Ape Rifle

Istanbul is not a city designed for the automobile, to say the least. With its dense, old urban fabric and hilly geography, you could almost imagine the first settlers musing to themselves, “gee, this place is going to be a real scene after the invention of the combustion engine”. And what a scene it has become all these years later, like so many other massive urban beasts the world over, with millions of vehicles bursting the city’s seams.

Steep, narrow and winding roads become major thoroughfares with a predictable outcome- a performance of narrow misses, precarious turns, grinding brakes and puzzle-like gridlock. While attending an event with a rooftop terrace overlooking just such a street, I was treated to hours of vehicular contorsion.

5:35pm

When there is open road in Istanbul, only one option is available: go fast. Forget that there is most likely someone right around the corner.

5:55pm

Traffic starts to build up in both directions thanks to cars parked in a rather unfortunate place.

7:28pm

Things get dicey as cars coming in opposite directions start to block each other from turning. Cue blocked lanes up and down the road in both directions.

7:46pm

Lots of close calls and gear grinding gets the traffic flowing.

11:08pm

A big van gets involved and really starts causing trouble. At this point several people got out of their cars to direct traffic and walk further down the road to tell people to back up and make space.

11:14pm

The big van continues its attempts to escape this nefarious corner. Some people get out of their taxi for a breather while they wait.

Anamur

Istanbul

Mr. Spielberg’s much publicized about-face regarding his participation in Beijing’s upcoming summer spectacle is a media dream come true, a potent attention-grabbing mix of Hollywood celebrity, African misery and Chinese power. Coming soon after a similarly themed mini-scandal in Britain, this development bodes ill for the host government, so intent on keeping this sporting circus framed solely through the prism of smiling pandas and dancing ethnic minorities. As the usual activists get fired up by the renewed publicity of their cause(s), it could be a long and laborious run-up to August for internet censors in the Middle Kingdom. 

It is, perhaps, unfair that Beijing is singled out for its amoral pursuit of black gold via tainted regimes when numerous other nations undertake similarly unsavory ventures in other, less publicized locales. With so many bloody hands on the international stage, it is difficult to even fathom the number of boycotts that, in an ideal world, would grind to a halt any major transnational gathering in 2008. After all, Mr. Spielberg’s native land has in recent years invaded (and continues to occupy) another nation in an unprovoked attack. Post-Soviet Russia has spent a good amount of its time and energy reducing Chechnya to rubble. Canada, with its rapid development of the carbon-suicide oil sands in Alberta, could feasibly be accused of grave crimes, albeit of a more environmental nature.

While it is highly questionable whether international politics should entangle sporting events, Beijing has nevertheless managed to shoot itself quite squarely in the foot in this instance. Its calls for an ‘apolitical’ event fall on disbelieving ears since it has effectively made the hosting of this two-week sporting event a defining element of its own agenda. Its messages of sports unity and non-interfere translate, beyond Chinese borders, into “if anyone is going to play these games for political gain, it’s damn well going to be us”. When you play with hubris, you have to expect to get burnt. Position the Games as a flexing of your muscles, and those who disapprove of your actions (for reasons founded or unfounded) will seek to humble you. This is not rocket science.

Beyond this debate, however, lies a much deeper and more disturbing question: what was Spielberg doing as an artistic advisor to the Beijing Games in the first place?I have trouble believe the organizers of these games imagined the ideal opening or closing ceremony to resemble a Universal Studios theme park, with dinosaurs crashing about or an aging Harrison Ford being chased into the Bird’s Nest by a boulder. A segment about Munich, perhaps? Tom Hanks carrying in the torch dressed in vintage WWII GI gear or, dare I say it, Zhang Ziyi in full geisha attire? 

A culture as rich and spectacular as the Chinese should not need recourse to the talents of an American blockbuster king to throw together a few song-and-dance routines. Evidently the whole affair smells of a publicity stunt, albeit one now gone wrong. That the Chinese organizers felt they needed a recognized celebrity from a foreign land to add some credibility to their party plans reveals a rising giant that is still insecure in its own skin, an awkward teenager on a growth spurt that craves approval. Unaware of its own attractive qualities, China seeks to imitate the popular kids in the hope of fitting in. Enter Rem Koolhaus, Sir Foster and the usual suspects to play off this for the sake of realizing their wildest architectural fantasies. 

And I, for one, find this extremely unfortunate. The Chinese have so much to offer in their people, history and culture, but it is questionable whether any of this will truly be on display come August. The need to impress at all costs long ago gained primacy over such humble considerations. And so visitors should be forgiven for any confusion when they encounter Chinese culture  as a haphazard collection of berserk architectural monoliths designed by Europeans. At the very least, however, they can now be relieved that a mechanical Jaws will not be attacking the opening ceremony.   

Cape Town, South Africa, March 2007

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.

Last June, a particularly interesting piece of news came and went without much fanfare: those who concern themselves with such things estimated that, sometime during the next year, humanity would become a majority urban species for the first time in its history. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this milestone slipped by largely unnoticed, little more than a flash in the carnival of endless distractions that comprise our modern airwaves. The media rule of thumb seems to be that the less trivial a matter is, the less attention it receives- hence the amount of coverage devoted to inconsequential personal details in the American presidential perma-campaign, or the latest exploits of spoiled brats misspending their fifteen minutes of fame.

So in this time when long attention spans are de facto discouraged, it is tempting to dismiss this urban majority estimate as just another tidbit in a sea of information, filed under “Did you know?” alongside sports trivia and tech gadget statistics. I would argue, however, that this news deserves a different fate, one in which it is given more thought and consideration. It is one thing to casually acknowledge that more people might now live in cities than rural areas, but another to truly contemplate what this means and how this might affect the course of our species in the long-term.

Granted, an initial difficulty with this contemplation lies in the arbitrary definitions of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. In such a complex and fluid world, is this division even relevant? As anyone who has spent time navigating the endless and ill-defined fringes of a mega-city could tell you, it is perhaps no longer even physically identifiable in many areas. On a conceptual level, then, the terms are left open enough for those who use them to do as they please: in China, for example, some ‘cities’ are in fact geographically vast regions comprising large rural areas where residents are ‘urban’ by legal fiat only.

And related to this is the tricky subject of rural-to-urban migration: when are rural migrants to the city considered urban? How are they counted? What if they spend some years in the city but ultimately go back to rural homes? Can they be considered urban and rural? It is quite possible, likely even, that the fluidity of social networks and migrant patterns render problematic any academic attempts to fit people into neatly defined spatial boxes.

Despite these somewhat semantic difficulties, it remains that large-scale urbanization as a force of change is one of the most important stories of our time. To expand on this, it is important to note at this point that a rural/urban divide should not be understood in any narrow physical sense (which leads to the problems mentioned above), but rather as a fundamental difference in lifestyle. A move from a rural, agrarian existence to an urbanized, industrial life is, above all, an escape from direct toil of the land. In the most rudimentary of rural environments, people survive through their own direct agricultural efforts; in any urban setting, people survive by accumulating virtual wealth that gives them claim to food and resources. The latter condition places urbanity at the very heart of industrial modernity as it is so often understood today: this reliance on complex production systems is considered advanced, while direct reliance on working the land is considered backwards.

Standard of living measures that are tossed around by governments and development agencies alike are, after all, doing little more than measuring the extent to which a society or region has urbanized itself (ie removed itself from direct toil of the land and built up complex industrial systems which can be understood through statistics). So as people the world over strive for a better life, it should come as no surprise that this process manifests itself as urbanization; after all, the very concept of the good life as many understand it today is inescapably urban, which is perhaps why the visualization of wealth is so often tied to city skylines. Perhaps also why informal urban settlements the world over swell ever more with new arrivals.

But enough of the academic meandering and back to the main point of inquiry: what can we expect from a humanity that is now in the majority off the land and seeking survival in an urban context? I believe we will see the growth of two related paradoxes- the first involving the environment and the second involving political stability and personal freedoms.

Regarding the environment, an increasingly urban humanity will be more mentally detached than ever from its reliance on the natural world- unfortunately, this at a time when our impact on the planet will be greater than ever. As people move from direct reliance on agriculture to indirect survival based on the accumulation of money, this drives the growth of complex industrial systems, be they transportation, commercial or utilities. Agriculture, somehow, just becomes another industry, no more or less than others.

So as these systems grow so complex that people can survive by trading financial derivatives or selling digital music, the reality that our whole existence is still based on the fruits of agriculture gets lost in a haze of economics and post-industrial drivel. Unfortunately, our physical impact on the land is as real as ever- it’s just that the urban human is less conditioned to understand its implications. Rather, we obsess with the survival of our industrial systems (the art of economics) as if they were self-contained entities disconnected from environmental limitations. And I fear that despite all the talk of environmentalism these days, the continued urbanization of humanity will only accentuate this trend with unforeseen consequences.

This development has significant implications, as all good environmental trends do, deeper inside the social and political fabric- and this brings us to the second paradox. While much is said about the freedom and vitality of cities and the opportunity they offer compared to agrarian life, what is less mentioned is that urbanization is also a process of disempowerment. A city dweller, unlike someone who can directly grow the means to their survival, relies completely on systems and services to provide for them. And for many, this is fine if not ideal- but only because they are well positioned to benefit and/or control these systems. In the dreamscape of development economists everywhere, this is the end state of paradise- everyone a productive, happy industrial consumer with the whole machine humming along nicely.

Of course, reality has a nasty tendency of getting in the way. The urban modernist dream falls apart with the realization that a transfer from an agrarian to an urban lifestyle does not always result in a nice condo with family trips to the mall. In many cases, it can mean a squalid existence in harsh slums, an urban density devoid of the services that are supposed to accompany it. This is detachment from the land as a means of survival, but without the access to the services or virtual wealth (ie money) that are supposed to replace it.

It isn’t much of a stretch from here to imagine, then, how increased urbanization might result in increased unrest and political stability. As agrarian beings, we associated our survival with nature- the quality of the soil, the constancy of rainfall, the scourge of floods or droughts. We were completely in God’s hands, so to speak- it is quite difficult to argue with a cloud, for example. As urban beings, however, we associate our survival with man-made systems (which, to be said, operate quite poorly if at all in many parts of the world). In this context, it is much easier to blame failures on governments, municipalities, corporations, etc. With mass urbanization, states are quick to grasp at the benefits- industrial development, large labour pools – without, perhaps, truly comprehending that they’ll take the brunt of the blame when large numbers of people feel the system doesn’t provide.

And, finally, this is why increased urbanization has the potential to lead to stricter state control at the very same time as it causes unrest and political instability. Just as those who are utterly disempowered and yet find themselves in dense urban environments will need to be contained, the industrial infrastructure that services the fortunate will need to be protected. When the ability to survive of the fortunate urban citizenry depends on the integrity of industrial systems (be they physical such as transportation or virtual such as finance), their protection against acts of terrorism and/or civil unrest becomes paramount.

In places where the large majority of urbanites are net benefactors of these industrial systems, this will be accepted without much thought or question- for example, think of the boom in CCTV surveillance in Western cities with London leading the way. As more people join the complex structure of the urban world, the more people need to be catalogued, counted and monitored. In places where huge majorities of urbanites are excluded from these systems, while at the same time increasingly depending on them, reaction is likely take on more violent undertones. One sure way to ferment protest is to strip people of their self-reliance and provide little or nothing in return- whether in the historically deprived urban townships of South Africa or the rural land gobbling industrial frenzy in China.

So detachment from the environment will deepen as the need to address our impact on it grows, and the potential for unrest is matched by the prospect of greater state control. I am not attempting here to romanticize the rural lifestyle; but rather, to temper the frothy narrative of economic miracles and growing skylines with the realization that there are some serious implications to urbanization. As more people than ever search for the good life in an urban landscape, it is important to contemplate what could happen if they find little more than exclusion and a denser version of the misery they left behind. As the human condition becomes increasingly defined by an urban lifestyle, as a majority of us come to rely on man-made systems for survival, it becomes ever more important that these systems be inclusive. Unfortunately, considering our current track record, this hasn’t exactly been a strong point in our evolution as a species.

<> 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

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.