(A conversation overheard at the coffee machine in the DECA teachers' lounge.)
- And are you doing anything special this session to celebrate 20 years?
- Yeah! We're making the next generation of street signs out of computer chips. They'll be busy until December, don't worry!
- Wow! It's amazing how you're always able to find new business for them to do every year.
- That's the fun of being a teacher. The day we won't know what to do with our garbage is when we won't have any!
- You're so right. But right now, I've got to run, it's pretty much collection time in Villeray. Last week, it looks like they passed the word: a whole street put polypropylenes in their polyethylenes bin, which was such nonsense! But hey, I left a couple of fines, so they won't do it twice.
- Oh yeah, plus I know you hate it when you have to be the police!
In March 2025, the City of Montreal adopted an exemplary waste management policy. Materials guardians, formerly garbage collectors, are now responsible for raising public awareness and ensuring that the life cycle of materials is respected. These carefully collected materials attract the best talents in this booming industry to the former Des Carrières incinerator, now a leading innovation center for waste treatment. Renamed the Institut Des Carrières (DECA), this facility offers training of excellence for the next generation: a constantly renewed annual program to develop new techniques for transforming waste into useful resources. The incinerator has also re-established its heating network, whose energy sales finance part of the Institute's activities.
***
(The door closes on the cab of a dump truck loaded with snow on a cold January morning.)
- Well, let's go, we're off to Dickson to dump the snow. I don't want to be late for lunch with my mom, especially since it's one of the last ones! Did I tell you she's retiring next week? It's crazy, when you think about it, she's been doing this run every winter for 20 years. You see, my mother is an environmentalist! A real one! I still remember when she came back from her first day of work after the reform, she was so moved, I think she was crying. I spent my whole childhood watching her drive off in her truck in the morning. But now I'm doing the same. I've been doing it for nearly 8 years now! I tell my kids all the time that I've got the best job in the world. I'd be so proud if they'd become material guardians too. When I think back to the old days, when they wasted the snow in Francon when it was just a hole, and we died of heat in the summer in Hochelag'. Did I tell you that my grandmother died in the middle of a heat wave? ...Yeah, in any case.
- Yeah.
The Grand Réseau du Résiduel (GRR) sees the management of residual materials, spaces and energy as opportunities for social innovation to meet the social and urban needs of the City of Montreal. Under this plan, the former Dickson incinerator became a site for recycling Montreal's used snow . After recycling the scrap metal from its obsolete machinery and deepening its pit, the Dickson cooler will supply an inter-neighborhood cooling network. This dual-system network uses underground pipes to circulate very cold water, produced by the controlled melting of reclaimed snow, to air-condition the indoor spaces served. Secondly, the surface of the Dickson lot is the first site to requalify residual urban spaces as "autonomous freshness poles". This model is based on the principle of uncontrolled organic vegetation, born of the values instilled by the Viauville wild wasteland. Since its deployment throughout the city, this method has refreshed many areas thanks to these vegetation poles, which require almost no construction and maintenance costs, encouraging the natural growth of plants.
***
(A fresh scent of dead leaves wafts into the park's vast, luminous space through the generous, half-open shutters, which we are about to close for the evening. The wide windows look out over the Rosemont rooftops and the treetops, which are already almost bare. A hushed ambience pervades this corner of the great room, with jasmine twisting on the galvanized roof trellises and potted lemon trees creating small, intimate spaces. A comfortable warmth emanates from the floor, and music and lively conversation can be heard further away: it's nice.)
- Hi! Sorry I'm late, lots of traffic on the bike path...
- Don't worry! I'm not heating up our place yet, I just came in an hour ago to read a bit in the warmth.
The heat emitted by the various furnaces and burners at the Institut Des Carrières, in addition to its role in waste management, allows the integration of a temperate urban park right on the building's roof. This fourth place (indoor, heated, non-commercial) is in keeping with the GRR's ideology of democratizing heating. The DECA park is accessible to all and maintained like all the city's other parks.
***
(The sled slows down, then stops at the bottom of the former quarry, now Francon Park. Without fully realizing the grandeur of the surrounding landscape, with its towering limestone cliffs that rise 80 meters before reaching the level of the Montreal floor, the child looks back up the slope).
Mom! Again!
(From competitor's text)
(Unofficial automated translation)
The jury underlines the inventiveness of the proposal, which reconciles an approach rooted in the reality of the site and its context, while incorporating a narrative framework of colorful stories, which contributes to the evocative aspect of the proposal. The variety of stories depicting the daily lives of various users exposes a social reflection completed on multiple scales, all the more so as it allows the proposal to be skilfully considered in the future. The complementary programs proposed for the Carrières and Dickson incinerators, evoking the conceptual autonomy of the team members' thinking, echo the opportunities offered by their immediate context while drawing on the potential of a structuring network on an urban scale.
(From jury report)
(Unofficial automated translation)
3 scanned / 3 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Perspective
- Conceptual Collage
