The green lane is one of the best urban planning ideas we’ve had in Montreal. From the 1990s, Montrealers began to rethink the alley to reclaim it. Walk down any green alley and you’ll see life in our neighborhoods — kids playing soccer, books swapping, homemade art, toys. Life, what. The alleys are the place where the communities of Montreal are woven: a treasure that must be defended at all costs.
But what makes a green lane green? This is where it gets complicated. In fact, the City does not have one green alley program — it has 20, because each borough has its own program. The basic idea is the same everywhere: to fight against urban heat islands, the borough removes part of the asphalt to put plants in its place. Voila, your alley is green!
A street committee
But the procedure is not simple. In theory, neighbors should form an alley committee; the latter must proceed with a formal consultation of the neighbours, draw up a proposal and send it to the borough for its approval. In practice, this translates into a mountain of paperwork and tasks to accomplish: studying the City’s bylaws, having lots of meetings, going door to door to hire neighbors, preparing a file.
It’s a bit like a part-time job, but not paid. It is not surprising that a number of committees, impossible to quantify, give up before even submitting their file, discouraged by the task.
Among those who take the trouble to submit a request, many will have worked in vain: the borough rejects several files because of its budgetary limits. To those lucky enough to be selected, the City will send a contractor who, with his heavy machinery, will dig holes in the alley to remove portions of asphalt and create small green flowerbeds.
Naturally, the excavation can only be done on a tiny proportion — in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, in 2020, between 1 and 4% asphalt was taken from an alley. It must be said that at a cost oscillating between $160 and $210 per square meter, doing more quickly becomes ruinous.
With time
Five years later, when the original committee has lost its momentum — because the children have grown up, or because its key members have moved away — these holes often find themselves abandoned. The City does not have precise data on the percentage of green lanes that have fallen into disuse, but the more time passes, the greater the risk. Ten years after the works, few green alleys are still green.
In Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, in 2020, 57% of the green alleys budget had been devoted to excavation. It must be admitted that the green alley programs, as they exist today, are therefore for the most part subsidy programs for neighborhood excavation companies.
At the same time, the Regroupement des éco-quartiers de Montréal leads the program A tree for my neighborhood which subsidizes planting on private land. You would think that a $25 tree planted in the backyard overlooking the alley is a better solution to the problem of heat islands than a $1,500 eight-square-meter hole: trees grow bigger every year. , even with little or no maintenance, and provide ever-increasing coverage.
In addition to reducing extreme heat in the summer, trees absorb rainwater before it overloads sewers, create habitats for biodiversity, effectively absorb carbon dioxide, force drivers to reduce speed, support the mental health of the inhabitants, etc. The most beautiful alleys are always those that offer the privacy that only a large tree cover allows. Not the ones that are strewn with abandoned holes.
I spent a pleasant afternoon comparing the performance of each approach. Using data from an access to information request from Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, I calculated that a dollar spent in 2020 to green an alley in the traditional way will cover approximately 0.52 centimeters square — might as well say not much. That same dollar spent on a backyard tree will cover twice the area.
That’s for the first year. It should be remembered that the tree grows from year to year, while the bushes tend to shrink if they are not well maintained. Assuming the bushes-in-the-holes lose, on average, 10% of their greenery each year as the tree itself continues to grow, the advantage of the backyard tree will increase to a so much so that, ten years after its planting, each public dollar spent will cover an area 60 times larger in alley than the same dollar spent digging holes.
The magic of a canopy
However, the City seems unable to assimilate this idea. So much so that its two programs operate in a vacuum, and no one has ever even thought of considering them together.
When I tell them I want to promote the backyard tree as an alternative to alley holes, the city officials look at me like an oddball. In their minds, the green lane is there to take care of the public infrastructure — that is, the lane itself — and not the backyards, which are private.
Fortunately, no one has ever explained this legal distinction to the trees themselves, which continue to quietly overhang the alley, providing it with shade, greenery and well-being.
All of this is just a symptom of a larger problem. The City does not really have a strategy for its streets. It falls back, by bureaucratic inertia, on its 20 programs. However, these must be radically rethought. The magic of an alley does not come from its excavation, it is born from the creativity that neighbors have deposited there and from the intimacy that only a thick canopy can create.
To transform our alleys into real living environments, we must think beyond the asphalt and find ways to convince our neighbors to get involved. Rather than treating them like unpaid municipal officials, we need to find ways to attract them to the lane so that we can transform it together, with our own hands.
Encouraging them to come together to plant trees in each other’s backyards would seem like an excellent starting point.