The Childish Folly of Dubai

Dubai feels like it was designed by a five-year-old boy. What kid doesn’t get excited about the BIGGEST BUILDING EVER, or the WORLD’S BIGGEST MALL? And then there’s the idea of a SEVEN STAR HOTEL. Wow!

A real kid’s drawing would have these elements laid out side-by-side, in two dimensions. Drawings by five-year-olds generally don’t have much perspective or depth. Dubai’s recent urban planning efforts seem to lack them as well. Where else can you visit a city that actually implemented all those dumb ideas you thought were cool in kindergarten? And that laid them all out as ineptly as you would have when you were five?

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Summer Streets

Ste. Catherine Street. Photo by Kate McDonnell

Two years ago, when Ste. Catherine Street in the Gay Village was pedestrianized for the summer, it was organized like a festival, with a corporate monopoly on outdoor beer sales and over-the-top decoration (and not in a fabulous way, just in a tacky commercial one). Even worse, the Village is not the liveliest place on weekday afternoons, so the street felt a bit forlorn before the sun went down.

But the enjoyment of experiencing a street free of cars outweighed all of the drawbacks. The Village’s summertime pedestrianization was successful enough that it has continued for the two summers since.

Now it has spread to other streets. This year, for the first time, St. Paul Street in Old Montreal was closed to traffic, something that should have been done a long time ago. Despite being one of the narrowest commercial streets in the city, and despite the tourist crowds that throng it all summer long, most of the space on St. Paul was taken up by cars. Walking along it meant a choice of squeezing past fanny-packed day-trippers on the narrow sidewalk or dodging cars on the street.

St. Paul Street. Photo by Kate McDonnell

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How to Fix a Troublesome Highway

When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.

The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.

In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.

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Outdoor Billiards in Shenzhen

In Baishizhou, five yuan will get you an hour of pool and a big bottle of strong beer. This is one of Shenzhen’s largest and liveliest urban villages. Pool is one of its favourite pasttimes.

The village is hard to navigate, with aimless roads and dark, foreboding alleyways, but I’ve come across a few outdoor pool halls in my wanderings there. My favourite is one that exists where an alley widens ever so slightly as it meets a larger street, a tributary joining its parent. It’s a simple operation, with a half-dozen tables and a beer cooler. The last time I went, with a few friends, the hours slipped by unexpectedly, and it was nearly 1am when we left, wandering back into streets that were only marginally quieter than when we arrived. Compared to Hong Kong, Shenzhen sleeps early, but this is not true of the villages — they stay awake all night.

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A New Square

When I returned to Montreal last fall, I spent much of my time riding around the city on Bixi bikes, which was the closest I’ve ever felt to complete freedom in a very long time: a bike, a city and nothing holding me back from just riding around aimlessly. It gave me a chance to cover more ground than I ever would have if I had stuck to my own two feet.

I came across this new public square at the corner of McGill and Wellington near the Old Port. When I left Montreal, it was still under construction and there were few indications of how it would turn out. (Considering Montreal’s excellent track record of recent square-building, though, my hopes were high). I wasn’t disappointed. Instead of paving over the entire square, or covering it unimaginatively with turf, wild grass was planted, similar to what was done with the median of Morgan Avenue in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Montreal is a windy city and wild grass like this looks particularly romantic when it is blowing in a breeze. It softens the square and defines the space without making it feel cloistered, which would have been the case if shrubs had been planted, or overly precious, which would have been the case with flowers. It’s also looks vaguely rural, which works strangely well with the industrial modernism of the condos that have been built next to the square — a subtle evocation of the weedy decay that characterized the neighbourhood just 10 years ago.

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Footbridges

I dislike footbridges on principle, because they represent an abhorrent, machine-like view of the city: cars here, pedestrians there and never the twain shall meet. The city is reduced (like the Internet) to a series of tubes through which different modes of transportation travel as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s soul-destroying.

But in a city as crowded and densely-populated as Hong Kong, I have to admit, footbridges do have some advantages. Though the motive behind their construction is still reprehensible — let’s get those people out of the way so that cars and trucks can go faster — they inadvertently create another layer of urban space where pedestrians have free reign. As a result, footbridges begin to mimic the atmosphere of a lively street, with protest banners, musicians, touts and (if the police are looking the other way) hawkers.

In Wan Chai, the busy footbridge leading from the MTR station to the office district north of Gloucester Road is popular with Falun Gong protesters. In Central, the footbridges around Exchange Square are filled with Filipina women on Sunday; the footbridge that links the MTR with the ferry piers is where someone named Law Fong writes bilingual treatises on the topics of the day and pastes them to the bridge’s pillars.

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The View from West Kowloon

The biennale of architecture and urbanism that took place in West Kowloon earlier this year was underfunded and underattended, but it was also an example of what shape Hong Kong’s future “cultural district” could take. The official plans call for museums, concert halls, public squares and other well-defined, well-regulated spaces, but what the biennale showed was that the most successful and imaginative uses of space are often those that are planned the least. By scattering installations along a waterfront promenade and using an overgrown vacant lot for artistic interventions, film screenings, forums and outdoor concerts, the biennale created its own ad-hoc cultural district, one that was far more thought-provoking than any government-imposed cultural centre could ever be.

Alas, big buildings make for better photo-ops than scruffy fields, so West Kowloon will eventually be dug up and turned into something more respectable. This summer, Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaus and local architect Rocco Yim will unveil three new proposals for the district. Originally, the cultural district was conceived as a tourist attraction, but after it was revealed to be little more than a property-development boondoggle — a single property developer would be given the multi-billion-dollar contract to build the whole thing — it was sent back to the drawing board in 2006. Since then, it has ignited a wide-ranging discussion on the state of the arts in Hong Kong; whatever happens now, it seems clear that public pressure is on the government to ensure that the cultural district exists for the benefit of Hong Kong people, not just for property developers and the businesses that profit from tourism.

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Gargoyles, Horny PhDs & Spoiled Newspapers: an Afternoon at McGill

DCorbeil | Arcadia in the city, Montreal 2010

Ce mois de mars. Incroyable par sa fraicheur, déroutant par sa chaleur inopinée. Frébilité perceptible. Émotions intenses.

Je parcours le campus de l’Université McGill, en plein coeur du centre des affaires de Montréal, à la recherche d’une place apaisante où lire ce journal pris à la course aux portes du métro. J’adore ces petits endroits, le jardin généreux,  où il est possible de se promener sans empressement, avec pour seul objectif la détente et l’évasion.

McGill est un Éden, downtown Montreal, comprimé entre les tours cristallines des avenues et les broussailles en pente du Mont-Royal. Architecture variée. Élégance victorienne. Châtelets aux tourelles inusitées. La visite de l’université me donne toujours un petit frisson nostalgique, le regard en balade sur cette grisaille burinée d’abondantes formes fantaisistes.

Jeunes en rut. Ethnies au garde-à-vous. Le printemps s’annonce précoce, les regards sont alertes. Je me retire de la foule compacte et repère une place mi-ombre, d’où il est facilement possible de jouir de la scène agitée tout en respectant mon rôle de spectateur.

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Urban Renewal : Quartier Concordia

Froideur intellectuelle

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Under the Wrecking Ball’s Shadow

There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.

On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.

“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”

For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.

Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.

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The Right Scale

Earlier this week, Montreal’s city council approved the development of two 32-storey Waldorf-Astoria hotel and condominium towers near the corner of Guy and Sherbrooke streets. The Gazette accompanied this announcement with a rendering of two massive, gaudy, post-modern towers; if they are vaguely reminiscent of the famous Waldorf-Astoria in New York, it’s only a coincidence, since the rendering has been recycled since at least the early 2000s, when the tower was first proposed but before the luxury hotel chain got involved.

Though the new development was approved by the council without debate, I’m sure its mass will elicit protests from those who are generally opposed to new highrises, especially those that might block the view of Mount Royal from certain angles. Putting aside the question of its architecture or function, however, I think this kind of building is exactly what the area needs.

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Paving in Portuguese

Ten years after its handover to the People’s Republic of China, the old Portuguese colony of Macau hardly abounds with the tongue of its former master. Portuguese signs still cling to shops and older buildings, but the language of the streets is unmistakeably Cantonese — with the occasional whiff of Mandarin coming from the direction of mainland tour groups. Macau’s future, its leaders have decided, is as a gambling destination, and increasing numbers of visitors from across Asia pack its Vegas-brand hotels night and day.

But the enclave’s Lusitanian design vocabulary remains remarkably intact, and nowhere is this more evident than in the patterns that swirl beneath its pedestrians’ feet. Calçadas (literally “pavements”), the unique street mosaics that decorate the cities of Portugal and its former colonies from Lisbon to Luanda.

The origins of calçadas are somewhat unclear. The popularity of tiles in Portuguese art first exploded with the introduction of geometrical ceramic arts by the Moors. Decorated tilework, known in Portuguese as azulejo, soon came to cover houses and churches across the country. But the first recorded calçada was not the product of an artist’s whimsy, but as a makework project for prisoners thought up by an army officer.

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Making of a Square

Place Gérald-Godin in 1979 and 2009. Compilation by Guillaume St-Jean

Over the past decade, Montreal has invested heavily in big-ticket squares and plazas, including the remarkable Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and redesigned Victoria Square, both completed in 2003, and the surprisingly successful Place des Festivals, which opened earlier this year. But some of the smaller new squares are just as impressive, perhaps doubly so for the fact that they’ve been perfectly integrated into the city’s life without any kind of the fuss or introspection demanded by their bigger counterparts.

Place Gérald-Godin is the best example of these small new squares. It sits just outside the sole entrance to Mont-Royal metro, one of the city’s busiest stations, and as a result it’s busy throughout the day. Until recently, however, it wasn’t so much a square as a patch of grass traversed by a couple of asphalt pathways. A building that housed a caisse populaire (and before that, a bicycle shop) occupied the corner of Berri and Mount Royal, next to the station, making the space in front feel like more like an afterthought than a real place.

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Informal Space, Untouched

Maguire Meadow. Photo from imagine (le) mile-end

I found myself in Kennedy Town yesterday evening, my hair still dripping from swimming at a nearby pool as I walked towards the waterfront, beer in hand. At the small promenade built next to a bus loop, the smell of diesel fumes in the air, I stopped to admire the violet hues of the sunset. But I didn’t stay there — I pressed on to a far nicer part of the waterfront.

By day, the shipping yard that stretches from Kennedy Town to the wholesale food market at Shek Tong Tsui, on the western end of Hong Kong Island, whirs with industrial purpose, as forklifts dart about and shipping containers are unloaded by boat. By night, it becomes a playground for people who live nearby. As I walked along the water last night, I saw kids riding their bikes, old men fishing, middle-aged women stretching and power walking. As the evening wore on, couples emerged, strolling hand in hand. Nobody seemed to mind the signs warned against unauthorized entry.

It reminded me of the Maguire Meadow, a large open field in the old garment district of Mile End, Montreal, which is slated for redevelopment in the coming years. Lately, people have been gardening on the field and using it for neighbourhood gatherings; over the years, it has acquired an impressive collection of flora and fauna, including walnut trees and the squirrels they feed. At the moment, redevelopment plans call for a new road to be built through the meadow, which has elicited quite a bit of protest.

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