The Problem with
Fixing Heat Waves in Parc Ex
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Planting more trees
will cool down the heat island in
Parc-Extension, but it might also change
the neighbourhood’s social fabric.
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Université de
Montréal’s MIL campus seen from Birnam
Street in Parc-Extension. PHOTO: Neha
Chollangi
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Parc-Extension is
coated in crimson on Montreal’s heat
map.
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The neighbourhood, packed with asphalt
and concrete, swelters through the
summers, absorbing and holding onto the
blistering heat. The buildings here are
denser and more tightly packed together
than what’s found in the rest of the
city — they also get much hotter, with
apartments that are often overcrowded.
Still, many people choose to stay
inside, in cramped apartments, just to
avoid the blinding sun. The streaks of
shade and foliage peppered around most
other neighbourhoods in Montreal are few
and far between in Parc-Ex.
The density of the area is particularly
stark in contrast to the neighbouring
Town of Mont Royal, which is a pale
yellow on the heat map and one of the
wealthiest parts of the city. A chain
link fence separates the two.
This year, on June 24,
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, Montreal broke
a historic record for the hottest day
recorded in June, with temperatures
peaking at 35.6°C.
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An aerial view of
the Town of Mount Royal (bottom left)
and Parc-Extension. PHOTO: Courtesy
Google
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Julia Pohl-Miranda, a longtime Parc-Ex
resident, heard that the library and
community centre would stay open on the
holiday. These spaces serve as the main
cooling centres for residents. But when
Pohl-Miranda marched down to the
library, all she found was a locked door
and a closed sign.
It was a national holiday. Many people
were home from work with nowhere to go
to cool down. The large population of
low-income residents, children, and the
elderly had no place to seek shelter
from the heat.
“I was very annoyed and disappointed to
discover that there was not a single
place in the hottest neighbourhood in
Montreal for people to go that was
air-conditioned,” says Pohl-Miranda, who
then went home to her hot apartment to
email the borough mayor and the public
health authority about how frustrated
she was.
“If somebody didn’t
die in this heat wave, you’re lucky,”
she wrote to the city. “They could very
well die in the next heat wave.”
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Jill, another Parc-Ex
resident, says the impact of extreme
heat is increasingly concerning this
year. She lives on a block with more
than 350 apartments where the
temperature stays high at night.
More green spaces are something Jill
wants to see in the neighbourhood, and
she has been advocating for a new green
alley. She says these spaces could help
provide more cool spots in the dense
area, improve air quality, and people’s
health. But at the same time, she is
frustrated knowing that these green
spaces could also gentrify Parc-Ex.
Eco-gentrification, or green
gentrification, is a process in which
greening initiatives, like a new park or
green alley in a neighbourhood, increase
property value and rent, attract more
affluent residents and displace the
low-income population of the area.
For Jill, eco-gentrification is
something that blocks all possibility of
making working-class neighbourhoods
greener because it creates a bind where
either they must remain as urban heat
islands or have green spaces and risk
gentrification.
Understanding
Eco-gentrification in Montreal
Montreal has a long
history of using environmental projects
to attract capital into the city.
In the 1990s, Montreal
Mayor Pierre Bourque advocated for
making Montreal into an environmentally
friendly city and using that as a driver
for economic growth. He was a key figure
in the construction of the botanical
garden in Montreal and in turning the
Miron quarry into Frédéric Back Park in
Saint-Michel.
Yaya Baumann, a PhD researcher in
geography at Université de Montréal,
says many urban gentrification projects
around the world involve some element of
greening, whether it’s planting trees or
constructing a new park. He also
broadens the definition of
eco-gentrification to include
sustainability projects that aim to
“green” a neighbourhood through
eco-friendly infrastructure like sponge
sidewalks, electric vehicle charging
stations, and low-emission buildings.
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Apartment buildings
in Parc-Extension. PHOTO: Neha
Chollangi
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Baumann was a former member of the
community-based action research network
(CBAR) in Parc-Ex and also did his
master’s thesis on the case of
eco-gentrification in Saint-Michel,
focusing on Parc Frédéric Back. He
describes eco-gentrification as a
“Trojan horse for gentrification.”
Other neighbourhoods
in Montreal have gone through similar
patterns.
In the early 2000s, the Lachine Canal
underwent a huge redevelopment project
that aimed to revitalize the area after
years of neglect by the federal
government. New, shiny commercial spaces
popped up, and luxury condos grew from
where old factories stood in the
working-class neighbourhoods of
Saint-Henri, Pointe-Saint-Charles and
Griffintown. The Woonerf Saint-Pierre
transformed a regular alleyway into a
wide green alley and was praised for
fighting extreme heat. The canal path
has become a popular spot for cyclists
and joggers.
The shift slowly but
certainly morphed the streets,
buildings, and stores surrounding the
canal into a whole new reality —
especially Saint-Henri, one of the
hippest spots in the city.
Community members like
Baumann and Pohl-Miranda are fearful
that the same story could repeat itself
in Parc-Ex.
The Greening of
Parc-Ex
The new Université de
Montréal MIL campus sits right in the
middle of Parc-Ex and Outremont. The
campus, which opened in 2019, is
Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED)-certified, integrates
green infrastructure in public spaces,
and aims to reduce car traffic in the
neighbourhood.
Sleek glass buildings tower right on the
edges of Parc-Ex as an innovation hub
for university students and researchers.
For many in the area, the campus has
planted a seed that has grown and slowly
spread, bringing an onslaught of changes
to Parc-Ex.
A 2019 study on the impact of the new
campus on rents in Parc-Ex found that
one-third of listings in the
neighbourhood used the new campus as a
selling point and that the listings that
mentioned the university were on average
$100 more per month than those that
didn’t.
The study, authored by UdeM professor
Violaine Jolivet, also found that there
was a large concentration of listings
near the university itself in the
southern part of the neighbourhood,
which “suggests a greater residential
mobility of tenants during the past year
in this area bordering the MIL campus.”
“The location of the site on the borders
of one of the most affluent districts of
the municipality, Outremont, and one of
the most vulnerable districts of the
agglomeration, makes it possible to
revalue a gap in the metropolis and to
place Parc-Extension on the map of
spaces to be invested in by developers
and small owners,” states the study.
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Université de
Montréal’s MIL campus. PHOTO: Neha
Chollangi
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Pohl-Miranda says that even when the
plans to open the campus first came up,
many community members (including her)
were concerned. She attended public
consultations and community meetings to
voice her concerns about how the campus
would change the neighbourhood and
impact the residents.
“It was a really big
concern that, I think, has been totally
vindicated,” she says.
The university had promised earlier on
in the project that a portion of land
would be allocated to student housing.
This would’ve relieved some of the
pressure on Parc-Ex, where the new
students would flock for its
affordability among the more expensive
surrounding neighbourhoods like Mile-Ex
and Outremont.
In the end, the
university sold the land to condo
developers building dedicated student
housing.
Former Parc-Exer Vijay
Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan
co-authored the book The Sustainability
Class on how mainstream
“eco-friendly” lifestyles and
transformations can often exclude
working-class people. The changes they
noticed in Parc-Ex around 2019 were a
keystone for the topics they cover in
the book.
Kolinjivadi, a professor of sustainable
and equitable economies at Concordia
University, says that he was seeing
changes in Parc-Ex even before the new
campus was built. New, trendy businesses
were popping up on Avenue Beaumont,
which seemed like an extension of
Mile-Ex. Then came the campus, which
amplified the gentrification that was
already in motion.
In 2019, Parc Pierre-Dansereau was built
as part of the goals for the campus to
“revitalize” and “green” the surrounding
neighbourhood. Parc Dickie Moore was
also constructed in an area adjacent to
the campus in 2022. The budget for the
campus was $350 million, which combined
funding from the federal and provincial
governments, along with the university.
Understanding
Parc-Ex’s needs
The tricky thing about
eco-gentrification, according to
Baumann, is that it’s difficult to be
critical of greening projects.
It’s hard to make a
case against planting more trees. And
indeed, people are not against greening,
per se, but rather the invisible impacts
it can have on the most vulnerable
populations.
In 2021, the City of Montreal invested
$1 million in a project called Vert le
Nord under the organization Ville en
Vert. The organization aimed to “green”
the neighbourhoods of
Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Saint-Laurent,
and Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension
by planting more trees in the area and
creating green alleys.
Despite its good intentions, the project
attracted some criticism from Parc-Ex
community leaders and organizers for not
taking into account the specific
community needs.
Baumann was a member of CBAR at the time
and was part of the community
consultations with Ville en Vert. He
said that while the organization reached
out to community organizations for
input, their projects were already
developed, and they couldn’t take
feedback and incorporate it into their
plans. The organization’s idea of
community participation did not really
involve figuring out what the community
needs, but rather “having a stamp of
community approval,” according to
Baumann.
The issue with the greening projects,
for community members like Baumann, was
not the greening itself but the lack of
measures to protect the neighbourhood
from real estate speculations. A report on the impacts of
green gentrification in Parc-Ex (which
Baumann was an author of) recommends
that similar initiatives in the future
apply social structures like rent
control or social housing alongside any
environmental project.
Ville en Vert did not
respond to The Rover’s request for an
interview by the time of publication.
CBAR member Sepideh
Shahamati says that there’s no denying
that the issues of extreme heat need to
be dealt with, but “unfortunately, in
terms of addressing this problem, a lot
of the (government) funding is going to
external organizations who have no idea
of what the context is in Parc-Ex.”
There is a strong
sense of community and grassroots
efforts in Parc-Ex, and the plethora of
local groups have a much better
understanding of the specific needs of
the residents, according to Shahamati.
He says greening shouldn’t be about
doing the most innovative and trendy
project. Instead, funding should be
given to community groups that already
exist in the neighbourhood, who actually
know the community.
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Athena Park in
Parc-Extension. PHOTO: Neha
Chollangi
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In 2023, the city proposed a new bike
lane in Parc-Ex on Querbes and Ball
Avenues, which would remove 250 parking
spaces. This issue triggered a massive
debate (and a legal battle) as many
residents were furious about the loss of
parking spaces, which were integral to
them.
For many young, middle-class residents
in Montreal, more bike lanes are
something to be celebrated, not fought.
But for new immigrants, Vansintjan
explains, having a car is essential to
survive in a new country. They might
have to drive much further away for work
or need it for their family. They are
often less focused on being eco-friendly
because they are preoccupied with the
daily hustle of getting their basic
needs met.
“What often happens is that people
impose these ideas of what is
environmental, and they’re often these
exclusive policies that are more for a
specific class,” says Vansintjan. “So
let’s say things like charging stations
for electric vehicles, bike lanes, or
subsidies for solar panels on your roof
— these are all things that are for the
middle class, for people who have access
to electric vehicles or who own a roof.”
Social needs as an
ecological strategy
The image of an
eco-friendly, green city is often a
painting that frames only a certain
sector of the population. The others are
left outside the borders.
“If we actually want to create an
environmentalism that’s for everyone,
you have to start from people’s basic
needs and think about environmentalism
as something like social or cooperative
housing — that’s environmentalism,” says
Vansintjan. “If you supply affordable
housing to people, and fast and reliable
public transit, that’s essential for a
lot of people, and that will help them
not use their car or not have to rely on
their car all the time.”
The alternative is an
environmentalism that is exclusive and
comes off as elitist.
If we think about meeting people’s
immediate needs in times like heatwaves,
practical solutions would include
increased cooling stations in the city
and access to air conditioners,
according to Pohl-Miranda. This could be
through government grants for community
organizations or mutual aid programs to
buy air conditioners for vulnerable
people impacted by climate change.
While these solutions might not be seen
as the most “eco-friendly,” Kolinjivadi
says that preventing real estate
speculation is far more ecological than
any bike lane or charging station.
“There is a real
material basis to putting social needs
first as ecological strategy,” he says.
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