Negative Space
Montreal’s urban form, like many other North American cities, is been affected by two major forces of change. The first is suburbanization, a defining element of the 20th century so analyzed and debated that it needs no further discussion in these pages. The second is the gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, a process which has transformed many a derelict warehouse on this continent over the past twenty years or so. The latter, in particular, has hit a fever pitch in these parts, with long-standing vacant lots suddenly devoured by high-rise concrete skeletons and neglected post-industrial neighbourhoods being lined up for China-style radical transformation. Add to this yet another large-scale project to overhaul one of the downtown area’s more lifeless sections, and you’d think the city was serious about dealing with its urban blunders of the 20th century (forgetting for a second that it was exactly these sorts of large-scale grands projets that got us in trouble in the first place).
The other day, however, a long walk in search of some picture frames led me through a stretch of Montreal’s urban fabric that has yet to experience either story of dynamic change. It was a landscape I have seen in many North American cities (particularly older ones in the northeast US and eastern Canada), a spatial no man’s land lost between the density of the central city and the mall-serviced sub-divisions of the suburban periphery. These are the areas not conveniently located enough to be a target for gentrification, yet way too engrained in the concrete urban fabric to be considered by those seeking suburban delights. They have seen scant construction or upgrading since the middle of last century, but are hardly abandoned- these are the forgotten landscapes, the negative infrastructural spaces in between areas that people want to be.
Often, these landscapes are a strange mix of industrial detritus from a bygone era, service garages and U-Haul lots. Space here is filled with low-rise sheds and cracked-pavement parking lots, and mostly devoid of people and life. Urban negative space is like the storage area for North American industrial society, its aging backbone that no one wants to see: train tracks and expressways, old warehouses, bargain furniture stores, ugly motels and graffiti-covered remnants of loading docks. Buildings here are cheaply built, purely functional, with an aesthetic that has decayed along with the passage of time since the 1970s. This negative space is unnerving in that it reveals the growing age of the ‘new world’, reminding us North Americans just how much of our urban space has been devoted to the needs of gritty logistics and throwaway commerce- the physical embodiments of which have not necessarily aged well since their heyday.
Wandering in such a space on a cold Sunday in November, it is difficult not to feel a certain quiet malaise, a sense of a society that is obliviously easing itself into an age of decline. Amidst the twisted metal fences overgrown with weeds, the idle boxcars and the fading billboards, contemplation of our great industrial experiment is all but essential. And out of it comes a fear that through our long-standing thirst for production and consumption, we have produced vast swathes of disposable built environment barely worth remembering.