Heritage and ecological transition: urban and memorial perspectives with Sophie Van Neste

On February 1, 2023, the City Talk “Heritage and Green Transition: Battle of Virtues or Happy Alliance?” was held in collaboration with the McCord-Stewart Museum. To further reflect on this topic, we sat with Sophie Van Neste, one of our speakers, associate professor, and researcher in urban studies at INRS, to discuss sustainable development and her involvement in the East Lachine area in recent years.

In your presentation at theCity Talk, you discussed the relevance of urban memory for the adaptation of cities to climate change. Can you remind us of the main considerations of this "carrier" alliance?  

I believe that heritage and ecological transition can indeed form an extremely promising alliance: urban history allows us to better understand the challenges of present action and its legacies in the future. 

The Lachine-Est site, a future Ville de Montréal eco-neighborhood in which our Labo Climat Montréal team has been involved, provides several good examples (see results here and book coming soon!). The redevelopment of urban wastelands, such as this area, into eco-districts is one of the city's strategies for taking action in favor of the socio-ecological transition and adaptation to climate change. 

The Lachine-Est sector in particular is an area of high heritage value. This is what gives color to the eco-neighborhood. This element was very transparent in the planning and consultation exercise. It helped to give an identity and a sense of place.  

For me, the area is also rich in intangible heritage: the history and memory of urban transformations. Lachine-Est is emblematic of great transformations in urban infrastructures. Through its industrialization and de-industrialization, its built environment and its transportation and water infrastructures have been dramatically altered. By recalling the repercussions of the evolution of the Lachine-Est sector, we can better measure the socio-technical systems that have changed and those that need to be transformed, the impacts on the neighbourhoods and their residents, and the legacies we are leaving for future generations. 

History can help us better understand the challenges of adapting cities in response to climate change. Hydro infrastructures are a good example. The city was built with the development of a huge network of old waterways and underground sewers to take wastewater, which threatened public health, out of the city. Stormwater was added to these pipes, producing a tremendous amount of water. Today, these same pipes, which are often several decades old, overflow during heavy rain events, flooding the basements of homes, streets, and sometimes even the metro, and pollute the waterways. This is getting worse year after year with climate change, as the amount of precipitation, and particularly short episodes of heavy rainfall, increases significantly.  

Municipalities are working to renew the approach. Little by little, a paradigm shift is taking place. Since we cannot do without these pipes, there is a growing desire to encourage the infiltration of water into the soil, rather than necessarily channelling it and discharging it kilometres away. There is also a desire for basins and planted areas to combine this new water management with higher quality public spaces, developing a different relationship with water. This new model brings up many challenges, notably for governance, on the silos to be broken between departments. Engineers must work with urban planners and architects and be attentive to the needs of local communities by asking certain questions. For example, how can we ensure that these new surface developments are distributed equitably and meet the need for renewal without increasing rents in less affluent areas? We see that a whole new set of players need to have a voice in the matter. 

According to you, there is a strong pedagogical potential to better understand the history of infrastructures, such as hydro infrastructures in an area like East Lachine. Can you give us concrete examples of how remembering the legacies of the past can improve our ability to act for the socio-ecological transition in the future? 

For me, two elements in particular demonstrate the links between urban memory and the ecological transition: the pedagogical potential and the recognition - and reparation - of past mistakes.

First, place memory tells and popularizes the story of urban infrastructure and its desired transformation today, in particular for urban sites that have witnessed these changes. It shows the changing uses and functions over time, marking the challenges faced through the ages, and the legacies (positive and negative) that each era leaves behind, which we must come to terms with. For example, the historical role of water in the city could be highlighted in some of the iconic places of this transformation, in the heart of or around the future Lachine East eco-district. One can think of the old Saint-Pierre River buried and transformed into a sewer system, as put forward by the association La Balade de la Rivière Saint-Pierre during the consultation of the Office de consultation publique de Montréal, and as beautifully shown by Concordia's Ethnography lab in their map of the Ghost River. Currently, it is the return of water to the surface that is put forward to combat climate change, with retention basins in parks and ditches on the edges of sidewalks.

It will be recalled that the agglomeration of Lachine prospered through industrial development. Its infrastructure (the Lachine Canal and the Canadian Pacific Railway) has been associated with prosperity, work and progress (Poitras and Aubry, 2004). Currently, the waterfront is valued for its potential for real estate development, as well as green and recreational space - while some are concerned about the preservation of the public character of the waterfront and the affordability of housing. Parks Canada (owner of the Lachine Canal National Historic Site) is one of the most vocal proponents of "green infrastructure" (vegetated features such as wetlands) in the future Lachine East eco-district. Parks Canada is asking that these facilities be able to capture stormwater and its pollutants before it is discharged into the Lachine Canal in order to ensure the preservation of its recreational and tourist use. 

The Lachine Canal and the nearby St. Lawrence Seaway, built in 1959, have changed the area’s relationship to water by emphasizing its potential for development and strategic transportation. However, the construction of the canal transformed the hydrography and use of the site by Indigenous communities. The Seaway also resulted in the removal of part of the village of Kahnawake (located across from East Lachine) and direct access to the river, reducing about 10% of the reserve’s territory, already affected by the construction of the Honoré-Mercier Bridge in 1934 (Rueck 2011)[2].  

In short, there is a potential in the Lachine East sector to make visible this memory which, far from being a simple history of progress and environmental improvement, also shows the different issues and injustices produced by urban development choices. This history deserves to be recognized and told, through the development and design of the site, and in the current redesign of the nearby Lachine Museum, already planned in collaboration with the Mohawk community of Kahnawake.

This brings us to the second important contribution of urban memory, which recognizes and acknowledges the inequalities created by the legacies of the past to help develop more effective and fairer choices of socio-ecological transition measures and reparative changes. It is the legacies of past development that have settled in urban space that reveal some of the greatest inequalities in the face of climate change. Specifically, the most vulnerable populations, especially during extreme heat waves, are those living in poorly built or polluted environments, with inadequate access to services, cool spaces, and user-friendly mobility. These vulnerabilities to climate change are closely tied to the history of city building. Yet these historical factors are not yet recognized as guiding priorities for climate change adaptation. In developing the city, the constructed urban structure has created vulnerabilities to climate change, a settlement that, without urban memory, may seem natural and unchanging. 

In a recent review of the literature for just climate adaptation submitted to the British Academy, Vanesa Castan Broto wrote:

“Urban adaptation does not happen in a vacuum. One insight of recent research literature is that the built environment constrains and shapes the extent to which urban adaptation is possible. History is a central factor shaping adaptation possibilities-[...] historical processes reveal the different ways in which social and political conditions undermine resilience over time [3]. »

In the case of the planning of the Lachine East eco-neighbourhood, there is significant valorization of the existing industrial-built heritage. However, there is minimal attention being paid to the darker sides of its history in the design of the adaptation to climate change. The closing of the Lachine Canal in favour of the St. Lawrence Seaway led to the deindustrialization of the area. This obviously had significant social and urban repercussion on the Lachine and Saint-Pierre neighbourhoods. These include poverty, loss of vitality, demographic decline, particularly caused by the arrival of the highway in the former industrial and working-class sectors, and the Saint-Pierre interchange (in 1966), directly adjacent to the main commercial artery and residential streets of Ville Saint-Pierre. 

The legacy of uneven urban development means that some areas near the new Lachine East eco-neighbourhood have poorer air quality and lack services, shops, and access to public transportation. This is all the more problematic for residents during heat waves, for example. These elements were clearly expressed during our survey with Lachine community organizations and residents of the Saint-Pierre neighbourhood (Labo Climat Montréal 2021). The presence of the Saint-Pierre interchange and the design of the neighbourhood’s accesses focused solely on vehicles also brings a high volume of cars and trucks, which causes more road deaths and extremely dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. These conditions encourage car use and make those who do not have access to cars more vulnerable – one resident told us about her habit of going to the pharmacy during a heat wave to cool off in the air conditioning, after a nearly 30-minute walk! 

I therefore believe that valuing urban memory and local heritage is crucial for a social approach to climate change adaptation. It allows us to identify the adaptation priorities to be targeted, as well as key players we should support (especially community members) and those to be called upon – especially those in the field of transportation and mobility – for a transformation of the territory that will improve both present and future living conditions. 

Finally, in connection with our theme “heritage and sustainable transition,” do you have any suggestions for inspiring reading?

These works allow us to better understand the links between the challenges of adapting to the existing impacts of climate change (increased precipitation, flooding, scorching heat) with the history of cities, in terms of their physical and social infrastructures, which change over time. 

To watch the Urban Exchange “Heritage and Green Transition: Battle of Virtues or Happy Alliance?"click here.

Sophie L. Van Neste is an Associate Professor in Urban Studies at INRS and holds the Canada Research Chair in Urban Climate Action. She conducts research on collective action in the face of urban climate change, particularly from the perspective of transformations to infrastructure, urban governance, and citizen and community initiatives. She was the lead researcher of Labo Climat Montréal (2019-2021), an action research project on climate change adaptation in the redevelopment of the East Lachine sector in Montreal. She also conducts research on blue-green infrastructure and citizen participation, heat wave adaptation, and is involved in partnerships with the likes of Transition en commun working towards a socio-ecological transition. 

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[1]Claire Poitras and Jean-Christian Aubry, "Étude historique du développement urbain. L'axe du canal de Lachine - partie Lachine et LaSalle". Report for the Service de la mise en valeur du territoire et du patrimoine de Montréal, Montreal, Institut national de la recherche scientifique - Urbanisation, Culture et Société, 2004.

[2] Rueck,Daniel. 2011. "When bridges become barriers: Montreal and Kahnawake Mohawk, Territory". In Metropolitan Natures: environmental Histories of Montreal, pp. 228-244. See also his book "The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada", Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press (The Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History), 2021, 336 pages.

[3] Vanesa Castán Broto, "Just Climate Adaptation in Cities: Reflections for an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda", The British Academy's COP26 Briefings Series, 2021, p.6 https://bit.ly/40SMwK6