In Montreal, vibrant urban communities start in the back alley

How I became obsessed with the theory and practice of the ruelle.

For the last year and spare change, I’ve been writing occasionally for Le Devoir, Montréal’s venerable, 113 year-old French-language broadsheet. I pitched them a series on urban life here from an immigrant point of view. Why? Because I suspect that in its own low-key way, Montreal has important lessons to teach us on how to build a genuinely vibrant urban community in the 21st century…starting from the forgotten urban space behind everyone’s house.

My very first piece for Le Devoir went sort of viral. It was a love letter to Montreal urbanism, or rather to the urban design of the French-speaking East-side, including Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, where I’ve lived for the last 14 years.

Now, this is not a particularly fancy-looking part of town. Other than going to Marché Jean-Talon —the sprawling municipal market here— few tourists find they have any reason to come here. Mostly, it’s working-class housing put up between the 1910s and 1960s, in the form of “plexes” — 2-4 unit buildings with the owner living downstairs and tenants living in the 1-3 apartments upstairs.

It looks like this:

About half of Montreal is laid out this way. The buildings are set side-by-side, wall-to-wall, so the resulting mix is pretty dense: 5,000-8,000 people per square kilometer. That’s the Goldie Locks zone for walkability and general neighborhood vibrancy, as urban planners know. But stopping at a density number is missing the point.

Because, there’s a twist. Since the houses are side-by-side, you can’t reach the back yards from the street. Instead, rows of houses are set apart by a huge network of almost 18,000 back alleys —“ruelles”, in French— which look like this:

My kids always joke about how different the connotations of a word like “back alley” are from those of “ruelle”.

“Ruelle” is the diminutive of rue: literally, it’s a “little street”, which makes it sound all cosy and nice. A back alley is where you go get high, or stabbed, or both.

Maybe because the word just sounds so darn nice, Montrealers and their kids seem to spend a lot of time in their ruelles. It’s easy to miss, because ruelles are easy to overlook, but it’s where face-to-face community happens here, hidden in plain sight. Neighbours have drinks on the ruelle, their kids play soccer or hockey or shoot hoops there. Some neighbours organize “haunted ruelles” for halloween, inviting kids to trick-or-treat around the back instead of in the front of the house. I’ve seen others hold piñatas for their kids there.

Walk down any ruelle in this city and you’ll see at least one bit of street art, some kind of sign of neighbors grabbing the space and making it theirs.

Just the other day, I bought some handmade soap from one ruelle neighbor and some used baking molds from another from a “vente débarras” — a sort of circular economy thingy where neighbors informally trade their old (but usable) junk with each other for symbolic prices. One neighbor, Carole, cleaned out her kids’ old winter clothes at $2 a pop and ended up making $100 and freeing up a lot of closet space. Another, Leïla, ruthlessly went through all her kitchen gadgets and picked out all the ones she doesn’t actively use. They put them up on little tables in the alley, put a sign on the end where it meets the street, and de-junked their houses.

One of the streets bordering our ruelle is Rue Marquette, so they called it…

This is the kind of hippie-dippie circular economy nonsense I would’ve rolled my eyes at before I moved here. But around here, there’s nothing imposed about this kind of low-stakes bartering, nothing top-down. Neighbors organize it on the ruelle Facebook page because they like it, and it solves a problem everyone has and is a chance to say hi and get to know each other.

Personally, I think of the ruelle as the secret Montreal: a strangely liminal space. Technically, it’s city property, but people treat it more of an extension of their back yards, making the ruelle an odd sort of public-private mash-up. It belongs to everyone, but more than anything, it belongs to us.

I’m fascinated enough by the ruelle as a social institution that I started an NGO to make community life there even more appealing. Vive la Ruelle is a back-pocket affair, just me and my art director Paula, who has all the good ideas, and a bit of money from the city and the local Credit Union. We hang out with neighbours, show them how to use paint and stencils to make their ruelle more inviting, then have a barbeque at the end. It’s great fun.

But it’s serious, too. This substack is about all the reasons our public sphere has stopped working as a place where we can have honest debates, about the ways polarization has wrecked our ability to meet each other as citizens. One important aspect of that is that we mostly live out our social and political lives online these days, in disembodied communities where you never have to deal with people face to face.

The ruelle is the antidote to that sort of alienated socialization. On the ruelle, you have to deal with your neighbours, and you have to take them as they are. They won’t all agree with you, they won’t all look like you, they won’t all take your values for granted. But you can still build a community with them, where you look out for one another’s kids, borrow and lend tools, hold little ventes-débarras, and make each other feel at home in the space you all share.

I get it that it’s not a model that will scale easily. Of course it isn’t. But there are important clues here on what it would take to detoxify our public sphere. It’s hard to stay angry at the person you’re buying hand-made soap from, hard to stay polarized with the people who watch over your kids when they’re playing outside. Polarization is, to some extent, a technological phenomenon, a sign that we’re interacting too much on screens and not enough face-to-face.

To the extent that people fail to socialize face-to-face because they live in car-oriented low-density neighborhoods that don’t create opportunities for face-to-face socialization, polarization is really an outcome of bad urban planning. It’s almost never portrayed in that light, but I suspect there’s more to it than people realize.