Historian Michelle Guitard put us in touch with Michele Quenneville because we wanted to learn about parking lots in Hull from a resident's perspective. The Impervious P-lot personnel interviewed Michele in her home a few blocks over from the grey buildings. Michele Quenneville is an environmental activist and retired translator who, in her spare time, works with various community groups to plant trees, set up and tend community gardens, and create a food co-op in the presently food-insecure Hull. She hates concrete and paved surfaces. So, naturally, she is upset about the many parking lots ...

The seventh interview of The Impervious P-lot was with Allison Riddle, federal employee. We spoke with her because she regularly uses the sublevel parking of the grey government buildings in Hull. Sitting with us inside her car in the dark, fluorescent-lit lot, Riddle told us she takes the bus to work except on days when it's rainy or snowy, when she's slept in, or when she has errands to run or friends to meet after work. In those cases she'll drive, which she tries not to do more than twice a ...

Marc Dubé is the owner of most of the parking lots in downtown Hull. He was kind enough to agree to an interview with The Impervious P-lot personnel and Spacing. In the mid 1980s, Dubé and two others planned to open a restaurant in downtown Hull. The financing fell through after they had already signed the lease on a building. Dubé realized an alternate source of income: he could demolish the building and put in a parking lot. Since his partners weren't interested, he began the business on his own. As he explained it: “We were three waiters that were supposed to renovate an old building into a restaurant...It was some kind of a deviation from the original idea.” Needless to say, his deviation was a success: Well, 22 years ago the parking industry was not known at all here — like it was in Montreal, Toronto, busier cities, Ottawa. And now everybody knows about this business; but before, nobody. It was like a hidden jewel. It was something that nobody knew at that point and I just had the opportunity to go into that industry. And now, everybody wants to, would love to have parking because it's a low maintenance company. Like once you add your trees and your paving and your booth you just wait for your customer to come in. It's a simple industry. It's not a complicated industry. And the beauty of it is that you get revenues that pay for your land, and your land keeps taking value. So then in 10, 12 years it's a retirement fund, pension plan.

Three of us working on The Impervious P-lot congregated in Montreal to interview Gina Laurel, an architect working on a Communications PhD about water infrastructure in cities. We wanted clarification on some points about water runoff raised in the first p-lot interview. Gina had a beautiful way of describing the relationship cities have with water: You're dealing with something that's non-human and trying to make it a controllable thing that is basically invisible and literally underground for the most part in an urban context; yet without which cities would just completely fall apart and not function; ...

Wherever buildings meet there are dialogues—I think this is what Galen shows us in these photographs. The framing of his photos directs us to a meeting of walls, a confrontation of fences, a shouldering of homes on one another, a vulnerability of facades. The particular buildings that attracted Galen speak in an idiom which is rarely noticed. His project, in one sense, was to record these overlooked local exchanges, this slang of buildings. - The Accommodations by Malcolm Sutton The above is an excerpt from the catalogue essay for an exhibition of photographs going up at ...

Editor's Note: Thus continues the investigation into the many parking lots of downtown Hull by Spacing's Ottawa/Gatineau Region correspondent Amber Yared: On our third interview for The Impervious P-lot we (Kathy, Malcolm, Michaela, and I) met with Brigitte Ann Epps, an attendant and valet for one of the parking lots behind the brown buildings in Hull. We were excited to talk to someone who would provide an insider perspective on parking lots. To start, I was curious about the small boxy structures parking lot attendants work from, like the one we stood in during ...

Ed: Thus continues the investigation into the many parking lots of downtown Hull by Spacing's Ottawa/Gatineau Region correspondent Amber Yared: Three Impervious P-lot personnel congregated for a second interview, this time in Hull with Historian Consultant Michelle Guitard. We sought out Guitard to find out exactly what used to be where the parking lots are now. As we had suspected, buildings had been there; but it was more lucrative for property owners to tear them down and build parking lots or to lease the land to parking lot entrepreneurs than to maintain the old buildings. Guitard walked us ...

A little while ago, before the snow melted, a small group of us met up in an Ottawa office space to interview architect Scott Hayward about “green” parking lots. He described how green lots work, told us about one he is working on right now, and explained how parking factors into building design. This was the exciting first in a series of interviews about parking lots for a Hull-based project I'm working on with Brooklyn's The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). The name of this project finds its ...