 40th anniversary this year has led to the usual baby boomer nostalgia. While much has been said about Expo’s socio-cultural impact (often portraying it as the high-point of optimism before the city was dragged down by Quebec separatism), for the purpose at hand it will suffice to analyze it from a single angle: its physical impact on the cityscape.

Like an self-respecting city hosting a big international event, Montreal wanted to impress. With the future looking so bright, it was its time to shine. The awarding of Expo ‘67 in 1962 provided the city, like countless other ‘event’ cities before and after it, with the opportunity to treat its urban space as a blank slate, a tableau on which to imprint a monumental vision of progress. This stemmed from a wider Western cultural context deeply in the throes of Modernism, with its emphasis on machine-like functionality, efficiency and an obsession with progress. In the urban context, this meant the road to societal salvation lay through large-scale planning and the reduction of urban life to its rational, functional elements. Modernity demanded a radical break from local context and historical circumstance in pursuit of an urban form that was considered universally ideal, regardless of actual place.

From this perspective, the city was a blueprint as much as an actual place to live; the planner delivered societal progress through the implementation of his/her technical expertise, often with little to no regard for the messy and complex realities of real lives on the ground. For what mattered was not a city’s life but rather its form. Radical physical transformation promised to move cities into ‘modernity’. On a less theoretical level, it also helped that Montreal at the time was being run by a pseudo-autocratic mayor, Jean Drapeau, with his taste for urban grands projets.

And so all these factors combined in 1960s Montreal to produce an urban construction frenzy in which the cityscape was deeply transformed. Major expressways of all sorts (elevated, trenched, tunneled) cut through swathes of urban fabric, neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for concrete highrises, the city got a subway system and even a large artificial island in the St-Lawrence River on which to build the Expo site. As usual in these situations, there was significant pressure for all this work to be completed in time for Montreal’s unveiling to the world. Expo ‘67 was declared a great success, and Montreal was a radically changed, more concrete city. To anyone familiar with contemporary urban China, this might all sound vaguely familiar.

1976 brought another major international event to the city, the Olympics, but by then the tide of Montreal’s stardom had already started to ebb. Problems surrounded the construction of venues, with the tower and roof on the main stadium not completed until several years after the event. Quebec separatism made its permanent arrival on the provincial political scene, sending much economic activity down the highway to Toronto and diminishing Montreal’s character as a national city. So for many, Expo ‘67 was both the city’s coming-out party and its highpoint as a cosmopolitan metropolis, a time of unabashed optimism before the onset of economic decline and political bickering in the decades to follow.

So here we are in mid-2007, living in the shadow of a past era’s vision of the future. The landscape of progress is now tired and weary, its crumbling concrete a dangerous eyesore. The complex tangles of spaghetti junctions are no longer marvels of engineering but now follies of ill-conceived urban planning. Elevated expressways are no longer roads to prosperity but rather blights on the landscape, leaving miles of derelict space in their wake. The horrid concrete highrises of the mid-20th century clustered around downtown are now a bit of an embarrassment. The Olympic Stadium? Well, that is a whole other story: after years of roof problems, structural faults and ill-suited tenants, it is now little more than a fading photographic opportunity. Even its vast concrete plaza has greenery growing through the cracked. 40 years later, the concrete future isn’t looking so good.

And there lies the deep fault of Modernism in relation to urbanism: cities were to be showcases- physical blueprints of the ideal city- rather than spaces in which people actually lived. By being so anti-historical, it seems that Modernism forgot that time still goes on and things age. A city cannot remain a frozen form, a perpetual manifestation of the perfect future in the concrete flesh. And time has certainly not been very kind to Modernism, particularly in Montreal where its decay has been compounded by rapid and often shoddy construction. And so now we are left to deal with the aftermath: collapsing overpasses, crumbling infrastructure and costly, messy projects to take down the future and replace it with something else.

Interesting enough, this is taking place at a time when there is again a sense of optimism in Montreal. But it is a very different kind of optimism this time around, as the city seems to have learned its lesson from the Modernist debacles of the 20th century. No longer is building a monumental future the priority; Montreal is now celebrated for its liveability, its culture, its accessibility. The grandstanding of Modernism is slowly but surely giving way to a human scale, an urbanism driven by human bustle and street life rather than cold technology and lifeless infrastructure.

Of course, we still have to pick up the pieces from the 20th century. It will be interesting to see what happens to some of these monuments to Modernism: will they be demolished? Preserved? I think it is quite the fitting fate that Modernism in Montreal is becoming what it feared most: outdated. That is a strange fate for the future indeed.