“It was in Paris, a city that was then so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there, rather than rich anywhere else. —Guy Debord
One of the great builders of modern Quebec, an illustrious politician, interested in a sensible development of cities, inspired by the cinema, would have affirmed to be “fiercely opposed to the death penalty… except against architects”. This is well said. But this confidence of Jacques Parizeau to the journalist Jean-François Nadeau does not change the fact that the architects are not responsible for the order.
While in Lévis, we are impatiently awaiting the third link, in Quebec, we are wondering. Make no mistake about it, the third link is first and foremost a motorway link. It slips “under the city centers” by connecting highways (20 south bank, 40 north bank). We “close the loop” of highways in “periphery”, the city centers remain secondary. The order is eminently political, it is said and honestly admitted: technology and economic growth prevail for reasons of security, speed, competitiveness and promises of wealth to come. What about city planning? A tunnel never comes alone.
The wealth of a people is not measured by the height of its buildings or the efficiency of its highways. Culture is also about collectively determining the way of inhabiting the territory, of modulating the natural and built landscape. To live in Quebec is already to be rich.
Landscape logic
“When you don’t have a mountain, you build one. This sentence, juxtaposed with an image of the city of Chicago, is written in full in the paper journal I was holding in my hands at the time, bus 51, en route to work, in the very heart of Chicago, city of architects. The city is built on flat land, a typical landscape of the American Midwest. The construction of a “mountain”, of a densified city, then takes on its full meaning.
In Chicago, on the ground or by plane, from a distance, attention is drawn to the concentration of skyscrapers posed in front of Lake Michigan. In the center of the city, it is the architecture that captures the attention, that fascinates. The city is built on the plain, in a flat landscape, bordering a veritable inland sea. To the east, the city skirts a wide expanse of water and the streets become, one by one, slender piers that direct the gaze to open street ends, framed and flooded with blue sky. Effect of built and natural landscape. The streets, just as much as the buildings, open up and point towards the sky. We are in Chicago.
In Montreal, we see that “another mountain”, a mass of skyscrapers, has come up against Mount Royal. The city unfolds in a multitude of avenues converging towards the ascending forests of the mountain. We thus obtain a “slice” of mountain for each street that converges there: “a slice of cake”. The city, saturated with pedestrians, borders and encircles the mountain. We are in Montreal.
In Québec, an exceptional promontory, the “mountain” is under our feet. We live up high, from Cap Diamant to Cap-Rouge. The city spreads out and covers the whole rock, until it overflows into the valley, without excessive or irrecoverable demarcation between city and nature. There are plenty of glimpses of the sky and the cliffs of the rock form “continuous green flows” of several kilometres. Chicago or Montreal, nothing to envy. It therefore remains to define the contours of a city in the making, while there is still time. Thus, we will truly be in Quebec, in symbiosis with nature.
One solution
The city of Quebec, by its elevated position and its wooded cliffs, bordered to the south by the river, to the north by the valley and the mountains, and in front by the St. Lawrence basin, a stretch of water between Cap Diamant and the he Île d’Orléans, a slack in the water, stopping time for a great river bringing the waters back to the sea, is housed in one of the most majestic sites in America. The wealth is there, precisely, and the city, until now, has been able to respect it.
The third link is motorway. Demonstration: by favoring connections to peripheral highways (20 and 40), town centers are connected “from the outside” and away from the river, which a bridge does not do, which is attached directly to the banks, at most short. The tunnel route involves going out and away from each city center, miles from the river, entering the tunnel, redoing part of the route already traveled, but this time underground (going back under the city centre), to cross the river (1 km) and to come out on the other side, a few kilometers further, in the same logic of drawdown (city center to city centre).
The choice of a tunnel, under the river, is obviously the only solution applicable in this thousand-year-old landscape, nothing else (apart from the transport of goods by river, cabotage further east, etc.). Adapting and tempering the third link to the scale of the city and to mobility needs between city centers is desirable. This should be achieved by identifying the contours of future real estate development (limited heights and positioning away from slopes).
In conclusion: “Love is not something, it is somewhere”, wrote Réjean Ducharme in The nose that calls. And that somewhere is in Quebec. So please don’t guillotine the architects.