WasteScapes App

Download the App to discover the hidden stories of Montreal’s waste systems

The WasteScapes App is an interactive map featuring over 40 waste sites around the city of Montreal. Download it for free, head out your door, and explore familiar sites from a new perspective– one that brings waste into focus! Some sites take you to guerilla artworks made from scavenged materials, while others reveal aboveground clues to giant subterranean waste infrastructures. Just like Pokémon Go, you have to be there to ‘unlock’ each site’s content– which includes an audio story and photos. Challenge yourself to unlock them all!

Tour Routes

The App is designed to let you find your own way between the sites, but here on the website, there are several curated tours suggesting routes on existing cycling and walking paths. The tours last from one to three hours, depending on your form of transport.

Download PDFs of the Waste Scapes tours below! Please note that the tours are not embedded into the App. If you want to follow our designated paths, download or print the tour PDF and use that along with the app to guide your urban exploration.

Scales of Waste: An Island, an Archipelago, and a River

Île Sainte-Hélène & Île Notre-Dame

Scales of Waste: An Island, an Archipelago, and a River

This tour follows the path of water along these two constructed islands with stops at the Basin Olympique and the Seaway, and asks us to consider the many relations and scales of waste - from microbes, to contaminants, to fish, to people, to whole nations.

Download PDF

Leftovers

Lachine Canal

Leftovers

This tour follows the Lachine Canal cycling path with stops at the Atwater market and the Angrignon snow dump and asks us to consider how we manage “left overs” – from street sweepings to food scraps.

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Waste Waters

East Montreal

Waste Waters

This tour travels east, visiting sewage infrastructure and buried streams, and asks us to consider the effects of industrial waste on our soils and waters.

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Waste Values

Mile End

Waste Values

This route follows the Réseau-Vert bike path through the Mile End, a former textile district, to explore the art of “rewilding” and re-purposing objects and places that have been cast off or discarded.

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Memory and Reconciliation: Frédéric-Back Park

Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension

Memory and Reconciliation: Frédéric-Back Park

This tour explores Frédéric Back Parc. Once a rock quarry, then a landfill, it is now one of Montreal’s most intriguing parks, with its hilly moonscape dotted with futuristic, orb-like biomethanation wells that manage the gas escape from the layers of decay below.

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Food, Dirt & Scale

North-West Montreal

Food, Dirt & Scale

This tour explores the north-west cycling routes and our relationship to compost and natural or biological “waste.”

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Waste Aesthetics

Downtown

Waste Aesthetics

This tour takes cyclists from the Mile End neighbourhood to the downtown sector to explore the art of reuse.

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University as Living Lab

Concordia University — Downtown and Loyola Campus

University as Living Lab

This tour explores how Concordia has been a hub for innovation around waste management and sustainable practices.

Download PDF (coming soon)

If you are an educator and want to incorporate this into a class – download our educational prompts

WasteScapes was created by students and faculty at Concordia University in Tioh:tiáke/ Montréal with additional support from a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Connection Grant

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