The author is founder of Vive la Ruelle and content director of the Group of Fifty. He also collaborates in washington post.
When I go out for a walk in the alleys of La Petite-Patrie, I make it a point to stop and talk to everyone I meet. Half the time, it goes no further than a “hello”. But the other half of the time, the results are amazing: people are quite happy to stop and chat, sometimes a minute, sometimes five, sometimes an hour. No one ever responded rudely or aggressively to my greetings.
Think about it: you can’t just walk up to a stranger on the street, say hello and strike up a conversation. This is not normal behavior! But in the alley, yes. Here, a different code of behavior applies. Interactions that might seem threatening on Sherbrooke Street seem perfectly normal to us behind our house.
Curious. It was my first clue that there is something magical about the back streets of Montreal. The latter are small fields free of urban alienation where the barriers that separate us from our neighbors are collapsing. But what really convinced me that there was something quite out of the ordinary about these spaces was when I started asking the adults I met about their childhood memories in the small street.
The results continue to amaze me. Without exception, Montrealers who were lucky enough to grow up with an alley behind them stop short when their memories are called upon. Often they start looking away. Quickly, we notice the eyes a little misty. Then the stories burst out: stories about the gang of the alley, stories of days spent in the alley, coming back dirty and happy just in time for supper. Stories of picking flowers and building sheds with found scraps of wood. Stories of first kisses, of hockey games, of the exhilarating mix of freedom and security my neighbors could find just walking behind their house. If you had the good fortune to grow up near an alley, I’m sure you have your own memories.
Multiple roles
Montreal has 490 kilometers of an accidental urban treasure, a universally accessible playground where children never have to cross an intersection. I find it curious that so little is said about the role the alley plays in children’s lives. The alley is too often reduced to a space that can only be greened. And while green alleys are beautiful places, I wonder if the exclusive emphasis on greenery doesn’t blind us to all the other roles that the alley plays in the urban fabric. It would not be the first time.
Too often, in history, the tendency has been to consider alleys as playing only one role. In the 19the century, this role was to keep the horses away from the main streets: this is why they were fitted out! At the beginning of the XXe century, waste disposal became the sole purpose of the alleys. Later, from the 1950s, when we were obsessed with cars, it was parking. Then, with the development of ecological consciousness in the 1990s, greenery became the alley’s raison d’être.
But the alley has never been limited to playing a single role in the life of our city. People who live near them have different needs and use their lane in different ways. A lanes strategy for the next generation should begin by identifying the many ways in which lanes enrich urban life, and then develop design approaches that balance them.
Think, for example, of the role the alley plays as a space for grassroots creativity: a lovingly painted poem on an abandoned wall, a sculpture made from old bicycle parts or scraps, a formal mural made with a grant de la Ville or, more often, a homemade painting on a wooden panel. There are the ubiquitous little signs with the names of the children, but there are also many more.
I saw small bar counters for 5-7 affixed to Hydro poles, swings hanging from overhanging branches, eyes, compasses and flowers painted on manhole covers. Almost every alley bears the footprints of at least one neighbor who decided that if he didn’t have access to a posh gallery downtown, he could still leave his mark right behind his house. This happened not because of the City, but in spite of it. The real question for planners is how they can help foster this source of creative citizen energy and how to give neighbors the tools to make these spaces their own.
Immigration
Think about the role of the alley in the lives of newcomers to Montreal. Moving to a new city, sometimes to a new country, where you have no social network, can be extremely difficult. For new immigrants cut off from family and friends and colleagues, it’s easy to feel distraught. But many of the newcomers I’ve spoken to say they met their first Montreal friends through the local community in their alley.
For those lucky enough to have direct access, the alley may become the first place they turn to when they need guidance on how to function in their new society.
Of course, most new immigrants are tenants, and tenants often don’t have direct access to the alley outside their apartment. The City should consider how to incentivize landlords to provide tenants with access points to the lane, as part of an overall strategy to ensure that the lane can play its role in integrating those here in Montreal society.
The development of the new Urbanism and Mobility Plan of Montreal is an opportunity to leave behind us the reductive approaches of the alley. The City should seize this opportunity to strengthen this urban gem and set itself the goal of creating a network of living lanes — full of green, full of art, full of birds, full of children and full of neighbors who quietly watch over on top of each other, producing the strong and vibrant communities that make Montreal the amazing success that it is.