We are good in Quebec at renewing ourselves in urban ugliness. When not with power centers where parking lots and “cardboard” buildings rub shoulders with major transport projects such as the REM.
When we observe what has come out of the ground over the last few months for the first phase of the REM, let’s not be afraid of words: it is an architectural, landscape and aesthetic disaster on several segments, ranging from Brossard to the west of Montreal. Excessive concrete pillars, orgy of overhead lines, stations with insipid architecture… We would have liked to do worse than we would have had difficulty in getting there.
To top it off comes the response from the promoter, CDPQ Infra, to justify this ugliness. “What matters to us is the reliability of the service,” he said, adding in passing that “phase 1 is largely motorway”. This insane response denotes a blatant insensitivity to the development of our territory, as if the landscapes resulting from the main roads had no value and could be disfigured without embarrassment.
It is even more revealing of the development vision behind this project. In several European countries, one would speak above all of a vast urban project which includes, in the background, a “transport” component. Here, we have more the impression that we are building a simple infrastructure, to which we are trying to graft – not without difficulty – an urban integration component that aims to disguise the disadvantages generated.
So let’s stop thinking about our urban projects in a compartmentalized way with a purely functional philosophy. Each intervention takes place in a context, whether it is a natural or built landscape. There is a responsibility that stems from this privilege of building and developing the territory, particularly when it comes to governments and large organizations like the Caisse de dépôt. There is a duty to set an example.
We can no longer be satisfied with empty sentences and buzz words during press conferences, and the EMN is the perfect counter-example. The president of CDPQ Infra, Jean-Marc Arbaud, told me in 2016 in the newspaper Metro that “the Caisse [était] very sensitive to what [la première phase du REM] or an architectural success ”. With hindsight and the progress of the work, this statement raises odd eyebrows five years later …
In this context, it is understandable why so many citizens and experts in the planning community are currently expressing many fears for the second phase of the project, the REM de l’Est. The Caisse de dépôt may well repeat that the architectural treatment will be different since we will intervene in residential areas, the organization remains in a credibility deficit when we see the disaster in the West.
There are moreover several lessons to be drawn from this first phase, from the lack of transparency of the process to the lack of interest of the promoter in the face of the consequences of his intervention on the built environment. The success of a project should not be based only on “quality of service”, but on a set of criteria, including architectural quality, respect for landscapes, enhancement of our heritage, as well as public appreciation. Not sure that the Western REM fulfills these criteria to make it a great pride of Quebec …