The central part of Bujumbura was laid out during colonial days, and features a classic City Beautiful rond-point, around which vehicle
traffic is channeled. The Chaussée Prince Louis Rwagazore and the Chausée Peuple Murundi come together here.
Bujumbura is the capital of Burundi, Rwanda’s non-identical twin in the Great Lake Region of Central Africa. Like Rwanda, Burundi’s population is divided between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, with Hutus forming the vast majority, about 80 percent. (Both countries also include a small proportion—less than three percent—of Twa, a people related to the pygmies.) Inter-ethnic violence has been endemic for more than 40 years, and although Burundi has not seen bloodshed on a scale of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a civil war that began in 1993 has claimed thousands upon thousands of victims. Whereas in Rwanda, Tutsi were the target of Hutu violence, the situation is reversed in Burundi.
A long, slow process toward peace and reconciliation was just beginning when I visited Bujumbura to research a novel, The Violets of Usambara. That was in October 2001, a most interesting time to travel in Africa, I can assure you. Both the US and Canadian governments had travel warnings in effect, and before I left I was told not to venture outside the city alone. What I found in Bujumbura was a city which still showed its colonial roots in the design of the central section. Wide, City Beautiful-inspired boulevards took off from a rond-point or climbed toward the hills. Both the airport and the cathedral boasted classic modernist design from the 1950s and early 1960s. But the city was surrounded by acres of informally-built housing. These neighborhoods are said to have grown as people have come to take refuge in the city from violence in the hills.
Cattle are extremely important still to Tutsis who are the traditional herders in both Rwanda and Burundi. When I was there the peace process between the two ethnics groups was underway, but tensions were still acute. Several well-off herders had brought their cattle down from the hills for safe keeping in corrals in the city right at the edge of Lake Tanganyika.
Having travelled in other parts of Eastern Europe when younger, I was excited about my first trip to Riga, Latvia, a few months ago. I was not sure exactly what to expect but had an idea that it would feel more developed than other parts of Eastern Europe while still bearing quite some traces of its communist past. The prosperity of the city surprised me – it feels like a wealthy Scandinavian city and, indeed, it has many cultural and business ties to Scandinavia. I did not feel during the course of my week there any hint of a communist inheritance.
I was also curious to see how the ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians co-existed in this Baltic city. Having read up on Riga before my trip, I knew that Riga is about 42% ethnic Latvian and about 42% ethnic Russian, and thus was not surprised to hear quite a lot of Russian spoken in the streets. It did not take me long to find out that there is indeed some antagonism between the two groups.
What I was not prepared for, however, was the complete lack of any signage in Russian. I do not know what the law is there, but it does not appear to consist of having a Latvian sign at least twice as big as a Russian sign. I saw plenty of English signs. Russian was most noticeable for its absence.
I cannot decide if this is a good or a bad thing – the Latvians were unwillingly taken over by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and their culture almost destroyed. Independence provided them with a precious chance to protect and restore their culture. On the other hand, Russians are, unless they are willing to Latvianise, clearly treated like second class citizens. I met one Russian who used a Latvianised spelling on his business cards, but used his native Russian spelling to sign his e-mails.
I sympathise with both groups and cannot help but compare and contrast the situation in Riga with that in Montreal, which it seems to resemble more greatly than that in other bilingual cities such as Brussels. Is it the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting demands of justice for a minority within a minority?
“Around 6am, the squealing of copulating rats—signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai—gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (“Shashi”) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground.”
It’s not the most flattering description, but the Economist’s December 19th story on Dharavi is actually a remarkably sensitive portrait of Asia’s largest slum, revealing a particularly complex social and economic space that is now threatened by redevelopment.
One million people live in Dharavi, which is somewhat incredible when you realize that it covers just one square mile. Although conditions are rough, life in the slum has improved remarkably over the past several decades. Part of the reason for that is that it has become an important economic centre, containing an estimated 15,000 single-room factories and functioning as the centre of Mumbai’s jewellery, textile and recycling industries. All of the trash thrown away in Mumbai passes through the workshops of Dhavari, where it is sorted and sold. For the slum’s residents, the line between home and work is blurred, since many living spaces also double as workshops; every inch of Dharavi is put to great use.
Government planners don’t slums like this; they never have. Mumbai is no different. For at least a decade, its officials have been trying to get rid of Dharavi. What they overlook, however, is the innovation and entrepreneurialism it produces. Dharavi is packed with an almost unimaginable number of people, but it’s also full of small businesses that were built by the most marginalized members of Indian society. Most are poor migrants from the countryside. For them, living in a slum, where living conditions are squalid but opportunities are immense, is the best way to improve their lot.
One of the more overlooked stories in the history of Montreal’s urban development is the widening of Dorchester Street. For more than a century, this long street spanned the centre of Montreal, from the working-class neighbourhoods of the Faubourg Sainte Marie to the more cossu quarters of the Golden Square Mile and lower Westmount. It was essentially Victorian in character, lined by nineteenth-century rowhouses, apartment buildings and not a few important landmarks, including Montreal’s Catholic cathedral and general hospital.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Dorchester had become a typical downtown street lined by a ragtag assortment of businesses, tenements and rooming houses. When Jean Drapeau was elected mayor in 1954 he saw in this unassuming artery the potential for a grand thoroughfare. Shortly after he took office, his administration ordered the destruction of hundreds of buildings along Dorchester; in 1955, the street was widened into an eight-lane boulevard.
Drapeau was as straight-edged and zealous in his desire for renewal as Montreal’s previous mayors had been corrupt and satisfied with the city’s disorder. In a way, the new Dorchester reflected his personal character and politicial ambitions: bold, even revolutionary, but also stern, unfriendly and controlling, a prude in a libertine city. The new Dorchester was not just a departure from Montreal’s traditional urbanism, it was a direct rebuke to it. It rejected the homely, intimate streets that have always defined the Montreal landscape, a clutter of mismatched staircases, cornices and odd signs. In part, this was in keeping with the Modernist ideals of the postwar era, but it was also part of Drapeau’s plan to do away with the old Montreal for which he had so much contempt.
French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.
The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening - especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris - the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.
Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City
Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieux: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.
As a resident of Sud-Ouest — right where Griffintown, Little Burgundy and Point St-Charles intersect, actually — I was surprised by the scope and scale of the Village Griffintown project announced yesterday for a long-neglected neighbourhood in southwestern Montreal. It’s not at all what we were expecting, and while we welcome redevelopment, and the proposed design has many positive attributes, not least of which is its ability to slow or stop urban sprawl, my neighbours and I have some unanswered questions.
1. Why the megablocks?
The design currently imposes some superblocks onto existing streets, blocking Shannon and Young. The plan view can be misleading, seeming to show through streets in the two large residential-commercial buildings, but these are actually sky terraces for the tower dwellers. Surely the same amount of space could be incorporated with more, smaller buildings, on more intimately scaled streets, and preserving the historic street grid?
2. Why go with Le Corbusier-styled ‘Towers in the park?’
Good retail urban design involves building right to the sidewalk, and lining the streets with shops, windows and displays. The current “superblock” design would seem to impose a lot of blank walls on side streets, and further separates the buildings from the streets with berms and plazas. The same seems to go for some of the smaller apartment buildings to be built canalside - creating isolated, “Habitations Jeanne Mance” dead zones, instead of lively / leafy / intimate streets. The city of Portland in fact discourages new commercial buildings without providing for “living streets” in this fashion, and it’s something we should look at here.
3. Why this ‘campus style’ unified design?
It may seem picayune to quibble about the aesthetics of the project, but viewed as an ensemble, it resembles a university satellite campus or a superhospital, rather than anything village-like. What we actually have here is not that different than the Terrasses Windsor — inexpensive modern boxes clad in different-coloured brick to make them seem more detailed than they actually are. Looking at Place D’Armes and other historical ensembles that evolved organically over time — where you can see three eras of architecture in the Bank of Montreal alone — how difficult would it be to design an ensemble of buildings that all looked different, yet historically appropriate to the neighborhood - red sandstone, limestone, granite, red and yellow brick, mixing historic styles from 1850s to postmodern — something that’ll age a bit better than the current design?
4. Why the secrecy?
Why was this project developed behind closed doors for so long? According to the Sud-Ouest borough mayors’ office there will be public consultations in either December or January, and a decision has to be made by April…a bit rushed for something so important, no?
5. Why the car-centric development when we’re coming to the end of the oil era?
I applaud the fact that they’re planning to make the development transit-centric, and incorporate the proposed tram line — but the economic reasoning for the large-surface retail outlets (and a 2000-seat theatre, and hotels) depends on a good deal of car traffic. Geology and politics are against car-centric development — most oil geologists believe we have reached the peak of oil production right now, and we’re heading down a rather jagged slope towards depletion. Will this project survive 30, 50 years from now when few people, if any, will be driving?
6. What’s the energy and waste footprint of this ensemble?
Similarly to the car question, we wonder about the infrastructure and energy inputs that’ll be needed to support this development. There’ll need to be new sewer mains, electrical substations, etc. Large-surface retail needs a lot of energy to heat and cool. The flat roofs will create urban heat islands. Could the project use passive and active solar, rooftop or roof-edge wind turbines, or even geothermal loops? Will serious attempts be made to ban waste (disposable cups, excess packaging) and encourage recycling and composting on-site?
7. Will there be space for smaller and local non-chain retail?
As Kate from the Montreal City Weblog notes, “I think what makes me saddest about this kind of megadevelopment, even more than the knowledge that it brings more suburban values right into the heart of town, is that such developments are relentlessly corporate. Where’s the space for the used bookshop, the neighbourhood café, the ethnic chicken rotisserie?”
I would add to that list: space for urban gardening / farming, local produce markets, community space, schools, daycares, clinics, soccer fields, indoor recreation, art galleries, and maybe some decent, non-chain pubs and places to play live music?
Furthering on from points 5 and 6, and touching on all the other points, the more self-sustaining the complex is, the better. In an energy-scarce future, even maintaining buildings of this scope and size is going to be a real challenge. Not impossible, but the developers and promoters need to show us that they’re taking this into account.
In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.
Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.
Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.
That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.
In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.
So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.
Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.
For as long as I have been visiting Vancouver, the abandoned Woodwards department store has loomed over the Downtown Eastside, a hulking reminder of the neighbourhood’s long decline into commercial and social oblivion. For more than a decade, developers and government squabbled over what to do with the site. In 2002, an organized squat took control of the building, demanding that it be converted into social housing.
The next year, the City of Vancouver purchased the building and started a public consultation project that eventually led to a unique $300 million redevelopment plan. Most of the building was demolished, except for a chunk at the corner of Hastings and Abbott, and it is in the process of being replaced by a large mixed-use complex that will incorporate 536 units of market-rate housing, 125 units of social housing for singles, 75 units of social housing for families, a supermarket, a drug store, retail space, government offices, a daycare, space for non-profit organizations, Simon Fraser University’s new art school, and green space.
For the most part, Woodwards has been hailed by many as an example of what can be achieved when the community comes together with public and private sectors to shape urban development. I’m inclined to agree: it serves as a model for future development on the Downtown Eastside, one that will reconcile market interests with those of a community riven by deep social problems.
The challenge now is how to deal with spinoff development, to ensure that enough social housing and social services are provided to counterbalance the effects of new market-rate condo construction.
Posters on a traffic control box, including an election sign
The ongoing school board election in Montreal has revealed, as with every election, an unacceptable double-standard in Montreal’s attitude towards postering. While politicians have the right to plaster the city with their campaign signs, virtually no legal space has been set aside for community groups, musicians, artists, and other individuals and low-budget organizations to make themselves heard.
Like it or not, posters give them a chance to effectively target a local audience that might not otherwise be reached. It’s a medium that is unfiltered, flexible and, above all, inexpensive. Most importantly, postering allows a diversity of voices to be heard in the streets. To restrict it is to infringe upon nothing less than our fundamental right to free speech. I’m not being grandiose: this is the opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled in 1993 that Canadian municipalities cannot legally prohibit postering on public property. “Postering on public property, including utility poles, clearly fosters political and social decision‑making,” the court declared. A ban on postering, it continued, constitutes a “complete denial of access to a historically and politically significant form of expression.”
Cities are free, however, to regulate postering. Some take a more progressive approach than others. Vancouver, for instance, places casts around its lampposts to which anyone can staple a poster. They’re removed every week by city workers. In Calgary, major streets like 17th Avenue have abundant postering space in the form of kiosks and special walls dedicated to posters.
In Montreal, though, the city has failed to provide any significant amount of legal postering space. In the 1980s, an advertising firm called Publicité sauvage won the right to place bills on construction hoardings; today, though, it monopolizes these spaces with commercial advertising, leaving few alternatives to most groups and people. In the Quartier des spectacles, a few metal posts have been provided for posters. In Lachine, the borough has erected poster kiosks along its main streets. But in most of Montreal, especially in the cultural hubs of downtown and the Plateau, people are forced to post their bills illegally on lampposts, postboxes and traffic control boxes.
Postering is a medium used by a vastly diverse array of people. Throughout the year, hundreds of independent musicians advertise their concerts with visually striking gig posters designed by artists such as Jack Dylan, whose work has been shown in galleries across Canada. Community groups user posters to announce important meetings. Political groups use them to make a statement. When some people were angered last spring by the rise in parking rates, they made themselves heard by putting posters on lampposts and parking meters across town.
Posters are uniquely flexible medium, too: last year, within an hour of the shootings at Dawson College, posters directing students to a safe space at Concordia were taped to lampposts all over downtown.
Montreal has an obligation to provide enough legal space for its citizens to make themselves heard. It could start by identifying the streets with the highest volume of posters, such as Milton in the McGill Ghetto, St. Viateur in Mile End or St. Laurent on the Plateau, and then copy Vancouver’s approach by putting a cast around existing lampposts.
Or it could do something even cheaper: allow people to stick posters to the traffic control boxes that are found at every single traffic light in town. Many of these ubiquitous black boxes are already covered in posters; why not legalize what’s already happening?
Every so often there is a reminder that Montreal, for all its history as a capital of Jewish culture in North America, still has a problem with anti-Semitism. In the past year alone, a molotov cocktail was thrown at a Jewish school on Van Horne and a bomb exploded outside of a Jewish community centre on Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t so long ago that a Jewish school’s library was destroyed in a vicious firebombing.
Just the other day, a friend told me about this piece of graffiti on Clark Street, between St. Viateur and Fairmount. Someone has scribbled the likeness of a Hasidic Jew with the inscription “Parásit.” It might seem harmless in and of itself, but these thoughtless displays of racism are usually symptoms of a much larger and more insidious problem. If we accept the legitimacy of messages such as this, aren’t we tacitly accepting their message?
Montreal is home to one of the world’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Numbering about 15,000, they live mostly within one kilometre of Van Horne Street between Mile End in the east and Côte St. Luc in the west. Historically, since the Hasidic population started growing in the 1980s, there have been some tense moments in the relationship between Outremont’s Hasidim and their mostly French-Canadian neighbours. Some Outremonters have fought against every one of the Hasidic community’s attempts to make a home for themselves by building new schools, synagogues and businesses.
For the most part, though, day-to-day relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim are civil. (I wrote about this last winter in “My Heimishe Bakery.”) That’s what makes it so disheartening to see this kind of graffiti. It makes me wonder: is that civility just a mask?
Today is Montreal’s fifth annual edition of Car Free Day, known officially (and awkwardly) as “In town, without my car!” The east end of the downtown core, between McGill College on the west and St. Urbain on the east, de Maisonneuve on the north and René Lévesque on the south, will be closed from 9:30am to 3:30pm. (Ste. Catherine in front of Place des Arts will be closed all day.)
The car-free zone will be divided into three sections: the “Active and Public Transportation District,” featuring a sit-in “to take action in favour of streets for everybody”; a “Health and Transportation District,” with “cardio fun” and line dancing; and an “Environment District” providing information on green roofs and urban gardening. This being Montreal, there will also be a “car-free happy hour” from 5 à 7.
It’s easy to be cynical about the AMT’s official celebration of Car Free Day. Already late to the game in 2003, the car-free perimeter has actually shrunk over the past five years. The fact that it begins at the end of the morning rush hour and ends at the beginning of the afternoon rush hour is a reminder that, whatever politicians say about getting people to use alternative modes of transit, the private automobile still rules.
Meanwhile, Montreal’s year-round commitment to getting people out of their cars has been uneven. While new bike lanes and paths have been inaugurated and a handful of streets have had their sidewalks widened, the most important effort needed has been slow in coming: investment in public transportation.
Still, even if you’re inclined to view Car Free Day as token recognition of the need to reduce private vehicle use, you have to admit that it does have a big impact, even during the few hours that it takes place. In 2003, during its inaugural edition, the levels of nitric oxide and carbon monoxide within the car-free perimeter fell by 40% below normal.
So get out there and enjoy Car Free Day. Don’t forget that, along with the AMT-organized event along Ste. Catherine Street, McGill University’s downtown campus will also be closed to cars. Information booths and other special events will take place around the lower field just off Sherbrooke Street. Have fun.
In last week’s issue of the Economist, a couple of interesting articles looked at the challenge of building mosques in Western cities. All too often, it seems, cities and neighbourhoods in Europe and North America become divided when faced with the possibility that a minaret might rise on the horizon. What is it, though, that scares people about mosques? Is it the fear of terrorism fed by media reports of radical imams preaching their jihadist rhetoric at suburban mosques? Or is it something more elemental, a simple fear of a changing society?
In Cologne, whose population population numbers about 120,000, the question of whether or not to build a lavish central mosque has split the city along deep, though unexpected, lines. Apparently, many Roman Catholic clergy support the mosque, but one prominent Jewish intellectual — Ralph Giordano, a Holocaust survivor — has come out strongly against it, claiming that it would encourage the creation of a parallel Muslim society in Germany. The whole matter has given a boost to Germany’s far right, which has used the mosque issue to win support for its extremist agenda.
If anything, though, the establishment of proper mosques — that is to say, grand and highly-visible public structures — is one sure way to integrate Muslims into mainstream society. But that is exactly what mosque opponents are fighting against: they don’t want Muslims to be accepted by the mainstream. They see Muslims as fundamentally foreign, so their opposition to mosques is rooted in xenophobia and little else. (Even Ralph Giordano admits that his opposition to the Cologne stems from his belief that Germany is a fundamentally “Judeo-Christian” country.) The idea of minarets becoming an everyday part of the urban fabric, like church steeples, is abhorrent to them. Perhaps that is why a number of Swiss politicians are currently advocating a nation-wide ban on minarets; not mosques, just minarets.
North America, the Economist notes, offers better legal protection to mosque builders, despite having its own “Islam-bashers ready to play on people’s fears.” There have been many controversies over the construction of new mosques but, in the end, Canadian and American courts are likely to rule on the side of religious freedom.
The Plains of Abraham are famous for the confrontation between the armies of Wolfe and Montcalm, a decisive battle leading to Britain’s conquest of New France.
Several centuries later, a confrontation over a street name is taking place on this lamp-post bordering the park. Federal and Municipal authorities can’t agree on whether to call the street “Wolfe” or “Wolfe-Montcalm”. It seems likely that the disagreement reached a stalemate several decades back. Nowadays, the two names coexist and most people are either indifferent or unaware.
There are legitimate reasons for both names. The city named the avenue “Wolfe-Montcalm” first, in 1901, a politically correct decision to commemorate both victor and vanquished equally. The National Battlefields Park was created in 1908 when Federal authorities saved the area from residential development and turned it into a commemorative park. The disagreement probably arose because the short avenue has always led to a monument on the spot where Wolfe fell in battle; the street has no link whatsoever with Montcalm. To complicate things, recent municipal mergers have resulted in the fact that a Wolfe Avenue now exists elsewhere in the city (home to an English-language, formerly Irish Catholic, elementary school).
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.
Montreal Apartments
