Dear Valerie Plante,
I was reading your tweet last Sunday on Twitter: “Air quality is heavily affected in Montreal […] Close the windows and doors of your house or apartment. Helping the stupor of the city, you have a window of a few days (weeks? months?) to try to replace the concrete with pedestrians and the asphalt with plants. Social acceptability remains the caudine forks of your profession. We even saw you extolling the “celebrations” of F1 two weeks ago in the company of Justin Trudeau.
The Grand Prix is already forgotten. Green, we will have to grow it everywhere: on the roofs, the sidewalks, the dirty and transverse alleys, every interstice, the race tracks. As Leonard Cohen would have told you, there is light in every crack in the sidewalk; and why not a plant? Your family name predestined you to carry out major chlorophyll projects.
I’m not teaching you anything by pointing out that certain neighborhoods are heat islands; your map of Montreal in open data illustrates this wonderfully (bit.ly/3Nwasgo).
And I deeply believe that life grows in the cracks, in the interstices, like lichen grows in the cracks of the rocks… A city must be a machine for creating cracks so that all social levels can find their place there.
What the map does not say is that people are dying of heat in their homes or they are flooded during heavy rains like those of September 13 and June 16, in the east of Montreal. My son is on his second flood in nine months in HoMa, marked in red on your map. After being homeless for five months because of renovations this winter, it’s a big deal for the shorts: “It’s no use being negative, mom, we don’t control much. He must have been a Buddhist monk in his previous incarnation. I was a parrot in a zoo in Delhi.
Don’t worry, my son transports his family at the end of the week to live in another heat island of Villeray. I will be faithful to the position as a driver / caterer. As my B says: “The advantage is that it bothers me less to move each time…” Minimalism has its virtues.
Green the city
Do I need to add that the City of Montreal did nothing for Hugo, 19, and his two roommates, 18 and 24, when the sewers and soils could not absorb the excess water which will worsen with climate change? My son is the first climate refugee in our family.
I read your 2020-2030 Climate Plan, 117 very ambitious pages. You plan to add 500,000 trees; Justin didn’t even plant the ones he promised on the campaign trail 🙁bit.ly/3NNlxLw).
So many men have made me so many promises, notice, one more… and meanwhile, the forest is burning.
The canopy has decreased since 2019 (falling to 24.3% for Montreal and 25.3% for Greater Montreal) and the David Suzuki Foundation recommends that you aim for an increase to 40% to face the future (bit.ly/46BP8Pw), and not only in trees, in shrubs too. The Quebec government submitted its 2023-2027 architecture and land use plan on Monday. The word “modernize” comes up often. I have a slight doubt: does the CAQ know that modernity is not just concrete and economic development?
I hope you have received the beautiful book Cities of tomorrow, by Arnaud Pagès, for your recent birthday. For those who are passionate about architecture and urban planning, the photos are inspiring and the subject is avant-garde (or it is our cities that are desperately behind, as you choose).
“Big cities are mineral radiators that absorb calories from the sun. This model is no longer sustainable”, notes the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut.
Everything must be vegetated to cope with climate change, including the facades of new or existing buildings, not to mention the roofs, which should provide us with food, and be painted white otherwise.
We must stop considering the existing building as an inviolable sanctuary […] Our leitmotif has always been to transform the city into an ecosystem, the neighborhoods into a forest and the buildings into inhabited trees.
We even mention the Lufa farms (I am an amazed Lufavore since the pandemic) in this book which offers us to see what is done best in the world in terms of intensification of nature in the urban ecosystem.
“It accelerates the transition to a sober and sustainable model, while providing city dwellers with a protective glaze against rising temperatures. Vegetation makes it possible to limit heat islands, to bring freshness to a building, to waterproof the soil, to better resist bad weather, to improve the quality of air and water, to absorb CO2 in the atmosphere and even to produce healthy food locally…”
You already know all this and the municipal authorities will play a crucial role for the rest of things.
Series of bad decisions
You are not responsible for everything, do not believe. In fact, if you’ve read the bestselling Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, bad decisions began about 10,000 years ago with the first agricultural revolution, where we went from hunter-gatherers to sedentary people. “The Agricultural Revolution was the greatest swindle in history. […] The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. It was these plants that domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than the other way around,” Harari writes. Further, he adds: “This is the essence of the agricultural revolution: the ability to keep more people alive in worse conditions. He describes this revolution as a trap, that of luxury, “of the satisfied farmer”. From generation to generation of sedentary people (the hamlets becoming towns), we forgot how the previous ones had lived.
What this history professor brilliantly illustrates is that throughout the process of evolution “people have been unable to measure all the consequences of their decisions” and other “improvements”. I fervently hope that you have enough vision (and influence) to imagine the impact of yours on tomorrow, because today it is already too late for those taken yesterday.
Joblo, Hugo’s mother