For decades, no one paid much attention to the disused industrial hangar rusting near a rail-lands overpass in Montreal’s Mile End district. Four years ago, it became noticeable again, when a collective of artists and community activists began cleaning it up and reinventing it as an arts and community space called Kabane77.
Artists are often the first rescuers of unwanted buildings, and the reluctant vanguard for gentrification. But the Kabane77 collective had neither title nor lease to the building at 77 Bernard Est, which is ostensibly why, last week, the borough of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal dispatched city workers to board the place up and destroy some of the furniture the collective had installed outside.
But behind the city’s apparently straightforward defence against squatting, many other issues are in play at Kabane77. The site has become a fascinating demonstration of the disruptive power of bottom-up urban development in a borough known for its progressive urbanism.
Gentrification was already well under way in Mile End when a handful of film workers developed the idea of Kabane77. A new economic base in software development was forming around the huge video-game company Ubisoft, installed in several large buildings nearby. The borough was brokering mixed-use developments such as Pied Carré, which included over 20,000 square meters of what were supposed to be affordable spaces for artists.
The Kabane77 collective, which has no spokesperson or board of directors, had a different goal in mind: a cultural space controlled by everyone who uses it. They were inspired by places such as Geneva’s L’Usine, a self-governing cultural space that includes 18 different groups and collectives working in numerous art forms, and which for the past 30 years has run with no hierarchy and no corporate sponsorships.
“We have many spaces that are organized from the top down, that are well-renovated and secure, and that people don’t use,” said one Kabane77 member, who asked not to be named out of respect for the group. “We call those places the hospitals of culture. What interests us is a new model of collective creativity, not just working away in our own corners but making something together.”
The 66-year-old industrial building stands in an evolving “green corridor” bordered at one end by Lhasa de Sela Park, and at the other by Le Champ des Possibles (“the field of possibilities”), an open wild space that is owned by the city but controlled by a not-for-profit group. Kabane77 could help animate this green corridor, said its members, and sometimes act as a shelter or covered bridge, with its broad delivery doors open at both ends.
The collective’s members include architects, experimental filmmakers, woodworkers, printers and artists who can’t afford the rents at Pied Carré. Its numerous allies in the cultural community include Casa del Popolo, a performance venue in Le Plateau; Centre Clark, an exhibition space near Le Champ des Possibles; and the Cinémathèque Québécoise.
Kabane77 has no interior pillars, which makes it good for projection of the films that might in the past have shown at Excentris, the indie film centre that closed last winter. The collective has hosted about a dozen public screenings, as well as magazine launches, film shoots, cinema workshops for kids, and open-door meetings at a big wooden table it built for the purpose. (Interestingly, the borough did not destroy that symbol of community consultation.) For each event, the collective successfully applied for a temporary permit to use the space. It also pitched a plan for more continuous occupation, on a self-sustaining, self-governing basis.
“We made a presentation to the city, and they said that it was a good project, but that there was no possibility for autonomous initiative,” one member said. Richard Ryan, a Mile End city councilor much involved in Pied Carré, told them that the site was dangerous and that they were not following the rules, the member said.
A spokesperson for Ryan’s party office at Projet Montréal, which controls the borough council, confirmed that the councilor was responsible for the file, but said he was unavailable for an interview.
The city announced last spring that it wished to demolish the building, at an estimated cost of $2-million, but has aired no firm plan as to what to do after that. An architect member of Kabane77 said it would cost less to adapt the building to cultural purposes than to destroy it. Leaving it empty would expose the city to the continuing risks and pains of owning an unoccupied building, including fire, vandalism and high insurance premiums.
One striking feature of this dispute is that the same municipal leaders who are saying no to Kabane77 are heavy promoters of one of the collective’s primary goals. A Projet Montréal campaign document from 2013 spoke of the urgent need to protect creative workshops and artists’ spaces.
“The city needs to show more leadership in order to protect both local and city-wide spaces for cultural and artistic expression,” the document states. Calling for more leadership from the centre of municipal power doesn’t seem to leave much room for initiatives from the margins.
“City officials have an ingrained desire to have power over what they believe is their domain,” said Mallory C. Wilson, one of the organizers of a three-day festival called Vivre le patrimoine!, which started Thursday at Kabane77. “It’s very difficult for community groups to come in and say, ‘This is what we would like to do with the space.’” There’s a culture clash between organizations based on written rules and hierarchy, she said, and groups devoted to autonomous collective action. “But communities are the people for whom we’re doing all this. We have to include them in the decision-making process.”
Vivre le patrimoine’s closing activities on Saturday take place at Le Forges de Montréal, which has experienced the administrative culture clash in a way that could be ruinous for master blacksmith Mathieu Collette. He signed a lease with the city in 2000 for an 1887 fire station wedged under the Bonaventure autoroute near the Old Port of Montreal. Collette established a self-sustaining not-for-profit smithy on the site, where he also teaches his ancient craft to others. He has invested nearly $500,000 in improvements.
The city had planned to direct a bike path near the site, and develop it as an interpretative centre for “intangible heritage,” which is protected under provincial law. But at some point, heritage functionaries disengaged from that project, and city revenue managers began poring over the details of Collette’s lease. They determined he had not invested as much as stipulated, and ordered his eviction.
“The Les Forges file is not being managed by people in heritage, it’s being managed by people in real estate,” Wilson said. “Les Forges needs to attract the attention of the people in authority who aren’t just counting dollars.” The land under the building is owned by the federal government, but an appeal to Minister of Canadian Heritage Mélanie Joly has so far gone unanswered, Wilson said. From a heritage point of view, the fit between Collette and his site could not be better.
Both Kabane77 and Les Forges de Montréal are happening in endangered buildings that are part of the city’s industrial history, and “industrial heritage is very overlooked by architects and urbanists,” said a member of the Kabane77 group.
But the more crucial similarity in these cases may be that both were thought up by someone who didn’t fit into the usual cast of players, and who was judged not to be following the rules. Maybe it’s time to ask whether some rules should bend to follow needs and community initiative, instead of the other way round.