Montréal Monday: new metro stations, smart cards, and shikumen

Each Monday (but this week it’s Wednesday), Spacing brings you some of the popular posts from our sister blog, Spacing Montréal. We’ll keep an eye open for topics and discussions that are pertinent to current public space issues in Toronto.

• Montréal’s STM announces that two new metro stations will be added to the transit line by 2013.

• With the launch of Montréal’s new transit smart card, Christopher DeWolf reflects on the name of the new service in Meet Opus, your new smart card. While Pamela Shapiro examines the flaws with this new system in Meet Opus: smart card “launch” part II. Some lessons for Toronto?

• The discovery of the shikumen, Cité Bourgogne, a distinctively Shanghai style of housing developed during the Taiping Rebellion to house refugees, offers an interesting look at the integration of the public and private in one space.

photo: passengers waiting for the metro in 1966; courtesy of the STM