Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

Introduction

1 Introduction Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais In its efforts to understand the city as an ecological setting, urban environmental history has revealed the naturalness of urban places. In that respect, the term “metropolitan natures” refers to the water that circulates within and throughout the city, animals that invade its territory and crowd its buildings, and trees that shade properties and public spaces, providing wealth and health to neighborhoods.1 It also evokes the soil that has been cultivated to feed the city, the land expropriated to expand its limits, and the rural and riverine landscapes transformed to respond to the needs of urban populations.2 These elements participate in a web of relationships, be they spatial, economic, or political, that sometimes reinforce or reproduce the social order and at other times ignite disputes between antagonistic actors, within the city and without. When one considers these and other discrete instances of the urban environment , one is left with the arduous task of specifying what is meant by the word “environment.” For one thing, it is not an object extracted from the material world or a fact to be accepted at face value but an aggregate in need of exploration and explanation.3 It is a plural process that lends itself to a multiplicity of meanings and forms, all of which point to the need to historicize relationships to environment and to unveil the social and ecological facets of that word. Investigated across different time periods and natural settings, its intricacies lend additional meaning to an understanding of urban phenomena. Metropol- 2 - Stéphane Castonguay and Michèle Dagenais itan Natures seeks to generate and investigate these different meanings of the urban environment in and around one of the oldest North American urban settings: the city of Montreal. The City and the Metropolis Montreal, the city and the metropolis, is also the name of an island, an urban agglomeration—the Greater Montreal area—and a plain that surrounds the archipelago of that island. One needs to acknowledge this plurality of spatial frames to grasp the history of Montreal over a long time period, one that spans more than four centuries. In its more basic definition, Montreal is generally understood as a city situated on an island, and one of its most distinctive elements, located at its core, is Mount Royal. Another characteristic is its geographical location, at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. The southern part of the island is washed in the St. Lawrence River, which approaches the city of Montreal through Lake St. Louis before entering the strait of the Lachine Rapids, where it meets the city. To the north, the Ottawa River enters the Lake of Two Mountains and reappears in two smaller rivers, the Rivière des Prairies and the Mille-Îles River, flowing on either side of the island known as Île Jésus. These rivers run for more than thirty miles before joining the St. Lawrence River at the northeast end of the island. The very term metropolis embraces various realities in terms of time, space, and environment. In part because it sits at the confluence of two large waterways , Montreal became, even before the end of the eighteenth century, the hub for trade in natural resources extracted first from the backcountry and later the Great Lakes and the western areas of the continent. All the merchandise—first furs, then wood and wheat—had to be unloaded from boats and transported to Montreal by road to bypass the Lachine Rapids. It was then transferred onto ships destined for foreign markets. The same held for European goods headed for the Northwest and the interior of the continent. According to classic Canadian historiography, staple extraction and export activities would be a fundamental driving force in the country’s economic development, allowing Montreal, with its position in the continental trade networks, to acquire and flex its economic muscle. With the founding of Canada in 1867, Montreal’s metropolitan role would be strengthened first by the integration of the various colonies thenceforth united and later by the settling of the West.4 A product of its geography, the city’s function as a hub also emerged out of large infrastructure projects undertaken to consolidate Montreal’s role. From 1820 to 1850, British political authorities built a series of canals to facilitate Introduction - 3 land development in northern North America at a time...