On the complexity of urban planning and civility

Far from being an absolute specific to new cities, a city already constituted like Montreal calls, at the time of its planning, for a relativization that its complexity imposes on it. If it cannot be done in simple terms and simplistic solutions, it is because it constitutes a very singular formal and sociological mosaic in North America.

On October 11, 1986, at the first international conference on urban design in Quebec, urban planner and sociologist René Schoonbrodt exclaimed that Montreal was “only a cohabitation of differences.” It is true that at the time, the destructuring of the city center and its surroundings was an almost caricatured illustration of this. Open-air parking lots, abandoned blocks, the old city cut off by highways, razed or forgotten suburbs, a juxtaposition of towers, churches, and 19th-century workers’ complexeseof megastructures; it then offered to the eye a whole composed of different heritages, a very curious heterogeneity, a city shaped over time by necessarily different values.

There are certainly several Montreals: there is that of the fortified city, of the continental metropolis, of the Victorian or railway suburbs, that of modernism, that of zoning, of highway networks and also that of collective infrastructures, that which protects its heritage specificity and that which today wants to be oriented towards dialogue and ecology. This is without counting the interweaving of multiple cultures that have managed to carve out their neighborhoods in a city undoubtedly more culturally complex than Paris.

Archipelagos shaped by time

Behind every movement (origin, point of view, reality, legislation), there are values ​​carried in large enough numbers that they become the foundation on which we build. Cities are made on the same principle. They are the cultural expression of our beliefs and become a sum of incomplete realities and singular places, in contrast and contradiction, archipelagos shaped by time.

We could push the reasoning to the point of affirming that urban planning does not exist; it is a notion carried by its various promoters over time: by monarchs, soldiers, engineers, architects, geographers, economists, builders, historians, sociologists, cultural groups, sellers of goods… It is at the same time a notion that is deployed by its infrastructures — streets, aqueducts-sewers, fortification walls, railways, a tram network, a metro, bicycles and buses, highways, a light rail — but also by commercial agreements, by globalization and today by digital infrastructures.

This results in urban organizations and configurations that, in turn, transform behaviors in the city and, consequently, the representations and values ​​associated with places. We shape what shapes us.

With the built environment set to increase by 60% by 2050 worldwide, with 85% of GDP already coming from cities in the industrialized world, with our infrastructure, our housing policies and their financing (notably the role of investment funds) as well as our travel plans to be reviewed, what angle will Montreal take tomorrow?

While the word urban planning only entered the dictionary around 1935 (it was mentioned for the first time in 1910 in the bulletin of the Neuchâtel Geographical Society), Louis Hautecoeur points out that “even if the word is new, the problem is old”, namely, living in the city!

The spirit of the polished

The exercise that the community has been engaged in since the sedentarization is: how do we want to live? Also, before addressing the question of the urban project, it is imperative to recognize the collective nature of any discussion about Montreal and the way to live there, which of course implies mastering the intertwining and the possible creative friction between the public and private spheres.

Housing, the cornerstone of cities, raises questions of accessibility, law, typologies, speculation and its production. We cannot avoid these reflections. This is perhaps where the urban project differs from real estate “promotion”. It is a pretext for civility before that of sales development: it has a collective scope, even before talking about height and land use coefficient. The urban project is not insignificant, it reflects the political structures and techniques that structure our public life.

These facts testify, they demand attitudes, relationships in everyday life, with habits very probably other than the known and mastered techniques that produce and guide the solutions chosen. As André Lortie so aptly points out, “the use of known processes produces a disjunction between diagnosis and prognosis, since urban planning is determined by the technical and financial resources that the industry makes available to it.”

The main question of urban planning, planning poses the question of the time to come, while the logic of the market poses that of the moment. A natural discord follows between the interests of the community and those of a group, what the philosopher Jan Patocka calls “the space of freedom that citizens offer and refuse each other. The spirit of the polished is a spirit of unity in discord, in struggle. Being a citizen is only possible in the association of some against others. This discord creates the tension, the tone of the life of the city.

Hence the question: how can we recognize in this discord a project that has an urban scope? It is undoubtedly this moment in the city that recognizes that it is time to go beyond certain real estate logics that dominate it and that engages the forms that allow civility.

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