Where does the water go when you flush?

>> A new eco-map links Montreal's urban life with its surrounding ecology

by PHILIP PREVILLE

On île Notre-Dame, at the very site where the world gathered over 30 years ago for Expo '67, there now sits a swampy marsh. But the site didn't turn into marshland out of neglect: it's a man-made marsh, placed there to treat waste water from Montreal's sewage system. The clean water that flows from it then ends up washing up on the shores of the île Notre-Dame beach.

According to Jim Banks of the Sustainable Development Association (SDA), the marsh is akin to what environmental designers call a "living machine... The idea is to let the animals and the plants treat the waste," Banks says. "The wetlands will adapt to the waste products, consume them and convert them into cellulose." The only bi-products of the treatment process are the growing plants themselves, making it an environmentally sound sewage treatment system.

Few Montrealers are aware of the city's sewer marsh, even though they swim in its treated water. But the marsh is one of many ecologically sound anomalies featured on a new map of Montreal called Tiotake: A Map of Montreal's Urban Ecology. Over two years in the making, Tiotake was created through a partnership between the SDA and McGill's School of Urban Planning. But the map itself is only a small part of the project: Tiotake is an attempt to catalogue all aspects of Montreal's urban ecology into a computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS), gathering information on population, wildlife, vegetation and water currents, and combining it with urban ecology information such as recycling centres, waste treatment facilities and pollution sources--all in a single database.

For Banks, Tiotake is all about stripping away the veneer of urban life and opening Montrealers' eyes to the ecology of the place they live. "We've become so far removed from nature when we live in urban environments. Normally, people look at maps to look up streets, to find where the concrete has been laid down. Meanwhile, we flush the toilet and we have no idea where it goes or what happens to it."

Tiotake is also an important first for Canada: Montreal is the first Canadian city to become part of the Green Map System, a global effort to create ecological maps of all the world's major urban areas.

In addition to the sewage swamp, the Tiotake map also highlights specific buildings in the city that use solar energy by mounting photo-voltaic panels on the roof (most are located on the outskirts of the city, though the four-storey Solarium office building at 1875 René-Lévesque, corner St-Marc, is an exception in the downtown area). Tiotake also maps the less savoury aspects of Montreal's urban ecology, cataloguing the oil spills and industrial polluters that populate the city's East End. It also locates Montreal's toxic chemical storage facilities and release sites--critical information for any prospective homeowner or renter.

"The idea is to use cartography to link people back with their ecological environment," says McGill Urban Planning student Louis-Martin Levac, who catalogued the data into the GIS as part of his master's degree. For Levac, the map creates all kinds of possibilities for future urban planning. "Say you have an industrial area with toxic emanations, and you also know the strength and direction of prevailing winds. You can then ask the GIS to tell you how many people have to inhale the toxins on a daily basis."

Both Levac and Banks believe that Tiotake can fill a crucial void: the lack of ecological information available to both planners and designers. Banks, a mechanical engineer, has devoted himself to finding and circulating that kind of information for years. ("I'm about as far away from ecology as you can get," he says of his profession. "It's all machine-based ideas.") "Designers never take energy consumption into consideration for the manufacture of whatever they're designing," says Banks. "They use materials made in China or other faraway parts of the world, and they have no information about how they're made, the environmental damage they cause. Designers never think of these things, because the information is never made available to them. Historically, we've always designed for a very narrow set of criteria."

For Banks, the sewage-treatment marsh is a perfect example of the kinds of projects urban communities should aspire toward. "Burlington, Vt. processes all its waste water through a living machine, and the end result is 10-per-cent cleaner than what most treatment plants produce," he says.

Tiotake: A Map of Montreal's Urban Ecology is available at most of Montreal's "green" retailers (health food stores, hemp clothing outlets, etc.) as well as through all Éco-Quartier offices. Price: $7.50. Info: Sustainable Development Association, 482-5033