Ape Rifle

Le Plateau-Mont-Royal
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

<> On September 20th, Montreal held its No Car Day entitled En Ville, Sans Ma Voiture! (roughly translated as the strangely alarmist “In Town, Without My Car!”). Some would argue that this was somewhat of a misnomer, as the no-car space was limited to a small downtown perimeter of a few blocks that lamely avoided two major downtown thoroughfares (Sherbrooke and René-Levesque) and rush hour (the ban on automobiles lasting from 9:30am to 3:30pm). In terms of creating a threshold of inconvenience in order to get people to reconsider using their cars even for one day, I have to admit it came across as a pretty feeble attempt (read: eye-rolling environmental tokenism). To be fair, I’m not really sure how much more you could expect in North America, where the private automobile sits on a pedestal somewhere close to God.

On the plus side, however, walking around inside the no-car zone was a breath of fresh air, both figurative and literal. The most remarkable change was not necessarily the freedom to walk on the street- anyone familiar with Montreal knows its pedestrians making a regular habit of that even in the presence of vehicles - but rather the silence. Thanks to combustion engines, cities have become a veritable cacophony of rumbling, screeching, grinding, humming and honking. Equally amazing to how much noise all the vehicles on our streets make is how used to it we have become- as far as my urban ears knows, nature sounds like the smooth flow of traffic. No Car Day, if nothing else, was a welcome reprieve from this daily auditory assault, available right in the heart of the city.

Inside the no-car perimeter, enjoying the silence

A block outside the no-car perimeter, a distinct lack of silence

Montreal, Québec, Canada

Anyone familiar with the trials and tribulations of Montreal knows the intersection between the avenues of des Pins and Parc has had quite a rough ride over the years. Despite its central location linking downtown with bustling urban neighbourhoods to the northeast and some of the city’s major parkland, Pins-Parc has long been a neglected urban non-space, a quasi-derelict site solely for transitory purposes. This might have something to do with the city’s decision to make it a tangled mess of pedestrian-hostile concrete overpasses back in the 1960s, which turned the area into little more than a massive, ugly funnel for automobile traffic.

In 2004, even the City had apparently had enough of the crumbling infrastructure, graffiti and confused drivers. It launched a renewal project for the intersection and proceeded to tear down the whole structure over the next few years; by the end of 2006 the area was radically changed, with a straightforward intersection lying in the wake of mid-century modernist folly. The only problem was that by removing all the concrete, there was, well, literally nothing there (see photo above) . The road system had been rescued from its earlier excess, but as an urban space it was no less desolate. There is now a vast hole in the heart of the city.

As a result, the final phase of the renewal project entails actually doing something with all this newly available land. The spaces to the north of the intersection will be greened and joined to the adjacent parks; the two municipally-owned lots to the south are proving to be somewhat more of a challenge. In a refreshing turn of events, the relevant city authorities are planning a public consultation starting next month and citizens are invited to submit their own proposals for development of the area.

I, for one, salute this welcome exercise in participatory urban development, and as a self-declared city junkie cannot pass up the chance to contribute to the public sphere of my hometown. Since I found out about the public consultation, I’ve given this matter quite a bit of thought, carefully considering both the physical limitations of the area and the desire for a vibrant public space on a human scale. The nature of the two spaces in question necessitates creativity, as the are each only about 3000m² and surrounded by a constant flow of vehicle traffic. This in itself limits their attractiveness and demands a non-conventional approach if they are to be anything more than neglected open space. How do you get people to use this space year-round - keeping in mind that winter here gives Siberia a run for its money - and take into account that most people do not consider breathing automobile exhaust an attractive hobby?

After wracking my brain a bit and putting my education to good use, I think I’ve come up with a solution: Montreal should use the space to host the world’s largest Starbucks. Sure, there’s already a three-floor megastore in South Korea, and an even larger one on the way in some mall in Dubai (where else?). But I’m talking grand scale, like a fifty-floor glass tower- maybe even evoking the shape of one of their over-sized cups. This monumental addition to the city’s skyline would serve no other purpose than churning out endless coffee beverages with ridiculous names, 24/7. At the top, a massive illuminated Starbucks logo would announce the new landmark to Montrealers. The green logo would also take care of fitting the development into its surroundings, since it would be next to a park.

At this point, you might be wondering how the heck yet another Starbucks, let alone the world’s largest, would contribute anything to the betterment of the intersection and Montreal’s public space in general. Well, here’s my rationale.

Montreal, thanks to years of political instability, economic doldrums and restrictive languages laws, managed to stay largely mega-chain free until relatively recently. I guess having to translate everything into French scared more than one American food and retail conglomerate away (or limited their presence to a few locations). Sure there were always McDonald’s, BK, Dairy Queen and the like- there just weren’t that many of them for a city of three and a half million people. In recent years, as Starbucks eagerly gobbled up half the real estate in any human settlement with more than ten inhabitants, Montreal somehow managed to stay out of reach.

Alas, this was evidently too good to last. Like a caffeinated weed coming up through the pavement, Starbucks has taken on Montreal and managed to open 29 locations before many of us knew what was going on. Despite being an avid coffee drinker, this nevertheless makes me fear for my fair hometown. I’ve been to New York and London, I’ve seen what the chain can do when truly unleashed; in those cities, you can barely take a few steps without having at least two Starbucks in front of you. I can’t even imagine what Seattle or Vancouver are like. If it can get itself into the Forbidden City in Beijing, it won’t be long before I open my closet and find a franchise has opened in there as well.

So to save Montreal before it is too late, I propose that all Starbucks be concentrated in one massive structure at the Pins-Parc intersection and a ban imposed on locations in the rest of the city. The building itself should be designed for the regular addition of new floors, cause lord knows Starbucks likes to expand. In this way, instead of eating into the urban fabric of Montreal, all the new stores can just pile on top of each other and leave the rest of us alone. This would also ensure year-round use for the site, as all those claiming they “can’t live without it” would necessarily converge on the site whether it was 35c or -35C.

On second thought, my plan would perhaps make the intersection even worse than it already is. The world’s largest Starbucks is probably not what those hoping to rejuvenate the area have in mind. Nevertheless, the Pins-Parc intersection- no beauty to begin with - could take a hit for the team and thus contribute to the betterment of the city as a whole.

Well, it’s official: the CN Tower in Toronto (pictured above) is no longer the world’s tallest free-standing structure. That honour now belongs to the Burj Dubai tower in that certain city in the desert. While this might lead some to wax on about the ominous symbolism of this event as the inevitable decline of Western civilization, I for one welcome the news with a curious shrug.

For one, it is surprising that a concrete communications tower in Canada managed to hold the title for so long since its completion in the 1970s. During that time, a myriad of different places slated to imminently take over the world have wowed us all with phallic displays of height- think Japan, the Asian Tigers, China. We’ve had the Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, an immense structure or twenty in Shanghai. It finally took the most overblown story of them all, the development frenzy of Dubai, to relegate the CN Tower to has-been status.

I doubt anyone has ever been scared that Canada would be the next 800-pound gorilla on the world stage, and yet amongst all the rising powers and blossoming skylines worldwide, a quiet Toronto landmark went unchallenged - perhaps because, being Canadian, it went mostly unnoticed. This should certainly not come as a surprise: the Great White North has never been the one to beat, has never been the global standard to best: that distinction belongs to our esteemed American neighbours. In that respect, you’d think the Sears Tower in Chicago was the sworn enemy of ‘developing’ nations worldwide.

Of course, one could ask why any of this really matters. With so many extravagant skyscrapers and mega-projects weighing down on our globe, the prestige of hosting the world’s tallest is fleeting at best. Of course, it makes sense that Dubai would go way above and beyond all others: if you are hoping to make a harsh desert into a premier tourist destination, you have to do something to attract people’s attention. While other urban areas build these monuments to corporate and/or government folly to bring prestige to their respective lands, in Dubai it seems these mega-projects are the city. There’s nothing else there, so better make it impressive somehow.

On a more somber note, the Burj Dubai story perhaps demonstrates our collectively destructive tendency to decry the state of the world on one hand, while digging ourselves ever deeper into that state with the other. In our time of environmental destruction, shocking inequality and political instability, the extravagance has never been greater nor the luxury more surreal. As much as everyone likes to feign concern for ‘global’ issues, we are hooked on an industrialization and construction binge like the world has never seen. With all that needs fixing in our world, with all the good uses the massive amounts of global capital could be put to, how a glorified theme park gorging on oil money in the desert is considered a marvel of our time is beyond me. I guess one man’s miracle is another man’s folly.

In a neat little book called A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright theorizes that civilizations are at their most extravagant, building their most impressive monuments (be they to deities, oil or corporate finance), right before they collapse. Sometimes I wonder if the ever-growing lineage of world’s tallest skyscrapers is a sign of one big, extended blowout party for industrial humanity as we know it. And as easy as it is to criticize Dubai, the society that gave way to the CN Tower is equally as complicit in this self-destruction. I guess, if nothing else, we’ll always have a nice view from the top.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada