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The following is an excerpt from Melvin Charney’s catalogue essay for Montreal Plus or Minus?, an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 1972. The essay can be found in On Architecture: Melvin Charney, a Critical Anthology edited by Louis Martin.
This exhibition is about Montreal and the people who live in it. It attempts to focus on the physical qualities of Montreal, and make visible, through images and information, the meaning of the city in the minds of most of its people.
The understanding that each one of us has of the physical presence of this city is blurred and diffused by what can only be called the realities of living in Montreal.
These realities can perhaps be described with numbers. There are 2,720,413 people in the Montreal region at present. It is the urban centre of Quebec, and the largest urban centre in Canada, followed, in size, by Toronto with a population of 2,609,638 and Vancouver with 1,071,081.
Furthermore, Montreal has the highest overall population density of any city in Canada at 9,300 people per square mile; Toronto has 8,200 and Vancouver 6,000. It has a high density in the centre of the city, 26,000 people per square mile, which unlike that of other cities, has been increasing in recent years. It also has fewer cars per capita of total population than other comparable cities; Montreal 0.24, Toronto 0.34, and Vancouver 0.34.
But these numbers only hint at the quality of a place different from any other city in Canada. They can hardly suggest the presence of a city unique in North America.
The character of this city is evident in our day-to- day experience of it.
Unlike most cities in North America, the place still works for some of its inhabitants. They live here by choice, and with pride. It has a dense, thriving urban and cosmopolitan centre. Its streets are alive with people. People crowd the streets at the first warmth of spring. In winter, public streets are found inside “buildings,” and in the Metro. This is in contrast to the decaying cores and police reconstructions found at the heart of most other cities in this continent. The fabric of Montreal still retains traces of an urban tradition which most of these other cities never possessed in the first place; they began as small settlements that later became overgrown villages that merged into sprawling suburban megalopolis, betraying a general mistrust of city life – conditions alien to the origins of Montreal.
But things are changing. Montreal is now at a turning point in the history of its development.
(…)
In the period from 1961 to 1970, Montreal had a 21.3 increase in jobs, while Toronto’s increase was 35.1. This poor performance happened despite the frenetic activity associated with Expo 67, and the rhetoric of the civic administration. It happened during a decade in which Toronto has been consolidating its role as the economic centre of Eastern Canada. The population of Toronto is now expected to exceed Montreal’s by the end of 1974.
(…)
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