Montpellier, France — You can't miss the bright blue trams of Montpellier. If you're walking through the Place de la Comédie, the one wide-open piazza in this southern French city's compact centre, the bullet-nosed streetcars are the dynamic constant in a place otherwise devoted to plein-air pleasures. They zip into the cobbled pedestrian zone with a grace that belies their bulk and release their exuberant crowds so close to the busy café tables that the fancy apéritifs seem to shake with sympathetic vibrations.
You can't miss the trams, but it's easy to do so. The waiters dashing into the square with their uplifted trays blithely skip over the tracks that separate them from their clientele, and it didn't take long before I was behaving like this carless place belonged to me as well. The greater good has won the day in Montpellier's historic centre, and there are no crazed drivers to compromise the traveller's drifting reverie. Released from the usual pedestrian preoccupation with personal survival, I ambled along in aimless innocence, pleased by pretty well everything I saw — gold-painted mimes cranking a donation-fed antique movie camera, a whirling carousel, the 19th-century opera house that seems straight out of Paris (minus the honking horns), an esplanade of chestnut trees and flower vendors, a space full of happy people who know that cities should be made for them and not the other way around.
The blue tram decorated with white swallows stole me back to reality with a combination of quiet and velocity that should be labelled hazardous to the escapist's health. But for a Canadian traveller trying on the pose of a French flâneur, even this onrushing doom prompted some urban dreaming.
I know we're supposed to go abroad to get away from ourselves, but some part of my itch to travel has always been accompanied by the urge to scratch away at the things that bug me about life back home. And once I'd dodged the tram racing through Montpellier's pleasure-centre, I thought back to my neighbourhood in Toronto and the years of fighting that went into the upcoming construction of a simple dedicated streetcar lane, which will still leave the automobile pretty well in charge: Now if only all the doom-sayers could come to Montpellier, surely they'd have to admit that all this economic activity disguised as rampant hedonism, all this absence of urban stress, was worth the risk.
A tram cuts through the Place de la Comédie in the centre of Montpellier, France. After years of work and millions of dollars, Montpellier has removed all cars from its heart, allowing tourists and residents leisurely strolls and calm outdoor dining with less noise, no exhaust and no fear of getting run down (Philippe Desmazes/AFP)
How could you look at the success of Montpellier's urban experiment and not see a future worth sharing? In truth, I was just passing through Montpellier — from a suburban tram stop just past the biotech campuses that have made this city of 250,000 one of the knowledge centres of Europe, I planned to take a local bus into the remote Cévennes region of mountains, gorges and old silk-making villages. But after just a few hours spent getting lost in Montpellier's crowded centre, I could understand why 65 per cent of French people questioned in a survey had named this city as the place where they'd prefer to live.
For a visitor, the virtual absence of cars is paradise — not the sort of thing we could ever accomplish back in the real world, of course, but an unstoppable delight in this bar-filled biosphere where tables crowd into every square, flute solos seep out of the upstairs windows of the pale golden buildings and the sweet sound of conversation reverberates along the quieted winding lanes.
Starting from the Place de la Comédie at the south-east edge of the old city, I did little more than stroll, using the encircling tramline and car-filled ring roads as my boundaries. Apart from a few 19th-century shopping streets that tried to rival Paris with their broad boulevards, everything curves and narrows in a satisfying medieval maze. Not having to watch out for traffic, I could pay attention to where I was, and yet I kept missing the wine-bar by the Place Jean-Jaurès or the bustling covered market, the Halles Castelane, and ended up contemplating a mad toy store called Pomme de Reinette.
115
