validation | performance by shauna janssen
theatre mega-planning intimacy erasure resistance
Le Dalhousie Griffintown reimagining anOther public space
left: Dalhousie Street,1909. Fire Insurance Map,Volume One, No.13582 - 02 below: satellite version of Le Dalhousie, 2013. James Lane is perhaps the only point of reference here.
at the bottom: Corridor Dalhousie Plan of 2009
The urban public sphere is constituted differently depending on the time and condition of a day. After dark, boundaries between what is public and private slip away; weather patterns, seasons and a city’s morphology have much to do with the conditions from which public spaces emerge. The publicness of urban space reminds us of Rosalyn Deutsche and her examination of the public nature of subjectivity, where social relationships are critical to the meanings given to the public sphere: ‘What does it mean for space to be public – the space of the city, a building, exhibition, institution, or work of art?’ 1 I consider how the concept of publics, and publicness, may not always be a product of the designed built environment and ask: under what urban conditions are spaces being re-imagined as public? In September 2009, the City of Montréal announced preliminary plans for a regional bus corridor expected to move approximately 1400 buses and 42,000 commuters daily between Montréal’s south shore and the city centre. This bus corridor coincided with the city’s plan to revitalise its harbour front and to reorganise the Bonaventure Expressway, one of Montréal’s major transportation routes on and off the island. The site of the bus corridor was on the remains of Dalhousie Street, located in Griffintown, one of Montréal’s former working class neighbourhoods. Located west of Old Montréal, a popular tourist destination, and just north of the rapidly gentrifying Lachine Canal district, Griffintown is resonant with Canada’s pre-industrial history. In the nineteenth century Dalhousie appeared as a short street running four blocks along a north-south axis. It was transformed from a street into a cul-de-sac with the construction of a Canadian National Railway viaduct in the 1940s. The Dalhousie cul-de-sac now sits between the massive concrete wall of the railway viaduct to the east and to the west, the façade of the iconic, historic, nineteenth century New City Gas buildings.
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1 Rosalyn Deutsche. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998
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