A New Way to Eat the City

Over the holidays, the Tyee, a Vancouver-based webzine, published a series of twelve “New Ideas for the New Year.” Here’s one that really caught my attention: planting fruit trees on city streets.

While the benefits of greening the city are well-known — street trees provide shade, suck up storm water, remove carbon from the atmosphere and reduce the urban heat island effect — the notion of actually eating the things we plant in our streets is still quite novel. By doing so, however, we would gain an important local food supply and a way to bring people together.

That has been the experience of the Edible Campus, a container garden on McGill University’s downtown Montreal campus that I wrote about last November. Over the course of last year’s growing season, it produced one third of the food needed by Santropol Roulant, a meals on wheels service, and drew together a diverse group of volunteers who helped maintain the garden.

What really struck me, though, was the way that ordinary passersby used the garden. People make a point to pass through what had previously been an barren concrete space between a Brutalist highrise and the entrace to underground lecture halls. They stopped to examine the plants, sat on the benches near the garden, and walked through a wood archway that had been erected in the midst of the containers. Little kids were especially delighted when they ran around the garden, which must seem more like a forest when you’re three feet tall.

Fruit-bearing street trees could have a similar effect. Cultivation would be a communal activity; imagine a neighbourhood apple-picking festival. The Tyee goes even further by suggesting that fruit trees could reinforce neighbourhood identities and immigrant cultures, much in the same way that community gardens allow people to plant varieties of fruits and vegetables that are hard to find in Canada.

In Vancouver, the parks commission has already started planting 600 fruit trees in city parks; community groups will harvest the fruit when it’s ready in three to five years. Meanwhile, the Fruit Tree Project arranges with homeowners to collect fruit from under-picked trees on their property. The harvested fruit is donated to community kitchens and people in need.

Here in Montreal, there is a far more limited variety of fruits that could be grown. Still, climate would not be as much an obstacle to fruit trees as the risk of neglect and mistreatment. For years, street trees weren’t given enough space to grow, and many sidewalk planters were left unprotected by grates, as anyone who has tripped into one can attest.

Since it passed a “Politique de l’arbre” in 2005, the city has cleaned up its act, but Montrealers haven’t: hundreds of trees are killed each year because of vandalism.

Urban, Multicultural Environmentalism

Volunteers at the 2007 Chinatown Clean Up, an event designed, in part, to raise environmental awareness

A few years ago, Sandra Lee was a McGill marketing student with a budding interest in environmental issues. Involved with a mainstream environmental advocacy group, she found herself increasingly alienated by what she terms the “camping culture” of the people around her, not to mention the fact that she was the only visible minority in the organization.

It dawned on Lee that concern for the environment, as universal as it might seem, manifests itself in different ways for different people. “A lot of environmentalists grew up with a focus on nature, going hiking and canoeing and stuff like that. I just don’t relate to that culture at all. What I’m interested in is environmentalism as it relates to an urban setting,” she says.

Around the same time, Lidia Guennaoui, another young environmentalist, was coming to a similar realization. Shortly after she graduated with a degree in environmental studies from the Université de Montréal, Guennaoui started work in a Côte-des-Neiges Écoquartier that served immigrants from dozens of countries. She found that she lacked the resources to engage them in environmental issues.

“There’s a lot of environmental education we need to do, but I realized that we don’t have the tools to do that. The tools that we have are very unilateral,” she says. “We’re at the stage now where we need to open up more and communicate. We all have our own set of cultural and social references, especially when it comes to the environment.”

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“Une bonne vieille tempête”

Until the rain washed much of it away today, it seemed like the snow wouldn’t stop accumulating in the streets of Montreal. A big storm in early December left more than 30 centimetres of the stuff on the ground; no sooner had that been cleared away did another 40 or 50 centimetres fall over the course of a few days last week. The city’s blue collar workers couldn’t keep up and streets were gridlocked for a good three or four days.

One random guy on the news (I think he was on the Magdalen Islands) described the storm as “une bonne vieille tempête.” I like that expression. It reminds me of fourteenth-century French poet François Villon’s famous line, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” It gives the impression that, even as we run towards something new and unknown, the icy hands of the past continue to grasp at our ankles.

The Edible City

Public space isn’t supposed to poison you. Last year, though, hundreds of Montrealers discovered that their community garden plots were contaminated with lead and arsenic. In some sections of the Plateau Mont-Royal’s Baldwin Garden, located on the site of an old quarry, lead levels were found to be nearly 1,000 times higher than the acceptable limit.

Cleaning the gardens has been a slow process. This past summer, 18 were declared off-limits to vegetable growers. It’s a hard blow for a city that prides itself on having one of the largest and most comprehensive networks of community gardens in North America, with more than 8,200 allotments in 98 gardens – used by as many as 15,000 people – scattered across the island.

Montreal’s city-wide garden program was launched in the 1970s, but after a thirty-year increase, the number of people who use it seems to have levelled off. Now, faced with the spectre of soil contamination, some are looking outside the box – or the garden plot, you could say – for more innovative and adaptable approaches to community gardening.

On a sunny and unseasonably warm October day, McGill University architecture professor Vikram Bhatt takes me to see one of those innovations: the Edible Campus, a small but highly-functional container garden installed on a concrete terrace at McGill’s downtown campus. In a few dozen plastic containers, spread over no more than 1,000 square feet, enough tomatoes, ground cherries, herbs and other fruits and veggies are grown to supply a full third of the food needed by Santropol Roulant, a local meals-on-wheels service.

“It has become so natural,” says Bhatt. “You couldn’t imagine that this was not here before. People hang around, walk through it, people sit on the steps [nearby]. It attracts more people around the area and it’s become a very attractive corner.”

Since it opened last spring, the Edible Campus has given a real sense of place to what was previously an empty space. Put a bunch of plants in some boxes on a concrete tarmac, it seems, and you’ll not only grow a large volume of healthy fruits and vegetables, you will create a spot where people can meet, mingle and interact with food they might otherwise find, processed and packaged, on supermarket shelves.

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The Falling of the Leaves

Posting pictures of autumnal foliage is such a huge cliché — but so what? It’s pretty.

Clean Up Montreal’s Chinatown

This Saturday is the annual Chinatown Clean-Up festival, organized by the Chinese Family Service of Greater Montreal, a non-profit community organization. It might sound kind of odd — a cleaning festival? — but it promises to be a lot of fun. Participants will spend a couple of hours sweeping up different sections of the neighbourhood while variety show presents music, sketches and other entertainment. Politicians will make speeches and do the photo-op thing. Best of all, volunteers will be rewarded with an organic cotton American Apparel t-shirt and a free lunch at the Man Sau Centre.

This year’s event is green-themed and co-sponsored, among others, by Éco-quartier and Green Life, a group dedicated to raising environmental awareness in the Chinese community and promoting a more city- and community-focused kind of environmentalism. While volunteers clean, a variety show in Sun Yat Sen Park will present sketches on recycling in Cantonese, Mandarin and French, and information booths will tell you how to reduce your environmental impact.

Perhaps the most important thing about Chinatown Clean-Up, though, is that it’s a a symbolic event designed to promote Chinatown and the Chinese community as an indispensable part of Montreal. “It’s meant to get the Chinese community together, but it’s also an intercultural exchange between everyone in Montreal,” says the event’s organizer, Laine Tam (who also happens to be a contributor for Urbanphoto). “I think it’s a great way to showcase what Montreal is all about, that it’s a multicultural and multilingual city, despite recent controversies.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in Chinatown over the past several months. It’s a bigger neighbourhood than most people realize, extending beyond the short commercial district between St. Urbain and St. Laurent, and a lot more diverse. Thousands of people live there, most of them elderly immigrants, and thousands more go there every day to shop. Most are Chinese, certainly, but they are Chinese from very different places: Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and a host of other countries. Shopowners and shoppers alike are a ployglot bunch, speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, English and French.

For the community, that diversity means that events like the Chinatown Clean-Up are necessary to bring disparate elements of the community together. For other Montrealers, the Clean-Up is a great way to reacquaint themselves with their own city’s small but venerable Chinatown.

The 2007 Chinatown Clean-Up will take place on Saturday, September 8th from 11am–2pm, at the corner of Clark and La Gauchetière. Contact Laine Tam at lainecfs@gmail.com or (514) 861 5244, ext. 231, for more details.

Green in an Unruly Metropolis

Parque Trianon, Avenida Paulista, early morning. One clue to judging the safety of a neighborhood is the presence of women out walking dogs. Despite São Paulo’s high crime rates, you see them in many areas.

São Paulo has the reputation of being a very dangerous city. Its murder rate is phenomenal: 36.9 per 100,000 people in 2004, while London’s rate was 2.4 that year, Los Angeles’s was 14 and Chicago’s 16. I didn’t know that when I picked Brazil’s industrial powerhouse as one of the cities to consider in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, and that’s probably a good thing because I might not have gone, and missed seeing where the rest of the world may be headed.

One of the beauties of the Internet is the ease with which you can “meet” people ahead of time to ask what to see and hear when you arrive. I had lined up appointments with city officials and academics before I left Montreal, and I’d also exchanged e-mails with two British journalists who know the city well, and who offered to meet for lunch the day I arrived to give me some tips. But I’m afraid I rather surprised these guys, because as soon as I introduced myself face-to-face I could see them swallow and consider before they spoke: obviously I was a whole lot older than the woman they were expecting.

“You can’t go there,” one of them began, when I asked about housing developments I should see.

“Don’t ride public transportation,” his friend chimed in.

“People get kidnapped at knife point in their own cars at that intersection,” the first one added.

It was enough to make me worry for a couple of hours about what I’d got myself into. But I decided I had ignore their warnings if I wanted to get a feel for this energetic place. Yes, the middle- and upper-classes are afraid, but I found that the overwhelming majority of people were extremely nice to strangers as they go about their ordinary lives. In fact, I think I stumbled on a great indicator of a neighborhood’s safety — the presence of women of a certain age walking dogs. I found them all over the city during the day, at least, taking the cachorrinho out to do his business and patrolling the street at the same time.

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Fort McMurray Goes Supernova

Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young

VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.

However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.

The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’

When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?

Shanghai: Creative Destruction?

Linden trees in the old French concession

In 2010, when Shanghai hosts the World Expo, 35 percent of the city is supposed to be dedicated greenspace. The stated goal is provide 15 square meters of green space per resident, with a park or other green feature no farther away than a half-kilometer walk from anyone’s home. It is an amazing challenge for such a huge and overcrowded city. Nevertheless, Shanghai will probably succeed in meeting it, but at great cost to the fabric of this enormous metropolis.

When I picked Shanghai as the Chinese city to consider in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, I had no idea of the ambitious plan. As an example of what can be done when powerful government combines with capitalistic fervor, however, I quickly learned that Shanghai is unparalleled.

The fruit of this green effort was evident from the elevated highways when I first arrived in Shanghai on the airport bus. Steel mills and industrial plants line the edges of the nearby waterways, their red brick buildings smudged by smoke, gray and black piles of slag and other waste lining the surface roads. But the edges of several compounds are planted in bushes and trees, producing a green contrasting brightly with the dark industrial tailings.

The highway right-of-ways are also lined with green, with footpaths and benches that people use, at least in the center city, like any other park. Further out in the new towns, I later saw that district governments often make other choices, grouping the required green space together to produce big parks filled with sports facilities.

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Red and Green in Kochi

Hammer-and-sickle in Kochi, the largest city of Kerala, a state that has elected several Marxist-Leninist governments

The view from the train window on the trip between Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of India’s Kerala State, and Kochi, its biggest city, is one of nearly continuous development. As I looked out the open windows I kept waiting for the countryside to begin. I shouldn’t have been surprised: what I didn’t properly appreciate was that Kerala, on the southwest coast of India, has a complex, centuries-old pattern of mixing rural and urban that may look like suburban sprawl but, until recently at least, hasn’t been.

Kochi, formerly called Cochin, is the largest city in Kerala state, with a population of about 2.5 million. The region had one of the most strictly-enforced versions of the caste system until end of the 19th century, but now it has made amazing strides toward equality and equity which is the reason I decided it to include Kochi among the cities explored in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006).

Kerala has the highest literacy rates in India — 94 per cent for men and 86 per cent for women, according to the 2001 Indian census — and the lowest infant mortality rates, 14 per 100,000 births in 2000. Other indicators suggest life is pretty good—without state coercion women have decided to have fewer babies than needed to maintain the population numbers, while life expectancy is right up there with that of developed countries.

Four times — most recently in 2006 — Keralites have elected a coalition government led by Marxist-Leninists, but the ambient political style is far from that seen in Communist bloc countries — or even in the authoritarian democracy of Singapore. In Kerala the emphasis is on community-based action: the great surge in literacy came in the 1980s when local groups worked on the grass roots level to teach people to read. Newspaper readership — a good measure of literacy in action — is now the highest in India. In fact, even though Kerala’s main language, Malayalam, is spoken by only about five percent of India’s population, a Malayalam newspaper has the largest circulation of any daily in any language in the country.

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Clean and Green

The first time I went to Singapore — in April, 2000 — the city state was in the middle of a “Clean and Green: That’s the Way We Like It” campaign. That was nothing unusual, I discovered later, but as I wandered around this densely populated island nation I was impressed by just how green and how clean it was.

I’d gone there to look at the Singapore Botanical Garden for my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t know what to expect. Shortly before somebody had been flogged for marijuana possession and there was much rumbling about what a police state the place was. So I was surprised when I was there for several days before I saw anyone in uniform besides a cop directing traffic. And I was amazed at what a green place this city of high-rises was. When I decided to do a book exploring the ways that people interact with nature in urban settings — Green City People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006) — Singapore was at the top of my list of cities to check out. I visited twice in 2005, and I came away even more impressed.

Singapore is an island about 250 kilometers north of the equator, and 13 hours ahead in time of the east coast of North America. It’s hot all year round, and as soon as you go outside you’ll meet the smells and the sights of a tropical paradise. Orchid and bromeliads grow on big trees shading thoroughfares, bougainvillea cascades from pedestrian walkways over roadways, well-tended gardens surround tall buildings where more almost all of the city’s 4.5 million people live.

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When is a Lake Not a Lake?

Anjou sur le Lac

Montrealers are accustomed to thinking of their city as an island, with a big river out front and a small river out back, as simple as that. But on old maps you will find other watercourses marked on the island, long since drained or driven underground to make human settlement more convenient.

Here’s one case in which a small urban watercourse has been revived as a landscaping feature — and not the only one in the metropolitan area.

One winter night as I was accompanying a friend on an aimless drive, we passed a sign saying Anjou sur le Lac. I blinked. “That makes no sense — Anjou’s not even on the back river, much less a lake.” Curious, we drove around and could see a bit of a frozen snow-covered pond, but that was the extent of our investigations. I assumed that sur le lac was merely a marketing ploy meant to evoke the wealth of Laval sur le Lac or the ease of summer resort towns.

I was mistaken, at least partly. On the map there’s definitely a sort of tiny lake in this part of Ville d’Anjou. The satellite view of the area shows that it appears to wind its way north as a watercourse through the grounds of CEGEP Marie-Victorin and the Parc Ruisseau de Montigny (possibly its original name) but then vanishes, probably underground, before reaching the Rivière des Prairies.

Anjou sur le Lac is a recent development with rows of new single-family houses — their still raw brick architecture focused around the all-important garage — some sixplex condo buildings, and two anonymous eight-storey buildings that could be apartments, homes for the elderly (as suggested by one web search) or even offices. All are clustered around something resembling a lake.

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Hamilton is a Green City?

A Hamilton foundry circa 1935. Courtesy Hamilton Public Library.

Sometimes the road you take can lead you places you don’t expect.

Shortly after my book on botanical gardens, Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens (Véhicule Press, 2001) came out, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton/Burlington, Ontario asked me to give a talk. I’d never been there, and I must admit I found it a little incongruous that a place like Hamilton, Canada’s Steeltown, was home to such a large and well-regarded botanical garden. After all, Hamilton has been home to heavy industry for a century which polluted both its harbour and the air above it. And, despite the beauty of the RBG, I might have continued to think that had I take the Queen Elizabeth Way into Hamilton from Toronto.

The QEW runs along a sandbar protecting the harbor and what you see from it is a classic, hellish Industrial Age landscape: steel mills, railroads, ships, smoke, flames, warehouses, and factories. Some are no longer used, but their rusting carcasses only add to the general impression of a gray, metallic wasteland.

But there is another approach to the city from the north, and by chance I took it, driving inland from the shoreline of Lake Ontario, flirting with the Niagara Escarpment. On this route you leave behind the sprawl that is creeping southwest from Toronto, and swoop past forested hillsides where the waters of one of the greatest wetlands in the region reflect the setting sun at the end of a long day. Coote’s Paradise, the RBG itself, a pair of well-maintained cemeteries, a graceful high bridge and a 19th-century manor house line this route into town. Drive along it, and you think the city you are entering is entirely different from the one glimpsed from the Queen Elizabeth Way.

How could this be? I wondered, and so I started asking questions. Very quickly I learned that the two visions of Hamilton are actually two sides of the same coin: the profits from industry actually paid for safe-guarding the green space.

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Green City: Montreal in the Summer

On the left, a good way to start a summer day
On the right, the Mile End community garden sits next to old factories

You can get hungry for green in Montreal in the winter, but in the summer the city abounds in greenery. Walking around this city got me started thinking a few years ago about the way individuals go out of their way to create green surroundings, and ultimately led to my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006). Montreal isn’t featured — the eleven cities I talk about range from Babylon through Chicago to São Paulo and back to Babylon — but a walk this week through my neighborhood showed me that the drive for green is still there.

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