mtl3p

This is one of my favorite blogs, and I have mainly kept it to myself. It’s about the authors relationship with the Turcot Interchange area of Montreal.

One of his last posts is about our need to learn from failed philosophies/ideologies of infrastructure:

While other cities are creating a sustainable future by envisioning and developing alternative means of transportation and protecting existing as well as creating new green spaces, Montreal seems to be settling into a hopeless repetition of Modernist planning. The golf course around the airport is being dug up and the new attitude seems to be that if you throw a few shrubs on a thing it somehow gets better.

The Turcot Interchange, however, is a glorious example of Modernist planning. It is also one of Canada’s strongest icons in transportation. To level it is like turning the Eiffel Tower into a 3 storey boutique with an observation deck. And placing grass, bushes, and trees around it is simply window dressing the issues and actually promotes the insane idea that having thousands and thousands of fossil fuel burning vehicles driving into the city core everyday is somehow a good thing.

Right after reading that I was listening to the Current on CBC (link to the summary will work tomorrow) and Naomi Klein being interviewed about her latest book . She was talking about an issue we’re becoming very familiar with here in Quebec - failing infrastructure. The idea that our society creating an infrastructural crisis in order to privatize infrastructure instead of re-investing to support, repair and extend the big wave of public infrastructure we created 40-70 years ago.

I had forgotten about a text that I worked on 6 months ago about Oppidan’s goal being to advocate for an infrastructural view of the technology (including soft / virtual / cyber technology) that we’re creating and then advocating the public interest of that infrastructure. I’m looking forward to sharing it soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under infrastructure, oppidan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.