Question Answer Who are you? Individual Name Cecilia Chen ...

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Project Statement The city is a fountain. Certainly, Montréal is home to many fountains, ponds, water “features” and water events – some intentional – others less so. A city on an island in a larger archipelago, called Tiohtiake by the Mohawk, Montréal is a fountain. It shapes the waters that move through it from upstream to downstream. All its inhabitants (plant and animal) and all its matter (mineral, metal, synthetic and composite) act together to influence the way water moves through the city – as well as radically altering its biochemistry. Currently, Montréal as a fountain finds a rather everyday and ignoble outlet in the wastewater treatment plant at the downstream end of the island. With intense rainfall earlier this summer the city became a site of flash flooding as its limited and aging water infrastructures failed miserably to deal with a changing climate. Our urban infrastructures do not celebrate water – as all good city-fountains should! The intent of this project is to celebrate water in the city and to ask Montrealers to propose ways in which we might make the city a better fountain – an urban environment designed inclusively with water and its more-than-human generative force. What is a fountain? It is a conscious and joyous expression of water. Well-known Roman examples such as the Trevi fountain celebrate the arrival of aqueducts in the city. This kind of fountain venerates its source with exubertant jets. But not all fountains celebrate water in the same way. Other, more contemporary fountains are given form by conscientious artists such as Basia Irland (see her Desert Fountain), artist and architect Maya Lin (see her many installations involving water, particularly her design for three phases of water in the Ecliptic park at Rosa Parks Circle in Grand Rapids, Michigan), and gh3 Architects and Landscape Architects with their SWQF (Storm Water Quality Facility) in Toronto’s West Don Lands – a building that is also a fountain. Recent wastewater management lore has recognized the sophistication and complex biodiversity of restoring wetlands and adding meanders back to river courses. These are only some of the many inspiring examples of design approaches that celebrate water. Some Theoretical Background A recurring place and re-iterated articulation of water for many humans is now the city. These densely settled areas embody great risks and potentials in their intense socialized interactions with water. Waters move constantly between and through bodies, ecosystems and cities, enabling biological and meteorological transformations, including life, death, pollution and disease. Waters are always environmentally responsive and join us with the more-than-human into communities of shared waters. We need to understand our part in this hydrocommons. Consciously or not, we create the hydrocommons together with other humans, other creatures, multi-national corporations, industries and municipalities midst climate change. Waters shape and found cities even as cities influence and transform these same waters that in turn contribute to climatic patterns. By deliberately thinking about our relations to water – by thinking with water – we alter how we understand where we live and how we might build cities that truly respond to the hydrodynamic ethics entailed in living both upstream and downstream from many others. These hydrodynamics are obviously ecological, physical, geophysical, and meteorological – but they are also social, ethical, and political. Consider the architectural fabrics, systems, and complex bodies of cities. Cities shape how we live – from how we move within and through their actual constructions and in how we perceive what is valuable about the diverse and overlapping communities that they enable. To begin with, by irrigating the way we think and plan our cities, we necessarily place urban centres in relation to watersheds, rivers, lakes, aquifers, and regional infrastructures; we become aware of the hydrophilic and hydrophobic bodies of plants, animals (including humans), gardens, parks, canals, roadways, buildings and the many shared places in-between. Current design and planning practices refer mostly to terrestrial property and political borders. Thinking cities with water deterritorializes or reterritorializes these practices critically and generatively – thus, enabling a way of thinking, planning and building that includes a more dynamic and complex systems-based approach to environment, biodiversity and urbanity. Where aspects of this environmentally and contextually City as Fountain Proposal for ABC : MTL – Canadian Centre for Architecture – C.Chen - 120731 . . . 2 of 5
sensitive thinking of built form and urban planning have been advocated and practiced at different times throughout the recorded history of architecture, this iteration – this particular instance of advocacy – is unique to a time when climate change is experienced globally (cyclones and hurricanes linked to warmer oceans) - and when weather events and water scarcity are both forefront in global conversations. The body of work that goes by the name of political ecology includes the work of Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika, and Matthew Gandy, among others. All three of these scholars trace how waters are socialized within specific urban and environmental contexts. 1 Kaika, for one, points out that water pollution is never an “externality” – nature is not outside of human activity, humans are not outside of nature – but that anthropogenic transformation of rivers, lakes, aquifers and weather systems may be understood as our production of nature. 2 In this production of nature, cities have an increasingly important role to play. The politics of the city cannot be separated by the multiple and overlapping ecologies that cities effect and affect. As centers of intense activity, they amplify anthropogenic habits of dwelling and the subsequent transformations of lands, waters and populations of a hybrid urban ecosystem and watershed. The complex collective assemblage that is a city is both a hybrid socio-natural ecosystem and a messy prosthetic of human nature-culture improvised in collaboration with lively surrounds. Hybrid cities built deliberately with (and not just beside or over) water can offer generative approaches in a time when more than half the world’s humans and uncounted other species (dogs, cats, rats, cockroaches, pigeons, raccoons, crows, dandelions) are living in some form of urbanity. > collective production of the city > collective production of this project > participatory workshops and installation City as Fountain : Mapping Water in Montreal For this project, an approximately 3m x 3m space in the CCA galleries would host a permanent installation and self-explanatory mapping work space that invites the spontaneous participation of exhibit visitors. This work space would include a generous mapping table (with stools of varying height) onto which physcial maps can be laid flat, and onto which maps can also be projected from an appropriately located digital projector during workshops. On the adjacent walls, there will be a place to hang maps not in use as well as a shelf with supporting materials and a display screen linked to digitally accessible water mapping resources. In support and activation of this on-going mapping process, I propose to organise a series of guided workshops for mapping the relations of water in Montreal and for re-making the city as a fountain. I will also arrange for a complementary set of talks and walking tours (weather-dependant) that engage different aspects of water and urbanity. (See the proposed project schedule below for further details) Finally, I will regularly (about every two weeks) photograph, scan and upload selected materials from this ongoing mapping process – a project blog of sorts. Ideally, this online documentation would be hosted on an ABC : MTL (CCA) platform, but if this is not possible, I would find space to host this elsewhere. 1 Maria Kaika examines the waters of Athens and London in City of Flows. Erik Swyngedous articulates a political ecology of water in his study of the Spanish waterscape between 1890 and 1930. Matthew Gandy critically narrates New York City’s thirsty relation to the Catskills through its extensive aqueduct systems. 2 City of Flows, 21-24. City as Fountain Proposal for ABC : MTL – Canadian Centre for Architecture – C.Chen - 120731 . . . 3 of 5
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