Sometime in the 2008-2011 timebracket, i find myself at a RuePublique/Car-Free Mile End organization planning meeting. All of us residents/merchants; some long-term OGs, some recently arrived to this thriving urban culture-meca. We're all educated and privileged (though, at the time those words were not as popular as today) and want to make our neighbourhood more walkable, cycle-friendly, "safe" and "green" (whatever that meant). In othe words: a collective worshipping of bike-lanes, community-gardens, and wide-sidewalks/no-parking zones.
A McGill prof.—Nik Luka—and some of his graduate students have laid something on the table: a plan to re-imagine St. Viateur street. The equivalent of white-lines on a mirror.
Fast-forward: i am helping set-up a couple of 'participatory planning' booths during a street festival in the summer. All smiles, all Olympico coffee and Latina sandwiches-fueled. Fast forward: some sort of City-organized town hall-style planning meeting; handshakes. Fast forward: beautifilly designed .pdf with many logos and the word community all over. Fast forward: city workers installing bike-ports and smoothing the extended sidewalks. Fast forward: eviction wave 2.0. (or 3.0?)
There's a feeling that everyone was white and educated. There's a feeling that i was white. There's a feeling that people felt i was not white.
There's a feeling—in hindsight—that the questions were skewed, that the methods were designed to create the pre-desired results, that our Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs-infused mindset couldn't allow for other imaginations beyond the physical urban design.
There's a feeling—in hindsight—that we were not asking the right questions:
housing,
(racial) justice,
access.
