November 9th

A city was reunited twenty years ago. There’s plenty to read about the demise of the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9th, 1989, but what occupies my thoughts is Robin McMorran’s 1985 photo, which I originally posted in 2007. It says a lot about the arbitrariness and absurdity of separation walls, which in the case of Berlin passed right through the middle of streets and neighbourhoods like a clumsy butcher’s cleaver. McMorran returned to photograph that same spot in 1990, and though the wall is gone, the void it created isn’t.

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Building Blocks

When I saw this fun Berlin-commie-block-as-Tetris video, I immediately thought of Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie’s experimental modular apartment building. When it was built, by assembling prefab housing cubes into a jumbled whole, it looked more or less like what you see in this video. Unfortunately, Safdie’s vision of customizable, prefabricated apartment construction wasn’t as feasible as he had hoped, so instead of the deconstructionist cubes of Habitat 67, we have a world filled with lookalike boxes.

Below is an excerpt from Stuart Cooper’s 1977 movie The Disappearance, starring Donald Sutherland as a hitman who lives in Habitat 67. There’s plenty of great shots set to a very appropriate soundtrack.

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Drinking from the Big Nose

Drinking fountains are everywhere in Rome, quite useful in a city where temperatures hover above 35C in the summer. These cast-iron fountains are known affectionately as nasoni, or “big noses,” due to the Pinocchio-esque appearance of their spouts. The design dates back to 1872, when the first twenty fountains were installed. Today, there are over 2,000 in the city, most of them emblazoned with the ancient Roman motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).

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Elevador da Bica

Lisbon

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How Bike-Sharing Changes the City

Photo by cagliostro

The launch of Bixi, Montreal’s new bike-sharing system, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite early problems — faulty lock mechanisms have led to the theft of dozens of bikes — it has been more successful than anyone imagined. In fact, Montrealers have taken so well to Bixi that Stationnement de Montréal, the municipal agency that runs the system, has decided to bump up an expansion that wasn’t planned until next year. Next month, an additional 2,000 bikes will be added at 100 new stations in Villeray, Little Burgundy and Côte des Neiges.

Just as the public has quickly taken to Bixi, the bike-sharing service has already engrained itself in the city. “Bixi has truly changed the urban landscape here,” notes On Two Wheels, the Gazette’s cycling blog. “There is a new, yet already familiar ‘blink’ on the bike paths; downtown it seems like every third bike is a Bixi. This program is clearly doing some heavy lifting toward getting more people using bikes that might not have otherwise.”

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Every Street is a Mosaic

Even the most ordinary street in Lisbon is a mosaic. The stones may be simply-hewn blocks of some kind of gray rock, or elaborate black and white designs, as found in the praças. Obviously putting them in place and maintaining them is labour-intensive, but they have the advantage of providing an easily-repaired surface that also allows rain water to percolate into the ground.

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Espace public et bicyclettes

En arrivant pour la première fois à Karlsruhe, en Allemagne, j’ai été surprise par le nombre de bicyclettes aux alentours de la gare centrale. Il faut dire qu’avec ses 65 millions de cyclistes, l’Allemagne – et ses villes – se doivent d’être adaptés aux vélos. Et la majorité des villes le sont ; Karlsruhe est une des ces villes adaptées aux bicyclettes, ce qui, concrétement, ce traduit par des facilités pour les cyclistes : pistes cyclables et parkings à vélos.

Parking à vélos à côté de chez un coiffeur

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The Errant Canadians

It’s fun to see Jean-Paul Riopelle, now considered to have been of Canada’s foremost artists, described as a “young abstract painter” in Les Canadiens errants, a 1956 National Film Board documentary. He describes the open atmosphere of Paris as being particularly conducive to the creation of art. Implicitly, of course, he is referring to the atmosphere back home in Quebec, which was decidedly hostile to any sort of innovative thinking. In 1948, when Riopelle joined fifteen other artists and intellectuals in publishing the Refus global, a manifesto against the conservative Quebec establishment of the era, he was essentially chased out of town. He moved to Paris in 1949 and he continued to split his time between France and Canada until the 1990s.

Canada has always been a country of immigrants but what isn’t as widely known is that it has been, for just as long, a country of emigrants. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration and a high birth rate were the only things preventing Canada from losing population as hundreds of thousands of people left for better economic prospects in the United States. Throughout its history, many of its luminaries have found it more worthwhile to live abroad — Mordecai Richler in London, Leonard Cohen in Greece, Mavis Gallant and Anne Hébert in Paris, just to name a few. Even today, an estimated two million Canadians live outside of Canada.

What interests me about this is how the expatriate experience has informed the Canadian identity. Unfortunately, the film above doesn’t really offer much in that regard, dwelling mainly on the surface of why such talented people decided to leave Canada for Paris and London. Unlike immigrants, who leave their countries to join family abroad or to pursue better educational or economic opportunities elsewhere, expats tend to come from positions of relative privilege. For them, moving abroad is a lifestyle choice more than anything else. That has been my experience in Hong Kong, at least, and from what what I can glean in Les Canadiens errants, it was true in 1950s Europe, too.

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Et si on partageait une voiture ?

Vers des villes sans congestion routière ?

Au cours de mon séjour en Allemagne, j’ai pu découvrir un mode de partage des voitures assez confidentiel (tout du moins pour l’Europe): le car-sharing (ou “carsharing”, ou encore “autopartage”). Le “carsharing” n’a rien à voir avec le covoiturage qui est encouragé depuis quelques années dans la plupart des pays européens. Le principe est simple (et est généralement le même dans tous les pays): les utilisateurs payent un abonnement mensuel ou annuel, prix auquel s’ajoute ensuite le coût de la location (à l’heure) du véhicule. Plusieurs types de véhicules sont proposés afin de s’adapter aux besoins de tous les utilisateurs : voitures citadines pour les célibataires, voitures break pour les familles, … Le client doit simplement prévenir (par Internet ou par téléphone, pas forcément à l’avance) qu’il souhaite utiliser tel type de véhicule à telle heure et le véhicule est mis à sa disposition pour la durée qu’il souhaite.

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Fake Signs

Panos 2013: “a collaborative project that takes the work of artists from around the world, in the form of fake road signs, and turns the streets of Lyon, France into an enormous gallery without walls.” Hmm. Sounds vaguely familiar. Maybe that’s because it seems to draw from the same way of thinking about cities as so many other arts interventions, which seek to disrupt the flow of daily life in order to draw attention to it.

In this case, the signs that work best are those that take their cues from their setting and those that critique the content of ordinary road signs. The English artist Tim Fishlock contributed an upside-down bus, which looks like a cute cartoon face but also suggests some kind of upheaval to the natural order of traffic. Naoshii, from Japan, took the classic “do not enter” sign and turned it into a window. Swiss-American Grotesk, with his sign reading “Sous les pavés, la plage,” manages to evoke the 1968 student riots in Paris as well as Paris Plage (or maybe just the state of riverside public space in general).

Photos courtesy Panos 2013

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Shopping Places, Then and Now

The Galéries Lafayette in Paris still is a gorgeous retail space

As with so many things having to do with taste in the 19th century, the French generally get the credit for inventing the department store: the Parisian pioneer Au bon march

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Stumbling Blocks

Pierres d’achoppement de Max et Meta Seta Strauss, morts à Auschwitz en 1942

« Pierre d’achoppement » en français, Stolperstein en allemand, stumbling blocks en anglais, tel est le nom d’un projet européen qui vise à placer un « pavé de la mémoire » devant l’entrée du dernier lieu de résidence des victimes du nazisme. Initié par l’artiste allemand Gunter Demnig en 1993, ce projet a pour but de ne pas faire tomber dans l’oubli les personnes mortes en déportation au cours de la Seconde guerre mondiale. Comme le dit Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, la fille du dernier rabbin de Hambourg, ”The stumbling blocks become reminders and voice; they call out, ‘Every human being has a name‘”.

La première pierre a été posée de manière illégale en 1997 à Berlin. Aujourd’hui, plus de 13 000 pierres d’achoppement ont été posées légalement dans plus de 300 lieux, en Allemagne, en Autriche, en Hongrie et aux Pays-Bas. La plaque en laiton comporte toujours les mêmes indications : tout d’abord « Ici habitait » (« Hier wohnte » en allemand, ou plus rarement « Hier arbeitete », c’est-à-dire « Ici travaillait »), suivi du nom, la date de naissance et la date et du lieu de décès de la personne déportée. D’un coût unitaire de 95€, ces pavés sont posés à la demande d’un membre de la famille du déporté, d’associations, … Ces pierres sont installées par Gunter Demnig lui-même qui a conscience de ne pas pouvoir créer six millions de pierres d’achoppement mais qui refuse de fabriquer ces pierres de façon industrielle puisqu’il souhaite avant tout amorcer une réflexion.

Ce projet, qui a suscité la controverse, pose en effet un certain nombre de questions. Tout d’abord, on peut être étonné de la simplicité du projet : un pavé est posé au même niveau que le trottoir, seule la couleur différencie les pierres d’achoppement. Si les riverains des pierres d’achoppement sont invités à les nettoyer régulièrement, ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Les pavés de mémoire passent donc le plus souvent inaperçus : les personnes que j’ai rencontrés ne les avaient pas remarqués, n’arrivaient pas à lire en raison de la trop petite taille (il s’agit d’un carré de 10 cm sur 10 cm).

Plus préoccupant encore, et, à mon avis, l’endroit où ces pavés sont disposés : le sol. Les passants semblent marcher sur ces pavés dans l’indifférence générale. Le fait que les noms soient foulés toute la journée a d’ailleurs constitué une des plus vives critiques émanant de la communauté juive de Krefeld (Allemagne) – un compromis a par la suite été trouvé entre les familles des victimes, la municipalité et les propriétaires des maisons qui ne souhaitaient pas se souvenir chaque jour des atrocités commises par les nazis au cours de la Seconde guerre mondiale.

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Tel Père, Tel Fils

La Rochelle, France

Montreal, Quebec

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Saudade

Lisbon is an unexpectedly quiet place. It is unexpected because, stereotypically at least, large Latin cities are supposed to be brash, chaotic and teeming with life. Rome certainly has perfected the art of chaos and Madrid is nothing if not lively, but Lisbon is comparatively reserved, almost secretive. As you wander up and down its many hills, you keep thinking that maybe it’s an off day—maybe everyone has gone away for the weekend—but I have a feeling that Lisbon is always like that: always slow, always melancholy, a city of fado and saudades. This is something that Lisbonites seem to cherish: when my friend Rossana visited the city last year, she came across a piece of graffiti stencilled on a wall. “Tourists: Cherish the Portuguese silence or go to Spain,” it read.

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