Densification is something that fascinates architects, urbanists, policymakers, economists, and other future-minded thinkers. It’s also happening in many different ways throughout Montréal, from central neighbourhoods to periurban contexts—and so it is everybody’s business in many respects. Within public policy, densification is a high-priority agenda item across Canada—especially in our major metropolitan areas, where it is purported to be a plausible and promising pathway for dealing with the latest iteration of the housing crisis bedevilling all of us. Densification, we are told, curbs (sub)urban sprawl, protecting valuable agricultural land, helping to maintain and enhance biodiversity, rendering public transport viable and attractive, enabling people to live and work in ‘walkable’ neighbourhoods without owning a car (Cavicchia 2023, Quastel et al. 2012, Qviström et al. 2019). This can encourage the production of a wide range of housing types including flats, townhouses, and small apartments (as opposed to endless bungalows), and the collective work of coming to terms in productive, sustainable ways with what Margaret Atwood has called ‘everything change’ (including the climate emergency). Often seen as a necessary (not merely sufficient) condition for economically-viable and energy-conserving ways of enabling people to move around for work, learning, and play without building hard-to-maintain road infrastructure, it is increasingly considered a self-evident goal for how we manage continuity and change in human settlements.
Why all the fuss about densification? This is a question we have been pondering for several years at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM), including a day-long symposium in October 2023 cohosted with the Office de consultation publique de Montréal. In exciting ways, densifications are fraught by controversy. This has structured an interlocking set of externally-funded projects linking CIRM researchers, students, and communities of practice. We want to broaden participation, not least because the questions raised by densification are not just matters of concern for architects, planners, and economists. Important cultural and social preoccupations demand attention, both in terms of present-day transformations and contexts where change might be in the forecast. What does it mean to live through densification processes at different spatial and temporal scales? How much do we know about the lived experiences—the ethnographies—of densification in everyday settings? Why do perceptions seem to matter so much more than ‘real’ or ‘objective’ measures of the number of households or jobs per hectare or per square kilometre? Why is densification often seen as inherently good among professionals in planning and design when we know that it produces so many bad results—nuisances, frustrations, anxieties, costs, and stress? Is more actually better? How much is too much ? For whom, and why? What can be said about how densification helps or hinders efforts at conservation of (and for) biodiversity? Who decides where, when, and how densification will take place? How do we deal with the messy, disruptive intermediate stages of construction, renovation, and the temporary relocation of key activities? To whom do we have recourse when those processes become more than a nuisance? Do the improvements achieved in the long run justify the headaches, damage, and loss that typically accompany any sort of densification and intensification of activities?
More fundamental questions are in play, too. What, ultimately, is getting densified where densification is afoot : Space? Everyday activity patterns? Sounds, smells? Moments of encounter? Job opportunities? Irritants, nuisances, hassles? In response, our densification(s) project explicitly brings studies of biodiversity, resilience, social practice, everyday life, and critical futuring into dialogue through original empirical work. Three sets of interdisciplinary action-research activities are now underway. One focuses on the ethnographies of densification—documenting the lived experiences, artistic and literary representations, and material cultures of change. Another explores popular attitudes and concerns about futures involving densification in its many forms, focusing on neighbourhood continuity and change through a series of crowdsourcing activities with diverse publics including online questionnaires as well as participatory community workshops. The third set of activities engages with specialists from the fields that one would expect to be most interested—public policy, urban planning, housing—and others who have exciting yet under-represented perspectives such as soundscapes, the experience of night in the city, and the fine arts. The main premise is that if we are to see scalable success with densification, as stipulated by current policy frameworks at all levels of government in response to the current housing crisis, we need to engage a wide array of stakeholders (i.e., households, but also producers, stewards, and enablers of metropolitan space) to see how they perceive future scenarios for the everyday settings in which they live, work, and play. The students will join an interdisciplinary team linking architects, planners, geographers, sound specialists, artists, and others, as well as several civil-society organisations and government agencies.
Codirectors: Nik Luka, Leila Ghaffari, and Kevin Manaugh
Scientific coordinator: Stéphan Gervais
References
Cavicchia, R. (2023). Urban densification and exclusionary pressure: emerging patterns of gentrification in Oslo. Urban Geography, 44(7), 1474–1496. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2100174
Luka, N. (2021). It’s not how dense we make it, but how we make it dense: on porosity as a corequisite of densification. Aménager : Expérience et innovation d’un quartier, 4 (2—Habiter), 12–20. https://tinyurl.com/luka2021porosity
Navarrete-Hernandez, P., Mace, A., Karlsson, J., Holman, N., & Zorloni, D. A. (2022). Delivering higher density suburban development: The impact of building design and residents’ attitudes. Urban Studies, 59(13), 2801–2820. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211036633
Quastel, N., M. Moos, & N. Lynch. (2012). Sustainability-as-density and the return of the social: the case of Vancouver, British Columbia. Urban Geography, 33(7), 1055–1084. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.33.7.1055
Qviström, M., N. Luka, & G. De Block. (2019). Beyond circular thinking: Geographies of Transit-Oriented Development. International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, 43(4), 786–793. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12798
Skrede, J., & Andersen, B. (2022). The emotional element of urban densification. Local Environment, 27(2), 251–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2022.2034769
