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148 City Streets as Environmental Grid The Challenge of Private Uses and Municipal Stewardship Sherry Olson 9 What part of the earth’s resources is a human being entitled to appropriate ? In a treatise on political economy, the earliest in North America (1820), Daniel Raymond, a Baltimore lawyer, challenged Adam Smith and developed an argument for stewardship of the earth, a horizon of sustainability, and, as a prerequisite, a greater degree of equality in the distribution of property.1 In the two centuries since, we have begun to recognize our dependence on ecosystem services of the entire planet—on species like earthworms and bees, soil bacteria, and reef coral.2 While environmental historians have given attention to the appropriation of oil, mineral, and forest lands, they have neglected the appropriation of urban land and its environmental implications. In cities, personal appropriation of the earth is carried to its extreme: every square meter has an owner with a well-defined bundle of rights. Nevertheless, on every square meter the community has a claim, expressed in its valuation for taxes, and every square meter plays a role in the city’s energy balance: breathing, digesting, excreting, shedding, absorbing, dissolving, attracting, or repelling. As a start, I propose to treat the street-space of Montreal as an object of analysis for environmental history and environmental policy. Human claims and human artifice are visible in the grid of city streets and their smooth-paved surfaces. The orderly layout of lots and buildings in Montreal is governed by City Streets as Environmental Grid - 149 invisible lines laid out by seventeenth-century surveyors and jealously guarded ever since. The most important of these lines are the street frontages that divide private property from the res publica. City streets are the predominant form of municipally owned property, and the nature of the street is necessarily public.3 As a circulatory system connecting each lot with the others, the streets are essential to any conceivable human use of what owners think of as their private properties. The value of a particular lot arises from communication— through the streets—with all the other properties, and the value of a lot can be further enhanced or damaged by its immediate neighbors: the customers they attract, the comings and goings, or the generation of noise, sparks, vibrations , fumes, or drainage. This understanding is at the foundation of civil law, of relations between neighbors and relations among citizens. The allocation of property—in the streets and fronting the streets—is the source of authority of the municipal corporation, of its powers and its weakness. The street system therefore merits the environmental historian’s attention. The flow of materials through the streets, into and out of the private lots, implies changes in the way energy is transformed and wastes are generated. The streets were laid out primarily to handle human traffic and the vehicles that carry valued goods and messages, but they are also channels for “free goods” like air, de-valued goods like garbage, poisons like carbon monoxide, and all the rain and snow that fall on private property (in Montreal seventy-four centimeters [twenty-nine inches] of the former, two hundred centimeters [seventynine inches] of the latter in an average year). The aggregate flows of materials reflect fundamental exchanges of human bodies—a million of them—with all that surrounds us.4 For city dwellers, the street grid is the system that delivers those vital environmental earth services, and the mode of appropriation has left a legacy in terms of the challenges we face. Each spurt of growth of the urban population was associated with expanding markets and greater demand for distant resources. A higher rate of exchange required another round of investment in piers, rails, or highways connecting the town to a world-system, and, in parallel, another round of investment in the city’s internal networks, to handle more goods, more information , more energy, and more wastes. The growth of Montreal was governed by the same rhythm as all the other large cities of North America. The numbers of building permits displayed in figure 9.1 accurately reflect a rhythm of destruction and renewal of the streetscape. Every fifteen to twenty-five years a surge of investment reinforced the powerful channeling of environmental services, producing changes in the layout of the grid, the flows of traffic at grade, and the hidden flows beneath the surface. Each investment forged technical con- [3.144.202.167] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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