TIME / TRANSIENCE / PERMANENCE

The notion of time is essential to understanding space and how people inhabit cities. Time has been used as an approach or a strategy for planning the use of public buildings in the city. Following the idea of time as a resource, some architects and urban planners use transitory urbanism as a strategy to use vacant, abandoned, or public spaces and bring them back to life. In this sense, transitory urbanism projects allow them to buy time in order to design new ways of inhabiting space. Though these projects are ephemeral and are initially designed for limited durations, they seek to rethink avenues for more permanent occupation. They represent the first step into testing viable alternatives for space usage, with the aim of developing sustainability over time. However, transitory urbanism is more than just about space usage. Through experimental use of space, transitory urban projects contribute to restoring a sense of community. By challenging municipal policies that fixate a space in single configurations, they achieve a sense of permanency built on solidarity among building dwellers, social sustainability, and democratic decision-making. As a result, they foster a sense of community that will live on beyond the life cycle of a project and that acts as an open door for whomever is in need of space.

In Montréal, several non-profit organizations use transitory urbanism to promote the revitalization and access to vacant buildings for communities in need and re-introduce excluded communities into vacant spaces that have been otherwise inaccessible due to bureaucratic and legal inertia. The CDC Solidarité Saint Henri, for one, is a network of community organizations based in the Saint-Henri neighborhood. It seeks to involve local residents and the borough in deciding the future of the abandoned Saint Henri library. While Entremise, which is an organization of architects and social activists, successfully obtained the right to rent out a pavilion of La Cité des Hospitalière, a vacant heritage site at the foot of the Mont-Royal, following negotiations with the city of Montréal. These organizations reflect the negotiation processes with the municipality regarding the occupation of vacant buildings at two different stages. In the case of the CDC Saint Henri, it is still unclear who can use the library building. The organization is currently holding public consultations with the neighbourdhood’s residents and negotiating access to the former library building with representatives of the Saint-Henri borough. The library, a heritage site left vacant since 2009, has also been marred in bureaucratic blockages that stalled decision-making about the future of the building. La Cité Des Hospitalières, by contrast, is an example of an accomplished process of reappropriating an abandoned urban site, where Entremise can carry out different kinds of transitory urbanism projects. Since 2020, the building has been ready to welcome new tenants.

Although the fates of the former library and La Cité differ, they both show how community-building processes led by local organizations interrupt the impermeability of urban spaces in order to make them more open to change and transformation. In the two examples, the transitory use of space is not an end in itself. For the CDC Saint Henri, transitory urbanism allows neighborhood residents to experiment with the building and collectively determine its future while adapting it to the needs of local tenants, some of whom have been threatened by gentrifying forces in the last few years. In La Cité des Hospitalières, tenants similarly have the opportunity to enact new relationalities to the space. These will open up creative possibilities for other dwellers who would otherwise infuse a historical and religious building with a contemporary identity.

Furthermore, transitory urbanism allows us to visualize that space can be marked by different temporalities and identities at once. The CDC Saint Henri seeks to connect the historical heritage of the library building to current usage. Entremise also seeks to highlight the architectural value and social heritage of La Cité des Hospitalières as they open the space to other activities and communities. Therefore, applying a time-based approach to these two buildings is necessary to capture the dynamic movements of space, where dwellers are allowed to re-appropriate a building and contribute to its social and cultural capital. In this sense, time introduces the notion of change and sustainability in understanding space and allows us to think of cities as malleable and adaptable.

Moreover, time highlights another important aspect of our relationship to space; belonging. A major takeaway from our interviews with participants is that we cannot make sense of community and how we occupy space without tracing the evolution of a space and its inhabitants in time. The community-building that happens in a space creates a sense of belonging that is timeless; the imprint of space on people lives on, beyond the physical space itself. The footprint of time on a given space also generates a distinct character that has significant heritage value for the communities who are attached to the space and its surroundings. As people come and go, time allows a space to gain symbolic permanence as it becomes a part of urban cultural heritage. On a larger scale, this process has a tremendous effect on the identity of a city.

Therefore, time invites us to adopt sustainability as an essential component of urban design and space organization, where time and space are indissociable as they go through cycles of reappropriation and transformation. Interventions such as transitory urbanism that encourage marginalized communities to re-appropriate vacant spaces necessitate a shift in political discourse, where we ask ourselves ‘what kind of city do we want to build?’ For this reason, municipal policies need to make room for visualizing such changes and enact law-making that is adaptable to space and people, rather than the other way around.