In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that make Montreal a distinctive cultural capital.
Summer is the season for cities to experiment with public spaces, usually by banning cars from parts of downtown in hopes of sparking some kind of pedestrianized vitality. An unusually playful example has temporarily taken over part of a street in the east Montreal district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (HoMa).
The space is called Patio culturel, though what it resembles most is a strip of beachfront without water. Part of a residential street that flows into HoMa’s main drag on Ontario Street East has been landscaped with gravel, boardwalk decking, large potted plants and a big sandbox. Three sky-blue vertical sections break up the visual axis of the street, and a dozen sling-backed beach chairs line the side facing Maison de la culture Maisonneuve.
Patio culturel was designed for the borough of Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve by landscape architect Pierre B. Bilodeau, and is meant to be an active space. Dozens of events have been organized through the end of August, including two barbecue-cooking demos this weekend. But for much of the time, it’s a space given over to lounging and building sandcastles. Mature shade trees, and those evocative beach chairs, make it a pleasant place to sprawl, at the very edge of the borough’s busiest avenue.
Farther west and uptown in Plateau Mont-Royal, three comparable installations have been plopped down on city roads, in spaces usually reserved for street parking. These haltes piétonnes – pedestrian stops – are portable shelters made from steel shipping containers, with three walls cut out and wooden seating and planters put in. They look like restaurant patios with no restos attached. This isn’t surprising, since the basic form is copied from two shipping-container food stands in Old Montreal run by Muvbox, which participated in the haltes piétonnes project.
What’s remarkable about these municipal hangouts is that, unlike pedestrian malls, they don’t aim to replace moving cars with moving people. They go flat against a basic assumption about urban street life: that circulation is good and stasis is bad. As sociologist Richard Sennett writes in his 1994 book Flesh and Stone, the flow-oriented form of modern cities absorbed something essential from William Harvey’s 17th-century discovery of the human circulatory system. We pay tribute to that bodily metaphor each time we refer to a major road as an artery.
The No. 1 fear for cities contemplating or maintaining a pedestrian mall is that people won’t circulate – that some won’t walk through at all, and others will stick around too long. The old-fashioned word for the latter problem is loitering, which is still an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada. It’s in the same section that prohibits brawling or being drunk in a public place. Section 175 (1) is a classic tool for controlling people who used to be called undesirables. The anti-loitering clause also bans obstructing others in a public place “in any way,” which leaves plenty of leeway for police to stop or hustle along anyone who looks a bit rough, or whose business isn’t clear.
Loitering as a concept changed when we became conscious of homelessness not as a personal failing but as a complex of hardships that are themselves indicative of a city’s health. The shift in attitude was dramatically illustrated two years ago when the Archambault music chain installed a row of “anti-loitering spikes” on a low ledge outside its flagship store on St. Catherine Street. Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre thundered his immediate outrage on Twitter, using the hashtag #picsdelahonte – “spikes of shame.” The spikes were quickly removed.
Archambault’s store is across the street from Place Émilie-Gamelin, which in recent years has seen lots of the kinds of people Section 175 (1) was designed to control. Montreal is trying hard to redefine the plaza as a bustling social hub through cultural events such as the summer-long Jardins Gamelin festival of music, art and urban gardening. A diaphanous suspended artwork by American sculptor Janet Echelman hangs over the middle of the plaza, which also features food and drink stands built into shipping containers.
That kind of redefinition is not so necessary in Plateau Mont-Royal, where streets that once housed the working poor have been thoroughly gentrified. HoMa, which a century ago was a centre for ship-building and other vanished industries, is also feeling the heat of gentrification, at times quite literally. A demonstration in April against the area’s transformation slipped into chaos after a Molotov cocktail was lobbed at police cars. Earlier this week, two local councillors felt moved to defend and celebrate the area’s socio-economic diversity in an op-ed for Le Devoir.
Gentrification is the polite and gradual way of discouraging the presence of those formerly known as loiterers. One would never use that word to describe the people I saw this week hanging out in the halte piétonne on Roy Street East near Saint Laurent Boulevard, chatting and checking their smartphones.
We will really move beyond the concept of loitering as a class-based social offence when we start building rest-stops for the homeless, preferably with doors, windows and everything else enjoyed by those of us who have a place to live. Je Compte Mtl 2015, a survey conducted last year by over 600 volunteers canvassing in streets, shelters, hospitals and other locations, found 3,016 homeless people in Montreal. Mayor Coderre has pledged his support, and $700,000 in city funding, to a plan by a consortium of business, scientific and social agencies to shift 2,000 of those people into permanent digs by 2020, with ongoing support to keep them there. If the mayor follows through on that pledge, he may never again have to fulminate against a spiked ledge.