Le Maire ne veut pas que vous quittiez Montréal.
Ainsi, la question se pose:
rue Wolfe à Montréal
rue Montcalm à Rosemère
Laquelle choisiriez-vous ?
Photo du jour : Wolfe vs. Montcalm
By Émile Thomas
Read more articles by Émile Thomas
16 comments
Si on se fie uniquement aux photos présentées, je choisis Wolfe.
Seulement, je crois que ces photos ne sont pas très honnêtes. La rue Montcalm à Montréal ressemble drôlement à la rue Wolfe qui est présentée.
Et la rue Wolfe de Rosemère ressemble pas mal à la rue Montcalm qu’on voir plus haut dans la même ville.
Bref, il est un peu inadéquat de comparer Wolfe/Montréal à Montcalm/banlieue.
Ha ha drôle de juxtaposition. Mais je choisirai Montréal, toujours Montréal.
Dommage que la site web du spacing ne peut pas supporter les accents, non? Drôle d’évolution.
C’est un peu bizarre qu’une de ces photos à été pris en été (ou le printemps) et l’autre entre l’automne et l’hiver. Une est grise, l’autre est brillante – y’a pas de question!
(Moi je chosirai la rue avec le trottoir…)
Je suis allé chez http://www.walkscore.com. Rue Wolfe recoit 92, rue Montcalm, 23. Ça en dit long.
It would be nice if writers and commenters could strive to be more objective, and focus more on urban planning and less on political engineering. For all his faults, Tremblay has performed some good work in office and yet we never hear of it on this site. Unless the mayor is doing something SO out of the ordinary that no one has ever done it before, there’s really no point discussing it. Every mayor in the history of Montreal has been criticized after the first year or two in office, this is old news, posting about politics is redundant. What is NOT redundant is discussing urban planning and architectural news and opinions.
Also, yes, as BEEG pointed out, the Wolfe photo was taken in the winter and the Montcalm photo taken in late spring. Not a fair comparison. Besides which, I used to live near Rosemere and while it is nice and green it is also difficult to get around unless you own a car. Public transport is available but not convenient. I spent many a cold, blistering hour in winter time waiting for the next bus to arrive and worrying I was going to get frostbite. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to travel around Rosemere with children. Owing an automobile adds at least $6000 to yearly household expenses, probably double that.
In any case, I moved back to Montreal: a) for its convenient 24/7 public transport system, b) for its culture, and c) because there are no anglophone universities in Laval.
Families may move to Laval/Rosemere to raise children, but those children often move back to Montreal when they come of age. A common occurrence in most large cities around the world.
this comparison is flawed. obviously the one in Rosemere looks better, but that is obviously because of the light and greenery. if you are going to do a real comparison of city vs urban streetscapes, perhaps take the photos in similar conditions/seasons.
I hate to point out the obvious but when using Google Street View, you don’t get to pick the season!
I’d take Wolfe without hesitation but if I had to live in the burbs, I’d take Montcalm over just about anything built within the last 20 or so years.
But I’ll stick to Rosemont!
If it weren’t so expensive I’d move back to my hometown of Rosemere in a flash.
I agree with Niomi’s assessment of Mayor Tremblay and the knee-jerk reaction to him that can be found on Spacing. God knows we’ve had our share of megalomaniac, corrupt, imbecile mayors, but he’s not one of them. He is an effective manager and communicator and has done some very unsexy and unpopular things that other people would have pawned off to the next administration (blvd St Laurent anyone?).
Anyhow, it would be nice to have an honest and nonpartisan look at him and what he’s done. I’m a Projet Montreal supportor myself, but demonizing Tremblay will get us NOWHERE.
Leila and Niomi:
I believe I’ve been pretty balanced when talking about the current administration. I’ve both supported and trashed them. This is the way it should be. I find not enough people criticize City Hall (how shameful is it that our City Hall is link to so many shady dealings?); or the city of Montreal itself (how shameful is it that our city is frequently filled with garbage and graffiti?)
It is not blasphemy to criticize the place you live. In fact, it is a duty.
Back to the original topic – the juxtaposition of the two photos is supposed to incite the City v. Suburbs debate. It needs to be discussed. It’s not a criticism of Tremblay whatsoever. For my part, despite the lack of plant life in Montreal, I’d still choose Wolfe. Why do you choose Montreal?
It’s a duty to criticize where you live? Oho… my view is that there is good and bad everywhere, and the more we look at the bad, the more we see that. The more we look at good, the more we see that. The actual surroundings don’t change much whether we complain or praise here on Spacing. It does make a big difference to how we see and appreciate our city. I see the same graffiti and litter and read the same newspaper articles that you do, but my impression of Montréal seems a lot more positive. I see a city that works exceedingly well on so many levels — it’s incredibly livable and enjoyable and pretty but rough-around-the-edges so quite interesting, not fancy nor grandiose tarted up but very human and creative and accepting of differences. It’s still a city, and with that comes traffic and litter and graffiti and homeless and so on. But I’ve also travelled a lot, and compared to other cities, we’re actually very well off: clean and safe and walkable with lots of pleasant tree-lined streets and parks and hardly overrun by cars (as anyone who has got stuck in a tuktuk in Bangkok traffic can confirm — it’s so hot and humid and polluted that you think you’re going to die except that you don’t of course; you just sit and suffer and suffer some more. :)
The “suburbs”, for all intents and purposes, have existed since the dawn of human civilization. You have your densely populated city core, your slightly less populated suburban “donut”, and the rural extremities.
The suburbs are a natural, organic, byproduct of urban growth. I don’t think there is anything wrong with them, nor is there a need to abolish them (not that we could do that anyway, nor should we). Some people prefer the suburbs, some people prefer the urban core, some people prefer living in rural areas. Just the way it is.
What is interesting to me is not the existence – or debate surrounding – sub/urban areas but the psychological profile of individuals who choose to live in these areas, and the back-and-forth flow of these individuals as they move from core to suburb to rural and back again.
I like Tristou’s take on things. :)
Wolfe every time. As Beeg says – the one with the sidewalk.
J’aurais pu vous fournir de meilleures photos pour vous convaincre de la laideur de Montréal mais je ne sais pas comment les mettre sur ce blog. En fait les photos que j’ai sont celles de Village Turcot, un petit hameau de l’extrême Ouest de St-Henri, coincé entre le très magnifique et très célèbre échangeur Turcot, la rue St-Rémi et la rue Notre-Dame. Plus laid que ça tu meurs et si j’étais poigné pour y habiter, je me flinguerais la cervelle. La rue Wolfe à côté de ce dont je vous parle, c’est de la petite bière…
Niomi, your understanding of urban history is very seriously flawed. The suburbs as we know them did not exist until recently in human history. You can contest this point until your face is red but it’s just a simple fact. The suburban “donut” is a post-war phenomenon (also, the way you’re using the term is a misnomer. “Donut” implies the central core has emptied out, as in many American cities after the 1960’s).
Up until recent times, “suburbs” and “faubourgs” were often as urban in character as the cities they were directly adjacent to. “Suburb” comes from the Latin “suburbium,” referring to the masses (the majority of the population) who lived beneath the city walls surrounding the seven hills of Rome in living in clusters of densely populated insulae.
For most of the time we’ve been building cities (i.e., several thousand years), cities transitioned straight to countryside. They were no more than a few square miles, huddled around convenient transportation nodes, citadels, churches, sources of water. Sometimes they were enclosed by walls. There may be small villages that surrounded major cities, but they were pretty uniformly urban or rural in character, not ‘suburban’ in the modern sense. You can see this, for example, when you drive around in Italy–major urban centers quite dramatically disappear into countryside. It’s quite stunning, actually. Little urban island after little urban island, perhaps a few houses huddled around a church off in the distance. You can see it in art: Beethoven’s pastoral works inspired by walks in the countryside just outside of Vienna.
The most immediate relative of modern suburbia didn’t really appear until the Victorian period in London. The railroads made it possible to access the City, still within the footprint of its Roman walls, from greater distances. Suburbs and planned communities were not mass produced until Levittown in 1947. Nothing that resembles modern sprawl ever existed until this time–Levittowns were totally revolutionary, particularly in terms of transportation infrastructure. Industrialization of urban development made it suddenly remarkably cheap to house vast and growing populations without creating slums.
To add to your misunderstanding: there is nothing organic about the modern suburb, quite literally *nothing*. These environments are completely master planned to the smallest detail, and entire communities are built at the same time often on clear cut land. Their street grids have nothing to do with getting from point A to point B or completely ignore existing pathways. The buildings aren’t even designed by architects, but developers select their “features” in style manuals and contractor’s catalogues.
It doesn’t take a moron to see the problems with modern suburbia (same with the state of a lot of our cities, which are far from perfect). The problem is, particularly in the US but also in Canada, the system tends to favor autocentric suburban sprawl at the expense of the cities and countryside that fall before them. In many places, there simply is not a reasonable alternative–there is no other market. Modern suburbs do not grow organically or by demand. They are brought into existence by legislation and prohibitively high costs for anything traditional or based on a different model. The worst part is, they are entirely unsustainable.
Go read a book on the topic of suburbanization, there are plenty out there.
MB, I disagree. I use the term “suburb” as meaning “outside the urban core”. Sub-urban, exactly as the word implies.
Suburbs are not unsustainable, or they wouldn’t currently exist. Obviously the suburbs are sustainable, since they are currently sustained, are they not? There is nothing wrong with suburbanization. What is wrong is the way we build structures, the materials we build with, the forms of energy we use, and the immense amount of waste that comes out of all urban areas, suburban, rural, urban, or not.
The problem is not the “suburbs” but the fact that humans are using obsolete and destructive methods to survive because our global society is still ridiculously focused on maximizing profit rather than maximizing efficiency and using state of the art technology to the planet’s best advantage. If we built the suburbs to exist in harmony with nature – and the environment – if we built our urban cores to also exist in harmony with nature, there would not be a problem with either the suburbs or with densely populated cities.
To note, I have taken two years of post-secondary studies in world history, two years of university studies in urban planning, and would have completed my bachelors in urban planning had I not switched to physics. I simply have a different way of looking at human history, and urban development. From my viewpoint, ALL human development is organic.