Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:40 on 2020-06-05 Permalink Reply  

• Alex L 10:46 on 2020-06-05 Permalink

  Well, I guess some people are stuck in the past.

• Jonathan 13:28 on 2020-06-05 Permalink

  I wouldn’t expect any less of them.

• Faiz imam 14:06 on 2020-06-05 Permalink

  A drive-in cinema is basically a parking lot with a screen, its easy to put up and easy to take down. Seems like a fine temporary feature, its not like there’s much else to do.

  Im more interested in what the long term future of malls, and Royalmount in particular, is.

  So many activities in those places rely on dense crowds and closed spaces. all of it will have to be rethought. We wont have much of that for years.

  I suspect many of royalmounts luxury activities are no longer viable. Ditto the office space. I’m hoping they will turn that into more residential and social uses, and make it a better more organic community. This is a huge chance at reimagining the site, if they want to do it.

• Brett 21:16 on 2020-06-05 Permalink

  What are the chances that they just give up on the project entirely?

• Michael Black 22:25 on 2020-06-05 Permalink

  I thought this was about a future drive-in, but it’s opening in a few weeks. It’s about the now, something people can do safely now. No different from interest in drive-ins that still exist, or a temporary drive-in set up.in Dorval.

  And yes, it’s happening because it doesn’t require much, so itcan open now when it’s needed, and taken down later if things change.

• david33 11:11 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  “So many activities in those places rely on dense crowds and closed spaces. all of it will have to be rethought. We wont have much of that for years.”

  This is common wisdom at the moment, but I’m very skeptical.

  The Asian cities that have suffered past viral outbreaks didn’t really change all that much beyond hygiene practices, etc.once the threat had passed. Malls and markets are as popular as ever, nobody bats an eye about attending rock concerts and sporting events, people cram into the metros. Even the reopened post Covid-19 cities in Asia and elsewhere dumped even basic social distancing pretty quickly – they’re not even wearing masks on the crowded Tokyo metros.

  If you think that North Americans in particular will react differently, probably the answer is that they will, but in the opposite direction. Look at all those protesters completely ignoring social distancing – and aside from all the looters, they’re in the cohort most likely to take the threat seriously. They simply burst out of doors, decided the Covid-19 was old had and that they wanted something more exciting to do, namely, protesting. And if – as many suspect – we see no significant uptick in cases tied to protesting, precautions such as mask wearing will likely go right out the window pretty shortly. For young people, these protests are sort of like a religious/social thing, and they’re great opportunities to meet people – Covid-19 protocols get in the way.

  Citiy Lab has a good rundown of the effects of past outbreaks in an article published in May, and there’s a der Spiegel one too. Aside from certain traumatized people, there’s no indication that people avoided “dense crowds and closed spaces . . . for years.” The City Lab article mentioned that in HK with SARS, the masks were gone just a month after the pandemic was declared “over.”

  Anyway, we’ll see what happens of course.

  I’d love it if this Royalmount mall project was killed, but I don’t see that happening because people are permanently scared of malls. Malls might die for other reasons – online shopping, changing tastes, etc.

• Tee Owe 11:34 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  David – ‘these protests are sort of like a religious/social thing, and they’re great opportunities to meet people’ – this is trolling. Any meaningful points you make are lost as a result, we only see the provocation. If you want to be taken seriously, then be serious.

• david33 11:48 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  Well, these things are like a church gathering, I was thinking.

  But if you want serious, the idea that anti-racism is the latest American revival movement – what Yglesias calls The Great Awokening – is hardly scoff-worthy. It’s probably best articulated by an African American philosophy professor out of Columbia University in NYC: https://www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion

• Michael Black 12:15 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 took place at the tail end of the 1918 Flu epedimic.

  I saw a story about it last year, maybe at the CBC. Or maybe The Walrus.

  Apparently one rallying point was on land the cousins had sold to Winnipeg on condition that it be used for public good.

• Chris 14:52 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  david33, that McWhorter article was a great read, thanks for sharing.

• david33 19:25 on 2020-06-06 Permalink

  Yeah, the closing paragraphs drive it home, especially for Canadians, who are masters of this:

  “And too often, Antiracism doctrine loses sight of what actually helps black people. Ritual “acknowledgment” of White Privilege is, ultimately, for white people to feel less guilty. Social change hardly requires such self-flagellation by the ruling class. Similarly, black America needs no grand, magic End of Days in order to succeed. A compact program of on-the-ground policy changes could do vastly more than articulate yearnings for a hypothetical psychological revolution among whites that no one seriously imagines could ever happen in life as we know it.

  Antiracism as a religion, despite its good intentions, distracts us from activism in favor of a kind of charismatic passivism. One is to think, to worship, to foster humility, to conceive of our lives as mere rehearsal for a glorious finale, and to encourage others to do the same. This kind of thinking may have its place in a human society. But helping black people succeed in the only real world we will ever know is not that place.

  Real people are having real problems, and educated white America has been taught that what we need from them is willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history. Naciremian Antiracism has its good points, but it is hopefully a transitional stage along the way to something more genuinely progressive.”