Tung Tau Estate

North Americans and Europeans have an almost natural aversion to Modernist housing projects. They’re very much maligned in our popular culture, often for good reason: generations of official neglect and social marginalization have left many of them in a desperate state. In Hong Kong, though, a large chunk of the population lives in housing estates, either upscale and privately-built or more modest and publicly-funded, and in most cases they are well-appointed, busy and perfectly pleasant.

Tung Tau Estate is one such example. Walking from Kowloon City to San Ko Kong, about 10 minutes away by foot, I passed through Tung Tau, a large public housing project built in the 1970s. I made my entrance through a flight of stairs into a sunken garden, where I came across a large group of poh poh — old women — sitting around a playground, chatting. As we passed through the rest estate, I noticed that everything was well-maintained, all of the public spaces were well-used and there was no shortage of amenities, including supermarkets and restaurants.

For years, the failure of many housing projects in the United States, Great Britain and France has been blamed on design. Their Corbusier-inspired towers-in-the-park, large open spaces and disruption of the surrounding urban fabric have all been blamed for encouraging social dysfunction. While Hong Kong is not immune to those problems — one particularly massive and isolated housing estate, Tin Shui Wai, has been dubbled the “city of sadness” for its high rates of unemployment, social isolation and suicide — most of its housing estates seem to work just as they should.

Cité Bourgogne

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I had just left the rambling lanes of the Taikang Road arts district and was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Shanghai’s former French Concession, each one buzzing with scooters, each lined by perfectly gnarled plane trees and odd, eclectic buildings. The blocks were long but broken by lanes, most of them crowded with hanging laundry, parked bicycles and potted plants. Security guards marked the entrance to each lane, but they seemed nonetheless open to the public, and passersby ambled past me and into the lanes without so much as a glance from the guard.

That’s when I came across a lane marked by an arch with a surprising inscription: “Cité Bourgogne, 1930.” (It really shouldn’t have surprised me, given the colonial history of the surrounding area, but it did.) Two young women stood at the entrance, chatting amiably. I decided that this Burgundian enclave was worth exploring, so I passed through the arch and down a narrow alley. I found myself in a compound of sorts, a small grid of laneways lined by tidy brick rowhouses. At the centre of it was a small square, ringed by houses filled with laundry lines, mostly empty except for a few wet shirts and a worn-looking Winnie the Pooh. Two middle-aged men sat at a table near the edge of the square, eyeing me with benign curiosity.

The Cité Bourgogne, it turns out, is an example of a distinctly Shanghainese form of housing, the shikumen, which takes its name (”stone gate”) from the archways that mark the entrance to each house and laneway. (Shikumen are also known as lilong, which literally means “laneway neighbourhood.”) Shikumen first arose in the nineteenth century when, fleeing the poverty and instability wrought by the Taiping Rebellion, thousands of country-dwellers flooded colonial Shanghai. Property developers scrambled to provide them with housing, and what was built resembled a cross between the traditional Chinese courtyard house and European rowhouses or mews houses.

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Less is More: New Public Spaces

Movable tables and chairs in a plaza at Broadway and 66th, New York

Montreal is in the midst of a great public space building boom. Plenty of new squares, plazas and open spaces have been created over the past six or seven years, most notably in the Quartier international, but also throughout the city. With the redevelopment of Griffintown, Viger Square and the area around Rosemont metro, along with the construction of the CHUM superhospital and the reconstruction of Place d’Armes and the Pine/Park interchange, ensuring that our new public spaces are well-designed is particularly important.

So how have we been doing until now? In the latest issue of Canadian Architect, Gavin Affleck offers a review of some of our newest public spaces. “In many ways the story of recent public space design in Montreal has been a story of moving from more to less,” he writes. “The city core boasts an impressive inventory of public spaces ranging in age from colonial squares to contemporary corporate plazas. During the last 20 years, the design of both historic refurbishment schemes and contemporary projects has been marked by a gradual shift towards a more minimal expression. The most successful of recent projects are evidence that well designed urban space is simple, flexible and free of physical encumbrances.”

By that standard, many of the spaces built in the 60s and 70s are abject failures, with Viger Square a particularly apt example. Designed by a team of highway engineers and visual artists, the resulting square is a “seemingly endless plethora of concrete park pavilions, pergolas, retaining walls, fountains, planters and outdoor sculpture” that is too crowded with architectural objects to be of any practical use. Many newer projects stand in contrast to this unsuccessful approach, including the early 1990s redevelopment of the Old Port, the renovation of Place des Arts and, most recently, the Quartier International, which is produced a revamped Victoria Square and the new Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, two of Montreal’s most interesting squares.

The key lesson that Montreal’s designers have applied in recent years is that simplicity and flexibility make the best public spaces. Beyond those two attributes, though, they also need activity, which is something that good design cannot create, but only facilitate. Affleck recognizes this: “What public space is about is human activity; what it is not about is architectural objects. The great urban spaces of European cities are precisely that: spaces. What fills them is the ebb and flow of life–events, experiences, activities. Rather than aesthetic, formal or visual concerns, the measure of success of a public space is the degree of vitality it achieves as a support for human activity,” he writes.

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Under the Manhattan Bridge

It’s a bit of a paradox — bridges are meant to connect two sides of a gap, to bring them together, but they often act quite intentionally as barriers because the space beneath them is so problematic. There is a tendency to leave it unused and overgrown with weeds, or to give it up for some perfunctory use, like parking.

But there are many creative solutions to dealing with the space underneath a bridge. I came across one of them when I walked under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown. Shops, retail arcades and produce stalls occupy the space beneath its stone arches; a fruit and vegetable market winds its way up the sidewalk along the north side of the bridge. Instead of dividing a neighbourhood in two, the bridge serves as a focal point for Chinatown.

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Deconstructing the Turcot Interchange

Photo by Karen Spencer

“What drew me to the Turcot originally was the size of it,” recalls Ken McLaughlin. The Verdun artist maintains Walking Turcot Yards, a blog dedicated to the area around the giant interchange at the junction of highways 15 and 20, built in 1966 in a feat of Modernist ambition. “It’s pretty incredible to look up there and see it all. It’s very sculptural, all the lines and shapes, very smooth,” he says.

Next year, though, the area around the Turcot Yards will be dramatically reshaped by a $1.5-billion reconstruction project. The grandiose swoop and curves of the city’s most iconic interchange will make way for an entirely new structure, its layers of flyovers and elevated highways replaced by a new structure that hugs the ground, surrounded by berms and embankments. Construction is expected to last from 2009 to 2015.

Quebec’s transport minister promises that the new interchange will be safer for motorists and quieter for nearby residents. But people in both NDG and St-Henri are worried that the impact on their neighbourhoods will be severe.

In western St-Henri, residents of the Village des Tanneries, who live right next to the interchange, fear nothing less than the complete disruption of their lives. Jody Negley, leader of the Citizens’ Committee of the Village des Tanneries, worries about having to live with six years of constant construction.

“Years of community effort on the part of residents and non-profit groups to improve quality of life in the area will be for naught,” she says. “Nobody will want to spend any time outside as the noise levels will be deafening, the air quality will be toxic, the newly built community gardens will be covered in grime [and] it will be unsafe for children to play outside, given the traffic and pollution.”

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Daap Din Tai: Riding the Electric Ladder

In the pantheon of public transit, Central-Mid-Levels Escalator is unique. Known in Cantonese as din tai, “or electric ladder, ” it was built in the early 1990s to facilitate travel between Hong Kong’s business district and the fashionable Mid-Levels residential area located above it. The esclator (which is actually a series of several different escalators, connected by various platforms and overpasses) works its way up, for nearly a kilometre, through a procession of steep, narrow streets.

Along the way, it passes through a half-abandoned market, past laneways and courtyards, a mosque shrouded in greenery, and a trendy restaurant and bar district now known as Soho, named because it is located south of Hollywood Road but no doubt meant to steal some glamour from better-known quarters in London and New York.

The best thing about the escalator is that it combines the freedom of the pedestrian experience with the fluid movement of motorized transport. There’s a certain kind of voyeurism that comes with riding the escalator, which puts you eye-level with balconies and apartments as you travel up the hill. “The Mid-Levels Escalator is the one place in town where it’s cool to be batgwa, unabashedly nosy,” wrote Daisann McLane (also responsible for the excellent Learning Cantonese blog) in the New York Times, ten years after the escalator opened.

“Riding the escalator every day, I feel as if I have a personal relationship with the occupants of several apartments along the route, the ones whose second- or third-story windows are so close to the escalator you can practically reach out and touch their flowerpots. As the stairs glide me up the hill, I stare into interiors lighted by the glow of red ancestral altars. On my morning commute, I mull over why the people on Shelley Street have hung fish in their windows to dry and lament the unfortunate sofa cushion pattern chosen by the occupants of the corner apartment by Caine Road.”

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The Bike Path of Champions

“I am now betting this bike path will change radically the lifestyle and quality of life of many Montrealers.”
- André Lavallée, member of Montreal’s executive committee, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, November 7, 2007

“It could turn downtown into a ghost town.”
- Sal Parasuco, retailer, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, September 10, 2007

« Assez vite aussi, j’ai eu l’impression que ce que ces flèches au sol disaient au fond aux cyclistes, c’est ” Par ici, la mort “. »
- Rima Elkouri, columnist in La Presse, September 20, 2007, on the St. Urbain bike lane

According to the United Nations, it was this year that the world became a place more populated by city dwellers than country folk. Today’s world is an increasingly urban place.

Of course, cities are inherently complicated, layered entities. More than their inhabitants, more than their buildings, people have over time built themselves a vast transportation infrastructure to connect themselves to each other - these may be streets, of course, but also include underground metro systems, freeways, maglev trains. Indeed, cities around the world are defined by elements of their transportation systems: what is Paris without the Champs-Elysées, or London without its Tube, or San Francisco without its trolley lines?

It is clear to me, as it must be to the vast majority of Urbanphoto readers, that the Montreal of only ten years hence will bear the imprint of, and perhaps be wholly defined by, what is perhaps the most important transportation development in the Western world of the twenty-first century: the de Maisonneuve Bike Path.

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Montreal’s Lost Expo Opportunity

Expo 67’s 40th anniversary has passed, but there’s one aspect of the world fair that I find strangely overlooked: its transportation system. While the Minirail and pedicabs moved people around the Expo site, more serious transit links were needed to get them to and from Notre Dame and St. Helen’s islands.

That’s where the metro, Expo Express and hovercrafts came into play. Hovercrafts were used to speed people between the South Shore, La Ronde and the Cité du Havre. The metro’s yellow line was built between Montreal and Longueuil because it offered a stop on St. Helen’s Island, right in the middle of the Expo action.

The Expo Express, meanwhile, was an above-ground metro line that ran for 5.7 kilometres between La Ronde and La Cité du Havre, with stops at four stations along the way. In terms of technology, it was essentially the same as the Toronto subway, except for one important difference: it was completely automated. Trains ran every five minutes and carried 1,000 passengers each.

After Expo ended, Expo Express was completely dismantled and the hovercrafts were discarded. It might not seem like such a big deal: they were needed for a fair and, when that fair ended, they were discarded. So what?

Well, it strikes me as awfully short-sighted to have permanently scrapped such an efficient public transportation system. Whereas Expo sites in other cities were intensively reused — after Expo 86, Vancouver redeveloped its fair site as a new residential district with room for 20,000 people — Montreal didn’t do much with its own. Today, we have a casino, a racetrack, a beach and a nice park, but that’s about it.

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Don’t Bulldoze the Slums

Street scene in Dharavi. Photo from the Economist

“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.

Potters at work. Photo by Akshay Mahajan

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A Hidden Street

I’ve always been intrigued by Demers Street. It’s a tiny street in the north end of the Plateau, running parallel to Villeneuve between Coloniale and Hôtel de Ville, lined mostly by cute duplexes built around 1900 to house workers from the nearby quarries.

Demers was just another back lane in a working-class neighbourhood full of them. That is, until 1969, when a group of five architecture students decided to embark on the renovation of the street, an early example of grassroots restoration at a time when the normal impulse would have been to tear the entire thing down and build anew. Jacques Giraldeau, a director with the National Film Board of Canada, made a documentary of the renovation, Les fleurs c’est pour Rosemont. “Ce film montre le travail accompli par les jeunes professionnels et les habitants de la rue; les déceptions qui, de part et d’autre, n’ont pas manqué de surgir et le malaise sur lequel s’est close l’expérience,” reads the NFB’s description. “Un documentaire propre à inspirer de salutaires leçons à ceux qui désirent oeuvrer auprès des classes sociales défavorisées des grandes villes.”

It’s hard to envision today’s Demers Street as the setting for the “classes sociales défavorisées.” Pedestrianized for one block, its asphalt paving has been removed and replaced with a stone pathway and narrow garden. In the summer, it’s remarkably verdant, but I like it even more in the winter, when the snow piles up and it feels like somewhere you’d expect to find a colony of elves. I’m not entirely sure who lives in the houses that flank Demers, and whether there’s a strong sense of community in this tiny street, but it certainly seems like the kind of place that would bind people together by virtue of its oddness.

Check out the NFB’s website to see a clip of Demers in 1969 along with some cool archival photos.

The Widening of Dorchester

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.

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The Evolution of McGill College Avenue

Yesterday, on Spacing Montreal, I wrote about several elegant synagogues that once graced the streets of downtown Montreal. One of them is the old Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1886 and destroyed sometime in the 1920s, which stood on McGill College Avenue near Sherbrooke. At the time, the surrounding neighbourhood, near the corner of McGill College and Sherbrooke, right next to McGill University, was an affluent mix of rowhouses and apartment buildings, not unlike Boston’s Back Bay.

In the 1960s, though, most of the area’s old urban fabric was destroyed by new development. Parking lots and office towers eliminated what little residential texture was left. You can see the process underway in the photos below, which were taken on Victoria Street in 1973 and 2007. The two remaining rowhouses on this downtown sidestreet had already been converted into commercial use; a parking lot stands in between them. Office towers, which were built as part of the business district’s post-Place Ville Marie expansion, loom behind.

In the early 1990s, the building housing Café André was replaced by an expanded McCord Museum. Not long before, in the late 1980s, the site of the former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue was redeveloped with a glass office tower, part of an ambitious renovation that turned McGill College Avenue into something resembling a cross between a boulevard and an office park. It’s pleasant enough, especially on a warm day when outdoor cafés line its sidewalks, but it’s still one of the more anonymous parts of Montreal. Aside from a few lonely rowhouses, little remains in the area around McGill College that would suggest it was ever anything but a humdrum office district.

Photos by Guillaume St-Jean

Tear Down This Wall

I have a hard time conceiving of the Berlin Wall. The above photo, taken in 1985 by Robin McMorran, a visiting British tourist, only adds to my incomprehension. Look at the way it snakes through the city almost arbitrarily, cutting off squares, streets, streetcar tracks. It was absurd and surreal yet it defined the day-to-day reality of Berlin for more than a generation.

The first incarnation of the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, when Soviet and East German leaders agreed that the flow of refugees towards the West needed to be stemmed. Over the next two decades, the wall was rebuilt four times, until it reached its final and most infamous state in 1975. The wall became a backdrop to speeches by Western leaders; it was there, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, that Ronald Reagan uttered his most famous pronouncement: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Despite its rhetoric, though, the West did little to prevent the construction of the wall in the first place. For nearly three decades, it divided families and neighbourhoods. Even Berlin’s complex subway system was cut in two by the wall.

Berlin’s wall was far from unique. Walls have, for centuries, divided cities from their hinterland, but they are increasingly being used to restrict movement within cities themselves. In the early 1980s, the Turkish and Greek halves of the Cypriot capital of Nicosia were separated by a barrier. Jerusalem has long been divided by the border between Israel and Palestine, a border that has been reinforced in recent years by the addition of a tall separation barrier. In Baghdad, military forces have laid the groundwork for a new wall that will separate Shia neighbourhoods from Sunni ones.

In some ways, the walls that exist along many stretches of the US-Mexico border, dividing otherwise contiguous urban areas like Nogales, can be seen in the same light. (Compare this photo of the border, marked by an imposing wall, with this one from 1898 in which there is no barrier whatsoever.) This is especially true as border cities grow larger and even more intertwined, despite the ever more burdensome restrictions on movement.

Andrew Chau, on his blog urban-ism, looked last month at the “(un)intended consequences of building walls. “In our capitalist system, goods and capital are allowed to move freely, but migrants cannot,” he wrote. “For the corporate elite and their companies, this is essential to distance themselves from the growing inequities between the rich and the poor.”

In cities divided, their main effect is to entrench social inequality by restricting free movement, just as the Berlin Wall did for 28 years. That wall was torn down, but in its place have risen many others.

Three Strange Streets

Back in October, on one of the unseasonably warm and humid days Montreal had towards the end of fall, I was on the 129 bus heading west to Victoria Avenue when I noticed three odd streets on the south side of Côte Ste. Catherine. Unusually for streets in Côte des Neiges, which tend to be very wide, they appeared to consist of nothing more than a simple pathway surrounded by greenery.

Later, I returned to investigate and discovered that the streets I had seen were Beaminster Place, Bradford Place and Campden Place, a trio of block-long passages tucked behind Côte-Sainte-Catherine metro. Lined by relatively modern four-plexes, they were open only to pedestrians, with a single narrow strip of pavement running between lush front yards. Residents parked their cars in the exceptionally wide laneways that ran between the streets.

In Côte des Neiges, a patchwork of different neighbourhoods built at different times throughout the twentieth century, I’ve come to expect urban planning oddities. But these three “places” were unlike anything I’d seen in Montreal before. According to the city’s property records, the houses along Beaminster, Bradford and Campden were all built between 1936 and 1951. Architecturally, they’re pretty much indistinguishable from any of the 1930s- and 40s-era houses in the west end; it’s their setting that makes them so unique.

The City of Montreal’s toponymy database reports that Beaminster, Bradford and Campden places were built in 1936 by the Terrace Construction Company, part of a 48-duplex development called Cotswald Village. If these names sound twee, it’s because they were taken from villages and towns in England’s Dorset, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire counties.

This still doesn’t shed any light on the motives of the developer. Why only three streets? Were they part of a failed plan to transform Côte des Neiges into a vast English-style Garden City? Or did the Terrace Construction Company simply have modest ambitions?

Click here to see more photos of the three “places.” Thanks to Martin Bérubé for referring me to the place names database.