La Défense 4: Un Aller-Retour

As a major employment node, the massive la Défense complex is directly connected to la Périphérique and to the RER commuter train network though a major transportation hub below the main plaza.


Auto-mobility@ la Défense


Rail Links


This last picture is almost seemingly the entrance to la Défense, however, it is in fact the entrance to Hull’s own peripheral government Place du Portage office complex built as an urban renewal project in the early 1970s. Like la Défense, the four-phase complex, boasting the largest contiguous floor of any office building in Canada, is linked to the (unfinished) highway and expressway network. The massive complexes and their unilinear transportation linkages are an ode to the swift character of the rush hour commute and to the efficient speed of modern office work and workers. While more accessible (in terms of class and age participation), these transportation corridors are still an enclosed and specialized one-way space. Its high-modernity entrenches the city landscape further in the limiting “yokes of corridor mentality”.

Place du Portage, like it’s transatlantic cousin, was built on the paths of low-income neighbourhoods - also-know-as ‘slums’ or ‘bidonvilles’ in the pathologies of modern postwar urban reformers. However, unlike la Défense, the old neighbourhoods still surround the government offices, though despite their kitch pastiche continue to suffer the repercussions of the massive intervention, and from a general uneven development of Hull-Gatineau’s urban-suburban polarization.