Montreal is alive and kicking: Mayrand
Urbanist Karel Mayrand makes a vigorous and poetic defense of Montreal in L’actualité, brushing aside the doomsayers and laughing off the fuss about bike paths. I kept wanting to quote chunks of it here, but it’s all worth reading in context.
Ian 22:47 on 2020-09-14 Permalink
Playing the percentages game works both ways. Weak arguments that we probably wouldn’t be having if bus & metro service was better.
Meezly 08:55 on 2020-09-15 Permalink
I’m fairly cynical, but I found this quite heartfelt, optimistic and inspiring. Thanks Kate!
Jack 13:17 on 2020-09-15 Permalink
A friend recommended this text in March when the lockdown hit, “The Diaries of Samuel Pepys”. The author a mid level British civil servant (Admiralty) described the pandemic he was living through. The wealthy abandoning the City, decrying its future. The poor bearing the brunt of the suffering and death. Municipal government authorities struggling with crisis after crisis. The absolute hit on mental health, it was written during the bubonic plague almost 500 years ago. Humans are pretty consistent in their fears and irrationality in the face of things they do not understand……hence bike paths.
Kate 13:35 on 2020-09-15 Permalink
There’s a passage from Pepys, whom I’ve only read brief passages from, where he describes walking past a popular inn during an epidemic, lots of people eating and drinking inside. He misses that kind of social scene and would love to go in, but he knows he can’t risk it and that those people are being really stupid. (But he stayed in London throughout the epidemic, rather than fleeing to the countryside like many people of his class.)
Ian 08:16 on 2020-09-16 Permalink
A more optimistic take on it, from 1664 –
“a near View of Death would soon reconcile Men of good Principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy Situation in Life, and our putting these Things far from us, that our Breaches are fomented, ill Blood continued, Prejudices, Breach of Charity and of Christian Union so much kept and so far carry’d on among us, as it is: Another Plague Year would reconcile all these Differences, a close conversing with Death, or the Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes, than those which we look’d on Things with before”
― Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year