The month of night

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Frouard, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France. December 2021.

It is in December that the true nature of the cities is revealed, for it is the same hand that built them that will also light them for about ⅔ of the day. Summer offers an easy cheat : the sun, which makes misery less painful. That is, the flattering light. The sun excuses, forgives, fixes. Winter, and even more so the month of December, brings us face to face with our urban planning choices and their consequences, since nature will not help to erase design errors. Ugliness can expect no filter from winter.

The quality of housing and urban planning are correlated with mental health, physical health and the level of stress felt by the inhabitants. These effects seem to be increased in people with lower incomes, who are more likely to live in small houses and therefore to live outside, depending more on public facilities for their activities^[1]. Both of these common sense observations are now supported by a growing number ofscientific studies.

Several criteria have been identified to characterize the quality of urban planning^[1][2] :

• its capacity to generate social links, through the presence of green spaces, squares and places of conviviality,
• a dense and uninterrupted network of non-motorised transport (walking, cycling, rollerblading, etc.) providing access to the whole city and to other modes of transport,
• traffic safety (low traffic accident rate) and personal safety (low crime rate),
• access to affordable, healthy housing,
• the ability to build vertically to limit urban sprawl and shorten distances,
• a sufficiently low level of pollution (chemical and noise),
• the aesthetics of the architecture and landscaping.

The usual irony is that the poorest communities are the most dependent on the quality of urban planning, while they also have the least resources to invest in and improve it.

Yet the city is still systematically thought of as a no-man’s-land of juxtaposed solitudes, ideally surrounded by their individual lawns, which are crossed by arteries dedicated to fast, motorized traffic, at the edge of which the pedestrian will be kind enough not to encroach on the parking lots. Not a place to live, not a place for social interaction. In this network concreted for traffic, public lighting is also thought to be economical, still often made of those horrible honeycombed concrete masts laid there in a hurry in the 1960 s on which sodium vapor bulbs have been placed, as seen above in Frouard. The lighting is dim, unfocused and uninviting, distorting the colours and accentuating the gloomy aspect of cities that are already ugly by day.

Frouard is a former industrial town of 6,560 inhabitants spread over 13.3 km² (491 inhabitants/km²), at the confluence of the Moselle, the Marne-Rhine canal and the Meurthe, 8 km north of Nancy (105,000 inhabitants within the city, 257,000 inhabitants for the metropolis) Since the closure of the forges, steelworks, slaughterhouses and the removal of the branch of the Marne-Rhine Canal that crossed it (and therefore its port, and therefore its cafés and inns) after the canalization of the Moselle for large barges, Frouard is mainly used as a dormitory town for people who work in Nancy without being able to afford a home there. The town has been quietly depopulating since the 1970 s (1000 fewer inhabitants).

Many of the central shops have closed down in favour of the Saule Gaillard shopping area, in front of the A31 motorway exit which serves the town from Metz and Nancy. This shopping area, 3 km from the centre, is difficult to access on foot, by bike or by public transport (less than 2 per hour). In the centre there are mainly pharmacies, doctors, banks, insurance companies, funeral parlours, two bakeries, a few Turkish grocery stores, too many hairdressers, estate agents and a Lidl discount supermarket.

The urbanism is suffered rather than built, as evidenced by the 1960 s concrete lampposts and the absence of green spaces worthy of the name, despite the abundance of industrial wasteland and the presence of an old disused canal branch left as a scrubby wasteland. The sidewalks are narrow and parking is the main focus. Everything is utilitarian and basic, economical, and oscillating between ugly and uninteresting.

The city is organized around two main Y-shaped streets which are places of commerce and intensive car traffic at the beginning and end of the day, not very conducive to strolling. Although located at the edge of the Haye forest and under the Rays plateau, where there is an aerodrome for model aircraft and a football stadium, access to the plateau and the forest is via a road without sidewalks with a slope of 7 to 9 % over nearly 2 km, which few people in town have the courage to face. The climb is usually done by car for the few walkers who go there on Sundays. You don’t usually meet anyone there.

The high street lamps in a sparse network are not very efficient to light the streets properly and create a significant light pollution by lighting mainly the sky. One can have the impression to be on the extension of a motorway exit on which people would live by convenience, between two commutings, because Frouard is an obligatory passage for the inhabitants of Pompey and Liverdun who return from work in Nancy. If we didn’t occasionally fish a drowned person out of the canal, we could say that nothing ever happens in Frouard.

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Montreal, Quebec, Canada. December 2015 and 2018.

The borough of Villeray, above, is located south of the A40 highway (the Trans-Canada Highway), north of Montreal. It has about 60,000 inhabitants spread over 5.2 km² (11,520 inhabitants/km²). It is a district occupied mainly by French-speaking Quebecers, as well as by Portuguese, Vietnamese and some French immigrants. Founded as a village in 1895, it became part of Montreal in 1905, and its particularity is that it became urbanized after the development of public transportation (tramway). The current architecture of multi-storey brick houses with exterior staircases dates from the 1950 s and replaces the first wooden worker-owner houses built before the 1930 s. These brick houses still have a wooden interior frame, even in recent constructions.

There are wide, tree-lined sidewalks, which are unfortunately occupied by snow banks for part of the winter. The streets are mostly one-way, maximizing parking space without depriving pedestrians of too much sidewalk width. The street lights are low and aesthetically pleasing, although they are usually buried in the trees, and therefore produce an uneven light. However, all the houses have lanterns in front of them, which are left lit on evenings when they are entertaining and which some people turn on as soon as it gets dark. The houses are built back from the pavement, and usually have a front garden under the stairs and overhangs, which further airs the streets.

Jarry Park and many squares make the neighbourhood green and provide playgrounds. Jarry Park offers several sports fields (tennis, baseball) and a stadium that we owe to the hygienist period of the 1920 s and 30 s (in a background of typhoid fever, tuberculosis and smallpox in higher proportions than the rest of the country in Villeray in the early 20th century). A large number of shops and restaurants are scattered in this residential area, despite the relatively low population density (houses are 2 to 3 stories high). The majority of the houses have a backyard overlooking an alley, once used to deliver coal, and that now provide traffic-free play areas for children. However, many residents have chosen to convert their backyards to parking.

It is remarkable that streetlights closer from each other and closer to the ground (barely reaching the height of the 2nd floor of the houses) draw a totally different street, more human, more intimate, and warmer than what we observe here in Frouard, with streetlights at the level of the 3rd floor.

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Mirecourt, Vosges, France. December 2021 

Mirecourt is a country town of 5325 inhabitants spread over 12.1 km² (419 inhabitants/km²) which has also been depopulating at an alarming rate since the 1960 s (3800 fewer inhabitants). It has made the bold choice to turn off public lighting between midnight and 5 a.m., in other words, to nip in the bud any attempt at nightlife and foot traffic. The little light that remains is provided by the illuminated signs of the businesses and by the traffic lights. The result is… you judge for yourself. Driving in such a city without lighting puts pedestrians at risk.

Mirecourt is, along with Cremona in Italy, a European capital of violin making, as it is still home to several violin makers, violin and bow making schools, including the only school in France allowed to issue the certificate of professional competence in luthery, and the violin maker who made Mistlav Rostropovitch’s last cello (Alain Carbonare). Despite this, the golden age of violin making is over and the main employer in the town is the Ravenel psychiatric hospital (about a thousand employees). The young people who come to Mirecourt to study violin making all ask the same question : why ? They will not have the opportunity to experience student life in the same way as their colleagues in the big cities.

The sidewalks are narrow, uneven and often occupied by cars that have no business being there. No trace of a bike path anywhere. No urban or suburban public transport. As in all rural areas, the use of the car is practically compulsory to cope with the spread of services.

Mirecourt has a lot of potential : a past and still a semi-present craft industry in wood, embroidery and violin making, a town centre that still has a lot of Renaissance buildings and many 17th and 18th century buildings, but nothing and no one to make it grow or to maintain it. Like Frouard, most of the shops are bakeries, pharmacies, hairdressers, fast-food outlets, estate agents and insurance banks. Even the administrations have deserted this former bourgeois town, leaving an empty court and a theatre recently demolished due to decay beyond repair. The town is also the only supply point for all the surrounding villages within a 10 km radius, although they are increasingly dependent on the neighbouring towns of Nancy (60 km) and Épinal (40 km) for specialist medicine and for specialist shops. In addition, the TER line that linked Mirecourt to Nancy was closed in 2010 or 2011.

The process of decay has been going on for more than 40 years, but what is serious is that Mirecourt cannot even serve as a dormitory town for a neighbouring town because the nearest one is 40 km away. It is therefore a population of retired, unemployed and welfare recipients, who see their youth running away and being replaced by Turkish and North African immigration, which does not fail to make the old white right-wing Vosges man grind his denture.

Just as lighting can make or break a photo, by redrawing volumes and contours, it can make or break a city by making it more or less gloomy or warm. In a month where it is dark for almost ⅔ of the day, this becomes terribly important for morale, which has an effect on health and therefore on health care expenses. However, short-term, economically driven, low-sighted approaches to urban planning are based on immediate utilitarian considerations, without considering (or with minimizing) the long-term effects. The conceptualization of the city as a juxtaposition of solitudes, where the inhabitant is tucked away in their own home and where the public highway belongs to no one, serving only as a rapid transit zone, is toxic for everyone, but first and foremost for people with little income.

That’s what always surprises me about pre-19th century construction. While living conditions were much less comfortable and almost everything was done by hand and took a lot of time, there was always a little room for useless decoration : carved doorframes, openwork shutters, engraved motifs in kitchen utensils… The investment in time and skills made in these small attentions at the time is out of all proportion to what today’s power tools would allow us to accomplish quickly and inexpensively. And yet, we gave up. We build boxes, without embellishment, without trying to do anything. This was understandable after the war, in the rush to rebuild, but not in the 21st century. What is most toxic is that this depressive mania gives the appearance of rationality in the name of cost reduction. Generating sadness is never rational, it is at best a psychopathic whim.