Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

Conclusion: The Historicity of Montreal’s Environment

265 Conclusion The Historicity of Montreal’s Environment Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais In the seventeenth century, the frontier town of Montreal began developing around the activities of fur trading and defending the colony against the Aboriginal populations on whose territory the urban core was established. Both a trade center and a military post from the outset, the city took shape while maintaining a dual-faceted relationship with its environment. Conscious of the region’s wealth of resources and the need to utilize them for profit so as to support a flourishing colony, the colonial elite nevertheless sought to protect the Montreal core from a foreign environment that they very often considered hostile (chap. 1, Coates). Not surprisingly, one of the first major projects was the erection of a wooden palisade, followed by the construction of stone walls to separate the urban from the so-called wild nature and to protect useful materials from threatening elements. This work occurred not so much through the strict separation of the milieus as through the movement and reorganization, both real and imaginary, of the activities and elements making up the intra- and extramural Montreal environment (chap. 2, Dickenson ). Thus, Montreal grew into a continuously civilizing colonial city on the basis of plans to conquer the rich resources drawn from the forest, wildlife, and flora of the surrounding plain. These plans, and the representations that translated them into images, led to the first efforts to organize the urban fabric, 266 - Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais channel surface water, and expand the habitable area surrounding Montreal (chap. 5, Fougères). Beginning in the industrial era, technical development and the capacity to reshape the milieu led to a closer intertwining of the natural and built environments , which was reflected in the enormous increase in efforts to profit from the local resources at the disposal of the new country’s metropolis. The water and rapids of the St. Lawrence, the soil of the Montreal Plain, and subterranean environment were all settings for infrastructure development projects to facilitate traffic flow, construct roadways within the city, island, and region, and rethink the territorial structure according to usage and the groups inhabiting it (chap. 9, Olson). These ambitious territory-shaping operations led to clashes, not just between materials (water, earth, stone) and technical means (chap. 7, Ross) but also among various social groups (chap. 8, Boone). The study of the confrontations between the urban elite and the local Amerindians or the island farmers points to the various cultures involved and the groups’ differentiated experiences of the Montreal environment (chap. 12, Ingram; chap. 13, Rueck). Certainly, the powers at play were not equivalent between the vulnerable populations of Montreal’s working-class districts, for instance, and the new technicians of the city, who, from doctors to engineers, helped organize the milieus and shape a new urbanity (chap. 4, Fahrni; chap. 6, Dagenais ). Nevertheless, Montreal’s transformations cannot be understood without taking into account the arbitration that took place between the natural elements and social groups that contributed to the city’s urbanization process throughout the nineteenth century (chap. 3, Kenny). While the production of Montreal’s hinterland commenced with the establishment of the colonial city—the fur trade constantly redefined the transcontinental frontiers of a “Nature’s Metropolis,” to use William Cronon’s expression—the expansion of the urban territory took a distinctive form during the interwar period. Aside from its spatial dynamic, Montreal’s metropolitan area took shape in a multiscale urban environment marked by new social relations that to some degree arose from the broader transformations under way, particularly following the arrival of numerous immigrant groups and the growth of the middle class. The shaping of the metropolitan space likewise resulted from distinct ecological dynamics, depending on the milieu in question. The ecological imprint of the industrial city became indelible. It transformed adjacent areas like Beauharnois, while neighboring regions that specialized in supplying the Montreal market adopted urban landscapes through their enrollment in trade networks that supplied a growing population (chap. 14, Pelletier). In the latter case, the spaces and borders connecting the rural and urban milieus shifted, both as a consequence of urbanization and suburban- Conclusion - 267 ization processes and in favor of the dynamics characteristic of the agricultural economy, whose ecosystems were not simply victim to the encroachment of the city and its industries (chap. 11, Castonguay). Nevertheless, in the second...