Urbanism

Just minutes from the heart of Old Quebec, where the historic lower town slips into a modern quarter with high tech companies, art galleries, and a restaurant that serves as Quebec City’s China Town; a concrete highway runs over the city like a coffin lid. Supported by massive concrete pillars, this highway cuts the two parts of the city off from each other in a classic example of awful automobile-centric urban planning. Anyone who thinks Vancouver needs a highway through the city should take note. Fortunately, art came to the rescue. Working with local street kids, a number of Quebec City artists covered the pillars with gorgeous, colourful, murals. In the old city itself, la fresque de Québécois, a mural depicting famous Quebecers throughout history has turned an eyesore into a tourist attraction. This strategy of urban recovery through murals was inspired by similar projects in Lyon - the fresque des Québécois was modeled on the fresque des Lyonnais Célèbres, and completed with the help of a group of artists from Lyon – and the city has about a dozen murals. As in Quebec, the murals were used to liven up ugly walls and grey neighbourhoods.

This is the fresque des Lyonnais Célèbres – the mural of famous Lyonnais – which includes some Roman emperor, and the Lumiere brothers, who built the first cinema projector. This mural wraps around the corner of the building as well; I particularly like the café that’s been painted on the ground floor. This mural is right in the heart of the city, just off the Saône river, and there is a similar one just down the street where all the people have been replaced by books.

This mural, one of my favorites, is a lovely testament to France’s love affair with literature. Where an American or Canadian politician might prepare for politics by burnishing his credentials as a businessman or as a lawyer, a prospective French politician writes books. (Which, in a society where politics is more about ideas than results, makes perfect sense.) Anyways, both in Paris and in Lyon the banks of the rivers are garnished with outdoor booksellers on sunny Saturday afternoons, and here in Lyon, where a windowless grey wall once stood, a wall of painted books now hovers benevolently over the booksellers.

But the most interesting murals are in a section of the city called the Quartier États-Unis, needless to say this neighbourhood was not named recently. It was in fact planned, built, and named, at the beginning of the twentieth century. An urbanist named Tony Garnier thought that the old city of Lyon was dirty, dark, and infested with pollution and people. So he planned a huge neighbourhood that was supposed to be a model of livable urban space for the future. Since then a number of murals have been painted in the neighbourhood including this one that depicts the way Garnier perceived Lyon.

This is another favorite of mine, I love the dual concept, the way that there is a painting of a riotous, industrial, smog filled, city on the upper part of the wall, and then a little wink-wink allusion that this is in fact a wall through the traditional style posters painted on the bottom half of the mural (reproductions of which litter the more touristy areas of Paris, particularly Montmartre). As you might have guessed from the name of the neighbourhood, Garnier had a somewhat utopist sensibility (although the term utopia loses some of its bite in such a determinedly unpragmatic society, if all policy comes from theory you may as well have a hopeful theory). His original plan envisioned a massive neighbourhood of residential buildings, schools and community centers, and industry. Many of the murals in the neighbourhood are actually just paintings of his architectural drawings:

If you look carefully at the top photo you can see that it is an
industrial plant, complete with smoke stacks and tubing. Such worshipful industrialism has tended to be the exclusive province of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world and angry Russian émigrés, I doubt that Ayn Rand sells much in France, but I imagine that at the turn of the century industry was still seen as an opportunity for huge progress, both technologically and socially. The high level of planning is however completely within character. I’ve been reading Paris to the Moon lately, a book in which Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker tries to dissect the joys, frustrations, commonalities, and essential differences between the U.S. and France (although New York and Paris are not exactly typical of their countries). At one point in discussing the theoretical approach he says, quite accurately I think, that it’s not quite that they can’t see the individual trees because they are only looking at the forest, but rather that they can’t see the forest because it’s covered by the map. Well in Lyon they’ve actually managed to create a physical manifestation of theory worship by covering a neighbourhood in murals of architectural plans. The irony is that if the plan had been successful, if the neighbourhood had flourished, they wouldn’t have needed to revitalize it with murals.

If this neighbourhood had been in North America the revitalization plan would have involved opening more stores, installing brighter lights, organizing an ethnic street festival and hoping that a Starbucks might set up and then the whole place could gentrify. The French approach was to invite various artists from around the world to create a mural of their vision of the ideal city. The mural on the left represents the ideal Egyptian city, and is a combination of pharaonic symbolism and silver lines meant to evoke microchips. The mural to the right is a vision of the ideal Indian city, and although it is supposed to represent three essences of life (something like culture, tradition, and religion) the little stick figures look for all the world to me like archaic video game characters that I need to jump over or shoot with my laser gun. The final fresque represents the ideal Russian city. The colourful chaos of this mural was a deliberate reaction by the artist against soviet style planned building, which was uniform, concrete, and grey. The mural actually reminds me of parts of Lyon: jumbles of pastel coloured houses piled up around each other like the end of a game Jenga, and the blue river snaking through the city, small enough to be part of daily life. But it is emphatically not like the Quartier États-Unis. Unlike the neighbourhood, the murals succeed because they are unique, colourful, and joyful.













Just outside of this area, off of a major road, three murals look down on a 5 way intersection cluttered with cars, construction materials, a tramway line, and telephone wire; they form an entry gate of sorts to the Quartier États-Unis. The murals are spectacular and odd: a futuristic glass and metal triangular apartment building, a reproduction of a 16th century Dutch masterpiece, and what seems to be a joyful cartoon version of the Dutch masterpiece. The masterpiece’s subject, the tower of Babel, seems dissonant with the celebration of Garnier the urbanist’s utopian vision. Is the mural an intended dig at the neighbourhood, a stridently humanist celebration of man’s potential? I have no idea. Regardless, this cautionary tale about ideal cities and man’s efforts at grand projects is a perfect front door decoration to the ‘United States Quarter’.