Journal

Pointe Claire Wild Garden

7/29/2016

Peter Graham and his family have been creating a naturalized yard at their suburban home in Pointe Claire over the past 17 years. Now, the City has decreed that it must be destroyed. Peter has launched a petition and publishes updates on his blog, www.lawnborg.com.

Try to think of an urban environment that does not actively prescribe what bodies can and cannot do. Pedestrians must learn to read the signs to know when they can walk and when they cannot. Modern architecture smoothens human experience, creating a world with fewer legitimate behavioural options. Even children’s playgrounds socialize our youth to understand that swings are for swinging, slides for sliding. Much of our early educational experience is focused on learning how to read and comply with the exigencies of particular material environments. Like Harry Potter’s ability to speak parseltongue, the material environment teaches us to speak and understand a language without any awareness or our fluency. Classrooms mean eyes to the front and pay attention. Modern landscapes may not be prisons, but they are clearly on the spectrum.

Photo by Peter Graham

Wild spaces are full of surprise and dynamism. The obvious floral change and transformation from the first crocus of spring, to the kaleidoscopic cacophony of summer and fall colours, to the first blanket of snow in late fall actually continues in other faunal forms throughout the winter as various animals become engaged with different food sources through the season. The male cardinals’ knocking ironweed seeds onto the snow for their mates seems to result in more ironweed the following summer. When redpolls visit the seed heads of thistles or black-eyed Susans in winter, they always bring grey birch seedlings with them for the spring. This rhythmic and evolving process contrasts markedly with the modern ideal of changeless landscapes seemingly composed as postcard images, but not necessarily to be lived in. Even normal weathering is problematized in the modern capitalist social imagination. No matter. More extreme weather simply means more sales of roof shingles, air conditioners, and plane tickets to friendlier climes. And it means more slavish devotion to behavioural coda we are neither fully aware of nor fully able to consciously understand.

Bodies move differently in wild spaces. But brambles or stinging nettles are suggestive of how to move your body in a different way than the way a television set invites you to pay attention. Wild spaces put your senses and synapses to work in a way that is qualitatively different from simply following the orders being barked at you from a mowed lawn, sidewalk, or shopping mall. Wild spaces welcome you like a family reunion in the country in an era when family members could not always be counted on fingers and toes. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces are everywhere, some familiar and some you will be meeting for the first time. Time spent in wild spaces always leaves me feeling connected to something bigger than myself, but bigger in a familial, partnering sense, not the oppressive sense of an overwhelming authority that can be neither challenged nor overcome.

Photo by Shirley

I have no doubt that researchers will soon expand Richard Louv’s term, ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ into a well-defined syndrome of psychological disorder. The origin of the pathology will be located in the oppressive but normalized man-made habitats that dictate the peculiar ways we can and cannot dwell in those spaces. I will close this reflection with words from Richard Louv (2012). The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in Virtual Age:

Several years ago, while researching Last Child in the Woods, I visited Southwood Elementary, the grade school I attended when I was a boy growing up in Raytown, Missouri. There, I asked a classroom of children about their relationship with nature. Many of them offered the now-typical response: they preferred playing video games; they favoured indoor activities – and when they were outside, they played soccer or some other adult-organized sport. But one fifth-grader, described by her teacher as “our little poet,” wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, said, “when I’m in the woods, I feel like I’m in my mother’s shoes.” To her, nature represented beauty, refuge, and something else. “It’s so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. For me, it’s completely different there,” she said. “It’s your own time. Sometimes I go there when I’m mad – and then, just with the peacefulness, I’m better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn’t even know why.” She paused. “I had a place. There was a big waterfall and creek on one side of it. I’d dug a big hole there, and sometimes I’d take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lay down in the hole and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I’d fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day.” The young poet’s face flushed. Her voice thickened. “And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.” (1)

Photo by Peter Graham

Our society must do more than talk about the importance of nature; it must ensure that people in every kind of neighbourhood have everyday access to natural spaces, places, and experiences. To make that happen, this truth must become self-evident: We can truly care for nature and ourselves only if we see ourselves and nature as inseparable, only if we love ourselves as part of nature, only if we believe that human beings have a right to the gifts of nature.
The little girl in Raytown may not have a specific right to that particular tree in her chosen woods, but she does have the inalienable right to be with other life; to liberty, which cannot be realized under protective house arrest; and to the pursuit of happiness, which is made whole by the natural world.
So do you. (2)

My garden and I grow together. I bring some seeds of asters, cup plant, and fox sedges. The garden brings goldfinches and chickadees. I am the garden and the garden is me.

(1) Louv, Richard. The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in Virtual Age. Chapel Hill, N.C: Algonquin Books, 2012. p. 266-7.
(2) Louv, Richard. The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in Virtual Age. Chapel Hill, N.C: Algonquin Books, 2012. p. 269.

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The ethics of accessing wild city spaces

9/20/2015

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By Kathleen Vaughan

Recently, I have been more concerned than ever with questions of our (humans’) rights to engage with our wild city spaces. As an artist who creates textile maps of my walks in urban woods and green areas, I love our wildish spaces – the nearby forests, our cities’ underused riverbanks and ravines, the terrains vagues and vacant lots.

Detail, Nel mezzo del cammin: Glendon Forest (2014-2015), hand piecing, digital and hand embroidery on wool and silk.

I walk these as regularly and as often as I can, and have had a special longing for their relatively benign otherness since I was a child. What a pleasure and relief to find space that isn’t all done up. Isn’t meticulously tended. Doesn’t show the imprimatur of the human hand.

But of course it does.

As a species, we have had an impact on all parts of this globe. Within the cities that I know best, Montreal and Toronto, the woods and green spaces can be either tended and protected, abandoned and ignored, or under threat from development, but still, the growth there represents human histories. My series of textile maps, Nel mezzo del cammin, tells some of these stories using textile piecing and digital and hand embroidery. Generally, I see my work as aesthetic advocacy, arguing for the preservation of urban green spaces and inviting others to enjoy them. Adapting the motto of the late urban adventurer Ninjalicious, my attitude to the urban wild has been “access all areas.”

From this perspective of human entitlement and desire, I was particularly concerned to discover in November 2014 that one of my favourite Toronto woods, the Glendon Forest, had been closed to foot traffic to allow for re-naturalization.

I’d walked the Glendon Forest regularly with my dog, Auggie (1998-2009), when we’d lived in Toronto. Part of the Glendon Campus of York University, this was the first large wooded terrain that I came to know intimately and well, exploring all its back trails on both sides of the Upper Don River. Over countless hours, I encountered the occasional person and dog, but more often was gifted with sightings of beaver, deer, ducks, geese and of course the small mammals that populate city parks. I was surprised by plants, too: bright red trilliums or ‘wake robin’ blooming in the spring, and in the fall, a beautiful silvery vine growing over a stand of sumacs. With research I learned that this was the invasive pest, Dog Strangling Vine or vincetoxicum rossicum, poisonous to the monarch butterflies who mistake it for nourishing milkweed and a colonizing threat to our green spaces and the plants it enmeshes in its fibres. I was both horrified and appreciative of my new learning.

Close-up of dog strangling vine on sumac, Glendon Forest, 2014. Photo: Kathleen Vaughan

Last fall, six years after my move to Montreal and the end of my regular walks in the Glendon Forest, I returned to find the dog strangling vine even more pervasive than when I left. Yes, I used my knowledge of the back trails to gain access to the closed-off portion of the woods and disobeyed the prohibition to entry. I had been longing for these woods for years, wanting to reconnect with the trails I’d known and loved in an earlier version of life. This time, the dog I took with me was Baloo, Auggie’s worthy successor. Of course, walking with an off-leash dog is even more ethically complex, since their energetic runs can damage undergrowth and disrupt wild creatures. But aren’t they, too, entitled to space to run?

Once inside the fencing, I found that indeed the Glendon Forest was re-naturalizing, as intended. Some footpaths had become overgrown. An old quarry road that once provided a broad walkway down the escarpment had fallen to pieces and was no longer passable. Unchecked erosion along a steep riverbank abruptly ended one small trail. As I attempted to follow my favourite route, I was blocked again and again by the re-surging forest. I drew on my knowledge of alternative walkways until finally there were no more alternatives. I had to retrace my steps.

I’m conflicted about all of it – the idealization of a ‘re-naturalized’ state, the efficacy of closing off the Forest, the possibility that neglecting it actually promotes dereliction and invasion by noxious species, the determination that some species are noxious, and my and others’ use of the space, regardless of the ‘rules’. What is right in this complex, entwined posthuman reality?

Glendon Forest and Lachine Canal installed at the Centre culturel Georges Vanier, September 2015.

These questions went into creating my Glendon Forest textile map, essentially a story of love and loss, prohibition and transgression, in this particular urban wild. Into the larger pieced fabric that represents the Glendon Forest and surrounding city, among the machine stitching that duplicates prohibiting and explanatory signage, I hand embroidered two trails: in yellow, the lost idealized favourite of the past; and in deep rose, the circuitous ramble and about faces of last November. I hope this artwork conveys some of the complexities of wildness in the city, as I continue to struggle to find answers to the ethical questions it raises for me.

The Glendon Forest and three other of my textile maps of walks in urban woods are on view at the Centre culturel Georges Vanier until September 27, 2015, as Tissus urbains / Urban cloth.
2450, rue Workman, Montreal, QC H3J 1L8

Kathleen Vaughan
www.akaredhanded.com

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The Former Augustin Cantin Shipyard

7/1/2015

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Submitted by Giles Hawkins, Montreal resident

On the north side of the Lachine Canal, somewhere between Charlevoix and des Seigneurs and just behind the Robin Hood silos on Notre-Dame, there is a large area behind chain link fence that was once a series of slipways and dry docks comprising the Augustin Cantin Shipyard. The site has long been abandoned and the slips filled in.

THEN: This is how the site appeared in 1875

NOW: View of the same site today from the south side of the Canal

Notice the curved concrete embankment here. This was once the entrance
to the dry dock and is now filled with rubble:

Camp site. Do not disturb!

The site was more easily accessed a few years ago and at all seasons of the year I regularly walked through the site with my dog from Charlevoix to des Seigneurs, but last year the fences were rebuilt and improved. Combined with the nearby rush to gentrify, condo-ize and art-gallery-ize the area, access has now become now more difficult. This is not to say, however, that the site cannot be accessed. On a recent visit I found a neatly cut hole in the fencing on the west side near the Canal.

Enter at your own risk!

Hole cut in fence

The site is partially open, partially wooded with chokecherry, sycamore and poplar. The nearby presence of grain silos and the rail line that supplies them means there is a ready food supply of spilled grain for the abundant bird life here, including the barn swallow (hirundo rustica) which one rarely sees in the city.

Chokecherries

The site has been home to various encampments of itinerants over the years and there remains one neat little encampment tucked away under the chokecherry trees near the centre of the site.

It’s a delightful and quiet spot where one can be alone and quietly enjoy the passing scene.

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Fleurs sauvages du Québec

5/19/2015

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Écrit par Fleurs sauvages du Québec

Il y a plus de 2 500 espèces de fleurs sauvages qui poussent au Québec et contrairement à ce que certains peuvent croire, nul besoin d’aller bien loin pour avoir la chance de les observer. La beauté de la flore du Québec est accessible à tous ceux qui se donnent la peine d’y porter un regard attentif, que ce soit dans une forêt éloignée ou tout simplement sur un bout de trottoir ou encore dans les racoins d’une ruelle ou d’un terrain vague. Les fleurs sont partout et chacune possède des atouts qui la rendent attrayante, même celles que l’on appelle « mauvaises herbes ».

Morelle douce-amère (clôture derrière la gare de train Parc). Photo: Sophie Morisset

Malheureusement, trop souvent, notre vie de citadins occupés et préoccupés crée un état d’aveuglement involontaire nous empêchant de voir ces fleurs qui nous entourent et dont la beauté demeure invisible. Le peu de place leur étant consacré par les organismes impliqués dans la mise en valeur des milieux sauvages et naturels contribue aussi à ce manque de visibilité, tout comme l’absence de ressources conviviales permettant leur identification facile et rapide. Du moins, c’est le constat qu’a fait Sophie Morisset en se promenant le long de la rivière des Mille-Îles au printemps 2011 alors qu’elle observait des fleurs qu’elle peinait à identifier.

Morelle douce-amère (Clôture derrière la gare de train Parc). Photo: Sophie Morisset

Pour remédier à cette situation, elle a l’idée de créer un site Web qui aurait pour mission de rendre la flore du Québec accessible à tous, de faire découvrir au public sa richesse et sa beauté ainsi que de le sensibiliser à son importance dans la conservation des milieux naturels. Au printemps 2014, après plus de deux ans de travail, aidé de son partenaire Éco-Nature et de la participation financière du Ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques, Sophie lance le site Web fleurssauvagesduquebec.com.

Fleurs sauvages du Québec, c’est avant tout un outil Web éducatif créé afin de fournir un accès facile et instantané à la flore du Québec. Il est pourvu d’un moteur de recherche spécialement conçu permettant de faire des recherches en utilisant des critères simples et intuitifs menant à l’identification rapide des fleurs observées. Chaque fleur possède sa fiche descriptive au contenu vulgarisé avec de nombreuses photos où des informations sur les traits distinctifs, l’habitat, la répartition et les espèces de fleurs à ne pas confondre sont publiées.

Mauve négligée (Parterre dans Rosemont La Petite-Patrie). Photo: Sophie Morisset

Fleurs sauvages du Québec, c’est aussi beaucoup de photos de qualité permettant au public de découvrir la beauté des fleurs. C’est des cartes interactives mettant en évidence l’accessibilité de la flore où le public est invité à soumettre ses observations et ses photos à l’aide de l’onglet « Partagez vos découvertes » afin qu’ils participent à l’établissement de la vitrine florale de la province tout en permettant d’accroître les connaissances sur la présence et la répartition des espèces floristiques au Québec.

Comme son nom l’indique, « Les chroniques de Sophie » sont des billets écrits par Sophie et ses collaborateurs. Ils se veulent de courts textes qui racontent des anecdotes et des faits intéressants relatifs à la flore québécoise. Lisez-les si vous voulez savoir quelle plante a déjà été utilisée dans les lotions après-rasage, pourquoi la sanguinaire du Canada s’appelle aussi sang-dragon et quelle mauvaise herbe connue de tous peut soulager les démangeaisons des piqûres d’insectes.

Liseron des champs (Le long d’un trottoir près de HEC). Photo: Sophie Morisset

Fleurs sauvages du Québec et ses partenaires organisent des concours et ils seront présents à différentes activités estivales dans la grande région de Montréal. Pour ne rien manquer, suivez-les sur leur page Facebook ou abonnez-vous à leur infolettre et n’hésitez pas à utiliser cet outil indispensable pour découvrir la flore québécoise au fil de vos promenades urbaines. Si vous avez accès à un réseau; cherchez www.fleursduquebec.com sur votre téléphone intelligent, cliquez sur « Recherche » dans le menu en haut à gauche et sélectionnez les champs correspondant aux caractéristiques de la fleur que vous venez d’observer. Si ce n’est pas le cas, prenez une photo et faites vos recherches une fois de retour à la maison. Profitez-en aussi pour partager vos découvertes. Qui sait, elles pourraient se retrouver dans les galeries photo du site.

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From a Green Dream to a Wild City Map

4/22/2015

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Written by Maia Iotzova, a founder of the Wild City Mapping Collective.

My first and most intimate connection to nature was formed while playing in the unmanaged green spaces scattered around the cement soviet style apartment building where I grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Bulgaria used to be an agrarian country. After the beginning of communism in 1944, big city complexes with numerous apartment buildings were built. However the maintenance of the green spaces within and around those complexes was rather relaxed. As a result there were a number of fields where nature grew and flourished. These wild green spaces were a marvellous world where me and my friends spent our childhood days in exploration and play.

жк "Младост 1", 1970 / Building Complex 'Mladost' 1, 1970 Archive found on Facebook

As a young adult I immigrated to Canada, and lived in cities in southern Ontario and British Columbia, where urban green spaces were meticulously manicured.

Still from the film Green Dream. @Maia Iotzova

I missed having access to a messy little wilderness right outside my doorstep. Wanting to capture the unique character of the nature I knew from my childhood I started making the film Green Dream.

Travelling back to Sofia in 2008 to film these urban oases and being involved with struggles to save a few places like that in Canada, illuminated the complex context in which they existed. They still held the magic from my childhood as the beautiful dreamy fields. Rich with biodiversity, they were places that added to the heartbeat of the neighbourhood. Yet they were often neglected. Turning into garbage dumping grounds they were easy targets for development of new buildings, roads, parking lots. I realized that in the larger context these spaces existed as phantoms without protection, and often they were not even marked on the map.

So, parallel of working on Green Dream, I started experimenting with ways to map these spaces. It was important for me that the map captured people's intimate connection to them along with their geographic features, so I tried to find a way to map people's connection to the landscape. My first experiment was the project I know a place... made during a Locative Media residence at the Banff New Media Institute in November 2008.

Ten volunteers form the Banff region participated. They were sent out with a kit, which contained the phone (Smart phones did not exist yet), a GPS external device and a card with instructions.

I had asked people to go to a space that was significant to them and spent 10-15 minutes there before they would answer any questions. That was important because I wanted them to feel and experience the space, instead of having a predetermined idea of what they were going to say.

Each participant was given a phone with a special program (The Geo Zexe), which allowed them to take a photo and to record an audio entry. (In theory the program was supposed to package the geo data with people's entries and send them directly to the map. In practice we entered each person's entry manually.)

Below is a video screen capture of the interactive map that was created. You can also explore the map here.

I loved the experiential quality of the entries, hearing the wind in the background and the quality of each person's voice brought to life the unique character of the space they were talking about. This gave the map the layered and personal dimension I had wanted.

I continued to work on the film and the map simultaneously and they fed each other.

In 2009 I moved to Montreal and to my surprise and happiness I discovered a wild field right behind the big industrial building where I had a studio space. I would eat my lunches there and go for walks. Then I learned that there were plans to develop the space and citizens were gathering for its protection. I met Emily Rose-Michaud who had created the Roerich Garden, a land art in the shape of the Roerich symbol used in World War II to denote a place of cultural significance and prevent it from being bombed during the airstrikes. The Roerich Garden had helped unify the community, bringing media and political attention to the space.

Roerich Garden in Maguire Meadow Photo by: Kevin Brown

This space used to be called Maguire Meadow, but the community renamed it Le Champ des possibles (The field of possibilities). In November 2009, with the fate of the space still uncertain, we did a mapping project in order to capture the meadow's significance for the people in the neighbourhood.

Again, an important part of my methodology was to ask everyone who participated to spend 10-15 minutes in the space before asking them any specific questions. I did not have access to the application or the cell phones we used for I know a place...and people could not record their voice. There had to be some low tech way to represent people's reflections on the map. I decided to ask each participant to draw or write their reflection on a piece of coloured paper. We took photos of them holding that paper and embedded the photos on a Google Map. You can see all the images in our Gallery Section.

Le Champ des possibles became a key player in Green Dream. In the summer of 2013 I filmed the field as it was officially recognized as a wild city park co-managed by the community. It was the first time I have seen such a success story.

In 2014 as the film was soon going to come to fruition, I renew my desire to map wild green spaces in the whole city of Montreal. It was clear that this had to be a team initiative and I brought together artists/geeks with expertise in different areas. Maya Richman, Igor Rončević, Marilene Gaudet, Dominique Ferraton and I developed the project Wild City Mapping.

We kept the personal reflection, from my earlier experiments, as a way to map a space . However this time we simplified the entries even more to accommodate a larger quantity of participants and the limitations of Mapbox, the open source platform we were using. To map Montreal we asked people to send us a photo and the coordinates of a wild green space with their reflection/description of the space. The radically different element that we added to this map was time.

We decided that it is important to see the transformation of each space through time. We kept all the map entries from past years and each year was denoted with a different colour. We also chose to note when a space was destroyed or developed with an orange tag, and with a blue tag, a plan or a wish for a space to become wild in the future. We used little icons in each tag to denote artistic interventions and community engagement. For example the flag icon is a sign that the tag has a link towards the community engaged with the space. The two human figures are a sign that the tag shows the portrait of a person with their drawing/reflection of the green space done in my community mapping style.

This is my trajectory of artistic and personal explorations with these ever rich spaces in our cities. My next wish, mapping Sofia, Bulgaria.

Happy Earth Day!

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Done is Better Than Perfect or How We Created wildcitymapping.org

2/27/2015

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Written by Igor Rončević, member of The Wild City Mapping Collective.

Bringing wildcitymapping.org to life was all about understanding both the limitations and the abilities of a small team that had a big vision. We all knew what we wanted to have one day: An online map of Montreal's wild urban spaces created by the community that uses them. A map that not only lists those spaces but in a creative way reflects people's connection to them. A map that shows how these spaces change through time in the urban environment.

The technical solution behind that vision included not only a custom made, artistic looking and fully interactive online map. A big part of it was also a smart-phone app that will enable wild green space enthusiasts to share their impressions and discoveries effortlessly. Take a photo with your smart-phone, write your immediate impression and you are just one button-click away from adding your contribution to the map. That's how we imagined it.

The map, the web site, and the app were supposed to be built using solely open source tools and also made fully available as open source. We wanted to encourage other communities to create similar maps for other cities by using our solution as the starting point in realizing their own ideas.

If you were ever involved in any kind of software development you surely now that implementing everything I mentioned requires a skilled team of designers and developers and a plenty of time and money. What we had was a small team of enthusiast, a seriously limited amount of time and no budget.

The fact that we didn't have the skills, time and resources to fulfill that big vision never led us to disappointment. Actually it was the opposite. It made us think hard how we could apply our existing experience and skills to develop a simplified version of our vision.

This photo captures our approach to building wildcitymapping.org.

Done is better than perfect

We took a realistic look on what we wanted to achieve and decided to leave the ideal plan aside for the moment, and to work on a a simple but functional prototype. And so the journey started.

Our first important decision was to create our map using Mapbox. Mapbox is a mapping platform that offers various mapping services to both advanced user groups like software developers and to users with no particular technical skills. Using Mapbox, one can style a map, put markers on it, add additional information like photos and text etc. - all that without any special technical knowledge. The best way to get a glimpse of Mapbox's possibilities is to try it on your own.

Mapbox editor

Mapbox helped us to immediately start publishing the material we collected, without having to confront any technical difficulties.

The next important tool we picked was Weebly. Weebly is a "drag & drop website builder [that] makes it dead simple to create a powerful, professional website without any technical skills required".

Weebly editor

Same as Mapbox, Weebly helped us to immediately concentrate on the content and the message that we wanted to convey, instead of investing our time in developing technical solutions on our own.

Some programming was still needed on our side. In order to store the photos and the documentation we had, we developed a simple online administration tool based on two open source solutions, elFinder and its connector for the ASP.NET. What we got was a powerful online file manager. We use it to keep all our files on one place accessible to all team members and to get public links to the photos that we show on the map and on the web site. Here is what it looks like.

Wild City Mapping administration tool

The final thing to solve was finding a convenient way of extracting the geo-positions out of photos that we had uploaded into our administration tool. We found the solution in the excellent ExifTool.

Now you know how wildcitymapping.org is built. The current version represents just a fraction of our vision. It is built in a pragmatic manner using the tools that helped us to focus on the content and not on the technical details. We hope though, that the time will come, when we will be able to improve it and bring it closer to our initial vision.

We are always looking for green space enthusiasts and geogeeks to join our team, and to help us realize the vision!

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Cartographie éphémère

2/22/2015

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Par Dominique Ferraton, artiste multidisciplinaire et membre du collectif Wild City Mapping.

En face du bâtiment sans intérêt dans lequel je travaillais plusieurs jours par semaine, un petit terrain vague a peu à peu piqué ma curiosité. Un espace vert riche en biodiversité, j'y trouvais un court repos en nature où je pouvais ignorer la circulation automobile de la rue Beaubien.

J'y voyais rarement d'autres passants, mis à part quelques personnes qui l'utilisaient comme raccourci ou comme aire d'exercice pour leur chien. Par contre, les traces d'une fréquentation régulière étaient partout, et un sentier formé par l'usure traversait la longueur du terrain.

Terrain vague au coin de Beaubien et St.-Urbain, en octobre 2008

Je n'étais pas la seule à apprécier cet environnement : une collègue a tenté de transplanter une vigne du terrain et la replanter dans le jardin sur son toit, un tas de briques avait été déconstruit pour épeler des mots dans le gazon, une moufette se promenait le long du mur à la recherche d'escargots jaunes qui apparaissaient par centaines après la pluie.

J'y trouvais aussi une alternative aux parcs du quartier dont la végétation et les zones de repos étaient contrôlées et délimitées. J'étais fascinée par la façon dont un espace vert en milieu urbain se développe et change au fil du temps avec chaque intervention humaine, animale ou végétale. L'exploration du petit lot sur Beaubien a été le point de départ de mon intention de cartographier plusieurs des terrains vagues de Montréal.

Tiré de "Mapping" par David Greenhood

Afin de refléter l'échelle humaine de ces terrains qui sont fréquentés uniquement à pied ou à vélo, chacune des cartes a été dessinée à la main avec des méthodes de cartographie artisanale. Pour en apprendre plus sur ces techniques primitives, je me suis référée à un ouvrage de 1962 intitulé Mapping que j'avais trouvé par hasard plusieurs mois plus tôt. Afin de connaître le nombre de pas par mètre que je parcourais, j'ai suivi leur indication de tracer un trajet de 100 mètres sur terrain plat, d'en marcher la longueur plusieurs fois et de faire la moyenne du nombre de pas comptés. Pour identifier l'emplacement précis d'un objet difficile d'accès, j'ai appris à le situer par méthode de triangulation à l'aide d'une boussole et d'un compas. J'arrivais à chaque terrain avec du papier quadrillé, une règle, une boussole, un compas, un crayon, et des bons souliers de marche. J'y passais plusieurs heures, et la plupart des terrains ont demandé plusieurs visites successives.

Carte préliminaire faite sur le terrain

Chaque terrain avait sa propre personnalité, et j'y découvrais plusieurs usages secrets. Dans les plus grands, je trouvais des sites de camping éphémères, des feux de camp, et des petits jardins communautaires clandestins. J'ai aussi appris à connaître la flore urbaine, qui était très semblable à la flore sauvage de mon enfance que je trouvais sur les bords de chemin dans la campagne en Montérégie. Je me servais du Guide de la flore urbaine, Plantes sauvages des villes et des champs et Les arbres du Canada.

Carte finale, encre sur papier, 18" x 24"

J'ai dessiné sur chaque carte les différents éléments que je trouvais intéressants. Il s'agissait d'une sélection tout à fait subjective, mais j'ai fait un choix qui démontrait que ces milieux étaient diversifiés et vivants, tant au point de vue humain que végétal ou animal.

Détail

Après avoir dessiné dix cartes, j'ai complété les pages supplémentaires nécessaires pour en faire une publication qui suivrait le modèle d'un guide de randonnée pédestre : une légende, et des cartes à plus petite échelle situant les dix terrains dans leur quartier et dans la ville.

Carte finale, encre sur papier, 24" x 18"

En travaillant sur ce projet pendant plusieurs années (de 2008 à 2013), j'ai vu les terrains changer, rapetisser, ou disparaître. En règle générale, les terrains vagues et la verdure urbaine spontanée sont des phénomènes temporaires. Quel que sera l'avenir de ce projet, il m'a rappelé l'importance d'explorer, de s'investir dans sa ville et d'encourager la verdure en milieu urbain sous toutes ses formes.