Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The construction of a new district on a former industrial wasteland in Montreal was an opportunity to occupy a non-place that William H. Whyte would name “huge reservoir of space yet untapped by imagination.” This transitory approach, initiated in 2015, aimed to initiate a discussion with residents of the surroundings and make the urban transformation more acceptable. In the last four years, the Virage-Campus MIL site managed by MTL ville en mouvement organization has experimented with the mechanisms of occupation, mediation, construction and reflection in order to introduce the notion of “public” in the space. In this sense, we can approach it as a prototype (Harop (2015) which is defined as an “incremental iterative refinement” (Buxton, 2007). It is an “embedded process” (Zhang, 2014) that underpins an investment of meaning and a change of perception. The site is constantly changing, the expectations and appropriations of citizens evolve at the same pace. He collects the wills, the marginal practices, he relies on experimentation, each action contributes to build a thought, a place, to take a stand. It is the process which counts, rather than the finality of the object or the product, the political action rather than urban form. The study addresses four years of space practices and urban tactics, theorizes on the notion of prototype, demonstrates how the project has the power to influence our way of conceiving the city and the public space and concludes by analyzing the reception of the project, its stakes, challenges, and opportunities.