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Densification is a peculiar term. It is ostensibly a descriptor of any process whereby something (a substance, a mix, or—as we now tend to find—a place or a part of a human settlement) becomes denser with the passage of time. It’s thus a neutral term in many respects, politely waiting for deployment along with uncontroversial cousins such as absorption, transformation, transportation, and ignition. Yet it’s also normative, a word denoting change from what exists to a state that is perhaps better—as in being more efficient in how scarce resources including space get ‘used’—and at once a word that can direct our attention to where things are worsening, such as how scar tissue sometimes unpleasantly thickens or hardens over time. In this latter respect, it lurks in a dank linguistic cellar among other cousins with whom few of us want to spend much time, such as ossification, corruption, and desertification. Put another way : densification is not an innocent word, and as a concept, it tends to ruffle feathers. For many future-minded people, it evokes a desirable change and perhaps even represents an imperative. For others, who may also be future-minded (but perhaps also concerned with maintaining the status quo), it evokes undesirable change that disrupts and destroys present conditions that are well worth conserving.

Densification is something that fascinates architects, urbanists, policymakers, economists, and others involved in planning for the future. It’s been a big preoccupation for most of my own quarter-century career at the juncture of housing studies, landscape planning, and urban design. It’s high on policy agendas across Canada—especially in our major metropolitan areas, with the recent controversy over protected Greenbelt land in the Toronto-Hamilton agglomeration being a case in point. Densification is posited as a plausible and promising pathway for dealing with the latest iteration of the housing crisis bedevilling Québec and many other OECD contexts. It’s touted as a necessary (not merely sufficient) condition for economically-viable and energy-conserving ways of enabling people to move around for work, learning, and play without building hard-to-maintain road infrastructure. It’s often presented as a self-evident goal for how we manage continuity and change in human settlements, and indeed it is now a cornerstone of medium- and long-term planning for cities and suburbs. Densification, we are told, curbs (sub)urban sprawl, protecting valuable agricultural land, helping to maintain and enhance biodiversity, rendering public transport viable and attractive, enabling people to live and work in ‘walkable’ neighbourhoods without owning a car, encouraging the production of a wide range of housing types including flats, townhouses, andÌýsmall apartments (as opposed to endless bungalows), and the collective work of coming to terms in productive, sustainable ways with what Margaret Atwood has called ‘everything change’Ìý(including the climate emergency).

Why all the fuss about densification ? This is a question we’ve been pondering at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM), the McGill-based forum where several dozen members collaborate on matters of fact and matters of concern that manifest themselves in the archipelago that is home to McGill. We have now partnered with the Office de consultation publique de Montréal, a quasi-autonomous government agency responsible for public hearings on civic affairs, to start drilling down on this question. On the 27^th of October, a day-long symposium will explore the sociopolitical pluralities of densification(s), with thinkers from fields that one would expect—public policy, urban planning, housing—and several others who have exciting yet under-represented perspectives such as soundscapes, the experience of night in the city, and archaeology.

If you still aren’t convinced of why densification warrants attention, think about what’s afoot on campus, both downtown and at Macdonald. Here we see case studies in what densification entails (piling more activities, more people, more stuff, and usually more architectural space, as measured in gross floor area) onto existing sites, at least some of the time. The removal of library materials from the stacks in the McLennan and other branches—to the new Collections Centre at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, from where we will still be able to summon them for our scholarly use—is an example of how densification both results from and intensifies competition for space. The massive and exciting New Vic project will intensify how the charming but decrepit buildings of the old Royal Victoria Hospital get used, with McGill futurists promising us a 21^st-century mashup of specialists who work on sustainability, urban affairs, and public policy, combined and intermingling in a dense but airy new series of pavilions that combine the old and the new for McGill’s third century.

If your spidey-sense is tingling, it should be. Each one of these examples might be characterised as necessary transformations for a university that flourishes thanks in large part to the location of its downtown campus in the compact, vertically-mixed central part of Montréal, where space is expensive and where everyone benefits—albeit in different, sometimes unjust ways—from proximity to services and amenities (think of the decent cafés where we get our fancy coffees, the convenience of the metro and the EXO trains, the pleasures of being on the slopes of Mont-Royal). More importantly, however, these densifications are fraught by controversy, and what we often refer to with a nervous guffaw as ‘growing pains’. Who decides where, when, and how densification will take place ? How do we deal with the messy, disruptive intermediate stages of construction, renovation, and the temporary relocation of key activities ? To whom do we have recourse when those processes become more than a nuisance ? Do the improvements we get in the long run justify the headaches, damage, and loss that typically accompany any sort of densification and intensification of activities ?

The venerable old Oxford English DictionaryÌýtells us that the term ‘densification’ has been in use since the mid-19^th century ; its first appearance in written form seems to have been in a manual on brewing beer, authored by someone with the delightful name of William Littell Tizard. Were it only that the connotations and debates associated with the word ‘densification’ were as cheerful as mixing beer with tongue-twisting names ! At CIRM, through our collaboration with OCPM, weÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½appl continue working on the difficult questions raised by densification(s)—and weÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½appl be looking to hear from different parts of the McGill community in the years to come.

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For more on this topic:

Luka, N. (2021). It’s not how dense we make it, but how we make it dense : on porosity as a corequisite of densification. Aménager : Expérience et innovation d’un quartier, 4 (2—Habiter), 12–20.

Mukhija, V. (2022). Opening up the private city : Remaking single-family zoning neighborhoods. In K. Goh, A. Loukaitou-Sideris, V. Mukhija, & L. J. Vale (Eds.), Just urban design : The struggle for a public city (pp. 105–123). MIT Press.

Paradis, D., J. Robin, C. Savard, A. de la Cruz, P. Dupas, L. Méthé Myrand, F. Pronovost, & M. Ladd. (2017). Réussir l'habitat dense : Dix clés pour des habitations compactes, attrayantes et performantes. Montréal : Vivre en ville / Écobâtiment.

Roy-Baillargeon, O. (2017). Le TOD contre la ville durable ? Utiliser le transport collectif pour perpétuer le suburbanisme dispersé dans le Grand Montréal. Environnement urbain, 12.

Valzania, G. (2022). Towers once in the park : Uprooting Toronto's welfare landscapes. Geografiska Annaler, Series B : Human Geography, 104(3), 227–249.