New York City is filled with all kinds of different people from all over the world. Everybody knows that, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting in the eyes of a visitor. What better way to get a look at people than on the subway?
Riding the NYC subway lines 4, 5 or 6 up and down Manhattan, from Wall Street up to Union Square then on to Grand Central, or taking the ‘L’ over to Brooklyn is as pleasurable to me as being above ground visiting the sites we are all supposed to see when you go to New York. The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty are all great places, but frankly, I’m over them. It’s the people of New York I want to see.
It’s got nothing on Il fait beau dans l’métro, but this 1985 TV spot certainly ranks up there in the pantheon of kitschy transit ads. What kind of bugs me about it is that the metro is taking this very fashionable couple from their living room to a restaurant and a swimming pool, yet they choose to get off and hop on a bus driven by some creepy moustachioed uncle with a twangy accent. What gives?
When it first launched, Urbania magazine had a pretty useless Flash-based website that replicated selected content from its print magazine. I’m glad to see it has embraced the full potential of the web. 14 “channels” of video, images and text add a new, more dynamic aspect to the quarterly magazine. One of my favourite features is the Urbania Minutes series of videos: one-minute vignettes of Montreal life.
Above is L’exil, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, a brief portrait of a Chinese dépanneur deliveryman in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Despite the annoying synopsis, which exoticizes Chinese immigrants (“En quête d’une vie meilleure, désireux d’offrir un avenir à leurs enfants, les ressortissants de l’Empire du milieu sont prêts à trimer dur pour réaliser leur rêve. Travailler 18 heures par jour dans une buanderie ou un dépanneur, ce n’est qu’une manière d’acheter sa liberté”), it’s a worthwhile glimpse into both immigrant life and the peculiar tradition of dep delivery, which has disappeared from other parts of the city.
Le métro de Montréal s’éveille, below, is one of those always-interesting behind-the-scenes looks at something we take for granted. We see the metro come to life in all of its antiquated glory, a 1960s flashback that begs to be seen as an old episode of Batman or something.
Pending the completion of Johannesburg’s Gautrain, the Cairo Metro is the only rapid transit system in Africa. And for all the rot and deterioration that characterizes much of Cairo’s city center, it’s surprisingly clean and efficient, with stations that possess a maintenance level and design savvy that would be the envy some far wealthier cities, like New York.
The scenario works like this: after a night of revelry on Boulevard St-Laurent, it’s time to stagger home. You know the set of night buses you have to take: the 360 to Atwater, say, and then the 356 out to NDG. But, of course, you have no idea what times they’re due to arrive; you didn’t think to write them down.
Montreal does have a phone system, (514) AUTOBUS, that you can call for bus times–but only if you know your stop code. And you probably don’t remember your stop code. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of night bus times with you?
I set out to solve this problem, along with several other niggling urban transport matters, with my project: Aide-mémoires transport, which I presented at Expozine on November 29, 2008.
It often seems like the subway is treated as a metaphor for urban life in general. When we’re immersed in the optimism of economic expansion, it represents progress and vitality. In more troubled times, it becomes a symbol of crime, danger, aggression and alienation.
Last winter, while browsing the shelves in Stephen Welch’s bookstore on St. Viateur Street, I came across Michael Brooks’ book, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York, in which he weaves the history of the New York subway’s development with the history of public attitude towards it. His point is that how people feel about the subway has always been as important as the actual operation of the subway itself.
I had this in mind when I saw Songs and Dances of the Inanimate World, a 1985 National Film Board piece by Pierre Hébert, Robert Lepage and René Lussier. Through animation, still photography and drawings, the film serves as a portrait of the Montreal metro, but it’s not a very flattering one, dwelling on the alienation and inhumanity of the underground. It’s fascinating to watch but I find the message a bit tiresome.
By virtue of where I lived, I only rode the metro occasionally in Montreal, getting around mainly by bus, foot or bike. Here in Hong Kong, though, I’m a regular subway commuter. On most days it’s monotonous, and on particularly bad days it’s insufferably hostile, but it always affords me a chance to consider the people I normally pass by on the street without thinking twice about. Last week, as I rode the MTR in the late afternoon, I considered how the teenage schoolkids heading home infused the train with a nervous hormonal energy. Another day, I watched, bemused, as a little white girl climbed up one of the support poles as if she was on the monkey bars. Her dad smiled but the middle-aged Chinese ladies across the aisle shot dagger looks, as if to ask, “How could he possibly allow that?”
Songs and Dances‘s French synopsis describes it as a “metaphorical and expressive representation” of the “rapports d’agressivité” — aggressive relations — in the metro. But are they really aggressive relations — or just the superficial indifference of urban life?
Earlier this evening I attended the latest Montreal edition of Pecha Kucha Night, a creative show-and-tell that is based around a number of brief six-minute presentations on an eclectic array of topics. One of tonight’s presenters spoke about Urban Play, an umbrella term meant to unite much of the public space-related art and intervention that is currently taking place in the world’s cities. It’s an interesting concept, one that (at least in my interpretation) encompasses a lot of interesting stuff: street art like that created by London’s CutUp or Montreal’s Roadsworth, interventions like those staged by Dare-Dare, and even things like the Silophone.
Tonight, though, I’ll leave you with videos of two rather light-hearted subjects that could perhaps fall somewhere on the margins of Urban Play: Korean subway tecktonik and a Montreal metro party thrown in honour of three of my friends.
When Montreal’s new public transit smart card was officially launched in late April, most of its details had already been known for months. There was, however, one surprise: its name, Opus, which was chosen from more than 1,000 proposals and then kept secret for nearly four years.
Many transit users like smart cards because they allow them to store cash value and multiple passes or tickets on a single card. Transit agencies like them because they reduce fraud and make it easier to adjust fares and analyze passenger flow. More than that, though, they are valuable marketing tools. That’s why, in cities around the world, so much emphasis has been placed on coming up with a catchy name to anchor a strong brand identity.
For the Société de transport de Montréal, which led Montreal-area transit agencies in the creation of the new smart card, creating a memorable name was essential.
“Three hundred fifty thousand people buy a métro pass each month and they use it every day. With a smart card, they need to keep the card permanently, so we need to build a relationship between it and the consumer,” STM spokesperson Odile Paradis said in a phone interview. “They need to keep it, take care of it, make it part of their lives. If it didn’t have a name, it would just be an anonymous access card that nobody would care about.”
Opus is being phased in, starting with a small test group now, and expanding to students this summer and the general public in September. The old turnstiles are to be removed next June.
It becomes obvious as soon as you enter the métro car: this will be no ordinary ride. The usual advertisements and bright orange colour have been replaced by a dark blue, wood-textured film covering the car’s interior walls. Distorted, semi-transparent photos are pasted on the windows. As the métro doors close, eerie music starts playing, followed by the mournful wail of a fog horn.
Nowhere are the odd sounds and visuals explained, which is exactly what artist Rose-Marie Goulet wanted when she created Point de fuite, an unprecedented art project that has been riding the rails of the métro’s Orange Line since last September. When she first teamed up with the Montreal Transit Corp. to create the installation, in 2006, she insisted that it not be labelled explicitly as an art project.
“It’s by chance that you come across this car,” Goulet explained. “People aren’t expecting it, that’s what’s important.”
At Henri Bourassa station, meanwhile, métro riders have even more unusual art to consider: .98, a new light mural that was inaugurated last April. Located in one of Henri Bourassa’s long corridors, the mural consists of several dozen LED lights programmed to change colours and blink in different patterns.
Art has been part of Montreal’s métro since the system first opened in 1966. In some ways, with its abundance of sculptures, murals and unique architectural details, it is a vast underground gallery through which hundreds of thousands of commuters just happen to pass every day. What makes .98 and Point de fuite stand out is the way they engage métro riders in unorthodox ways.
When lighting designer Axel Morgenthaler was commissioned to create a new work of art in the Henri-Bourassa station, he wanted to make something unusual that would grab the attention of harried commuters.
The usual assortment of passengers on the train:
cellphone fiddlers, ad-gazers and the lone reader
With typical New China audacity, even hubris, Shanghai authorities opened up more than 100km of subway tracks on a single day this past December, nearly doubling the metro system in a single stroke. This puts it well on its way of becoming the world’s largest–at least by the length of trackage–in two or three years of time.
Yet there doesn’t appear to be anything about the Shanghai Metro that marks its soon-to-be special status; nothing like the claustrophobic confusion of the Tokyo Metro, the steam-punk appeal of the NYC subway, or the hi-tech sheen of London’s Canary Wharf underground station. Superficially, what the Shanghai Metro does offer are the familiar standards: free daily newspapers, automatic vending machines, contactless smart cards, platform screen doors, annoying LCD screens, inoffensive-looking station interiors, neutral voices announcing the next stop, and respectable-looking riders mostly engaged with their cellphones.
Spacing Montreal contributor Jacob Larsen was the first to tell me, at our last meeting, about his strange experience of riding in a metro car with a dark blue interior and creepy music playing over the PA system. Then, earlier this evening, my friend Mary told me that she too was in dark blue metro car when a woman’s voice could be heard saying, in Mandarin, “I think the next station is Berri-UQAM. It’s such a nice day out! That woman over there is cute. Oh, that other woman looks sad. But it’s such a nice day out!”
The spooky metro car is an initiative by the artist Rose-Marie Goulet called Point de fuite. Goulet was interviewed last month on Radio-Canada’s morning show. The goal of the project, she said, was to reach out to “people who don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to a place where they can see art, like a gallery or a museum. Why not have a work of art in our daily lives that can change attitudes, to provoke discussion amongst people in the metro?” In a nod to Montreal’s multilingualism, the audio clips in “Point de fuite” are in French, English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic.
“The ambient sound in the metro is very loud, up to 85 decibels, so we created sound ‘bubbles’ that interfere with our own aural space,” added Goulet. “The idea was to create another voyage, by sound and sight, beyond the trip that we take every day.”
I’d love to experience the installation myself, if only to see how passengers react. Unfortunately, many metro commuters are shoe-gazing zombies, so the effect of the art might be lost, at least at rush hour. “A lot of people on my train turned their heads wondering who was carrying speakers,” observes Fagstein. “The sound is surprisingly clear, and just a little bit louder than the station announcements. Reaction was sadly underwhelming. People coming home from work are amazingly uninterested in things going on around them.”
Point de fuite will ride the rails for another six months, eventually taking the blue and yellow lines as well as the orange. Pretty much the only way to experience it is to encounter it randomly. If you want to hunt it down, though (and I have no idea how that would be possible), you’ll find it in the centre car of the number 78-007 metro train.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 8 hours agofrom web
why does it now take decades to build subways in developed world cities, while china builds several a year? a summary http://t.co/VpgYJJ1Vabout 15 hours agofrom web
