Who is the “public” in public space?

Beatrice Toner

I am a Montrealer. I am a user of the city and its public spaces. I go to parks, take the metro and walk through the streets.

A homeless person is a Montrealer. He uses the city. He sleeps in parks, stays warm in the metro stations and roams through the streets day and night.

Who – me or the homeless person – is more entitled to use Montreal’s public spaces?

There are an estimated 30 000 homeless people in Montreal. And that stat goes up every year. Several services are offered to the homeless to help them out, but these services simply aren’t covering their needs. The shelters in Montreal provide beds in the wintertime for at least six or seven hundred people. What about others? And during the rest of the year?
If you are a resident of Montreal, or of any other large city in the world, you will know that homeless people, young or old, tend to hang out in public spaces where, hopefully, police will not quickly whisk them away. One of those places here in Montreal is the Viger Square, on Berri Street over the Ville Marie Highway.

When Viger Square’s construction was completed in 1983, Charles Daudelin’s oeuvre was supposed to become a busy meeting spot for locals. With its concrete structures, hanging plants, steel instrument-like fountain and open central plaza, it was meant to be the place to be. Unfortunately, due to its inaccessibility or the fact that it is disconnected from the areas surrounding it, the Square never became the place it was designed to be. In fact, it is located between two busy parts of town – Old Montreal and Berri-UQAM metro station – in an area which is a route, not a destination. Today, the main users of Viger Square are homeless people looking for a bit of privacy.

The “residents” of the plaza see it as their home, even if life there is fairly dangerous. One 45 year old woman told La Presse in 2008 that in the Square your stuff can be stolen and you can be raped. But she would rather have one fixed place to be than to have to move around each time the police arrive and make her and the other “residents” leave.

So here are the facts. The Viger Square never caught the general public’s attention and was been adopted by the homeless of the city shortly after its inauguration. However, the City will not allow them to use it completely. They are shunned out by the police if they are found there after midnight and are not allowed to put up any sort of permanent or temporary housing (tents aren’t even legal). But no one else is using the park.

Shouldn’t this type of space become an exception to the regulations, which deprive the homeless people of Montreal of a place they can call their own? Couldn’t one put in place a few installations that would give the inhabitants a few resources to live with? In recent years several people have come up with solutions for this type of issue. As a matter of fact, a self-managed group of artists, Dare-Dare, set up, in 2004, a temporary shelter on the Viger Square to house a few of the group’s offices. This curious location for office spaces brought up several debates on the place of art in the social. In addition, Dis/location: projet d’articulation urbaine, which lasted until 2006, created an unusual link between the general public, artists and the homeless community. The performances given on the Square varied widely from dance, theatre and music, to architecture, electronic arts and visual arts. Yet, this kind of initiative does not create concrete improvements to their lives, but rather changes the way the general public perceives them and their way of living. The improvements should, hopefully, follow.

Other initiatives have been proposed by designers. The New York artist Michael Rakowitz came up with two designs for bypassing the no-tent laws. The first was portable tents made from car covers. All a user would need is pay the “parking” meter fees and he or she could sleep in peace. One disadvantage: covers designed for luxurious cars could attract some unwanted attention. And I don’t mean from the police. This project, called (P)lot, is not yet in use. It’s still a proposal.

In 1998, Rakowitz came up with another solution for homelessness, which has been in use since its creation. To come up with a prototype, he considered typical building air vents where the homeless tend to sleep in order to stay warm. The design he came up with is an inflatable tent-like structure made from plastic bags. A tube connects the shelter to the vents, heating the tents’ outer layer. Given that the shelters could be considered as tents and therefore be considered illegal, Rakowitz proposed another design which is more like a sleeping bag. Since 1998, Rakowitz made at least thirty paraSITEs for homeless people in several American cities.

So let me ask my starting question again. Who is more entitled to use public spaces such as the abandoned Viger Square? Projects such as the ones proposed by Dare-Dare and Michael Rakowitz would give people living on the streets the opportunity to adapt their living environment to their needs, without bothering nearby picnickers or park users. Consequently, my answer is homeless people are as entitled as any other person to use parks, urban plazas and other public spaces.