Parc Lafontaine, Montréal
When your walk home from work goes through this place, life ain’t bad.
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The island of Montreal The escape route (via the one major south shore bridge not in the midst of falling apart) 90km away from the island of Montreal In the annals of regrettable architecture, Hydro-Quebec’s Montreal headquarters must certainly be reserved a place of honour. Completed in 1962 to house Quebec’s government-owned electric utility, its wide-bodied ode to statism dominates the eastern edge of downtown and looms over the city’s small but lively Chinatown. The building’s bland appearance, however, belies the reality that [...] As the human species becomes ever more urbanized, the very concept of eco-systems grows faint in many minds. Our landscapes are heavily manufactured and manipulated, our access to basic resources and sustinence filtered through complex industrial systems of our own design. Growing up in an urbanized reality (where the difference between city and country life [...] Growing up in Quebec, I’ve always thought of the province’s politics as, how can I put it most politely, ’special’. With its endless linguistic battles, arcane language laws and nationalist bickering, La Belle Province always managed to make its neighbouring anglophone jurisdictions appear as beacons of normalcy. Tussles over which flag flies where and how [...] Alberta: home of the Calgary Stampede, the Canadian Rockies and even the World’s Largest Dinosaur. Oh yeah, and also a massive environmental fiasco in the tar sands development (or “oil” sands, depending on which lobby group you work for). The growth of this energy-intensive and environmentally destructive oil extraction industry has been a hot topic nationally, fueling [...] In our time of economic morosity and environmental distress, one could be forgiven for musing that our current industrial civilization is on a slow and largely clueless path of decline into the long good night, as promises of material progress and redemptive consumption struggle to keep ahead of their growing self-contradictions. For some reason, billboards plying [...] Given the inordinate amount of media attention lavished on Beijing over the past few years, it is not surprising that the city’s traffic congestion has gained a certain level of global infamy. During the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, Beijing’s clogged transportation arteries became veritable stars in their own right, receiving a good [...] |
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