Jonathan Sa'adah

Category: Photography

  • The Irresistible Pull of Gritty Cities | Part 1 of 2

    ▲ Catania Open Market I envy the Sicilians and their abundant produce, even at the end of November. Their markets are noisy and colorful. The produce feels close to the farm, which it is.

    The Irresistible Pull of Gritty Cities: Understanding Why We Love What We’re Missing

    I’ve always found myself drawn to certain cities with an almost magnetic pull – places that feel lived-in, weathered, and wonderfully imperfect. From the narrow stone alleys of Damascus to the chaotic vitality of Mexico City, from Palermo’s winding streets to the crumbling decadence of Thessaloniki, these are cities that seem to embrace their contradictions. They’re places where modernity coexists awkwardly but beautifully with centuries of accumulated history, where every street corner tells multiple stories, and where the urban fabric feels genuinely human in scale.

    ▲ Thessaloniki Old City We drove our car through these streets and it was definitely a social experience, since traffic was both directions and each encounter was a negotiation. The stairs on the right definitely would not satisfy Montreal’s setback regulations.

    As someone who calls Montreal home – a city that sits comfortably between order and character – I often wonder what it is about these grittier places that captivates me so deeply. Is it simply the allure of the tourist’s gaze, romanticizing what locals might find frustrating? Or is there something more fundamental about how these cities are designed and how they’ve evolved that creates genuinely superior urban experiences?

    I believe it’s the latter. These cities embody qualities that many of our more regulated, sanitized urban environments have systematically designed out – and in doing so, we’ve lost something essential about what makes a city truly livable.

    ▲ Jean-Talon Market Montreal Our winter markets are abundant but everything is quite orderly, and (sadly!) imported from afar, especially when compared to Catania.

    The Human Scale That We’ve Forgotten

    Walk through the old quarters of Damascus or wander the residential streets of Palermo, and you’re immediately struck by how perfectly sized everything feels for human beings. Buildings rise to four or five stories – tall enough to create urban passageways but low enough that you can still make eye contact with someone leaning out a third-floor window. Streets are narrow enough that neighbours can converse across them but wide enough for the essential choreography of urban life: children playing, vendors selling, neighbours meeting, deliveries being made, life happening.

    ▲ Damascus Street Football Other than there not being any women in this photograph, a lot is happening on the street. This was in the Old City.

    This isn’t accidental. It’s the result of centuries of organic development where buildings were constructed at the pace and scale that individual families and small communities could manage. In Thessaloniki, the traditional urban fabric prioritizes pedestrian comfort over vehicular efficiency. The narrow streets that might frustrate a traffic planner become perfect corridors for social interaction, where the pace naturally slows and encounters become inevitable.

    ▲ Palermo’s streets pick up on the city’s ancient layout, with automobiles present but taking a backseat.

    Contrast this with our modern approach to urban development, where efficiency and standardization trump human experience. Even in Montreal, our newer developments tend towards what we define as modern experience – wider streets, taller buildings, larger blocks that prioritize movement over lingering. We’ve optimized for cars and commerce rather than for the casual encounters and spontaneous connections that actually make urban life rich.

    ▲ Looking north in Montreal from Côte-des-neiges at residential and commercial buildings in one of the fastest expanding parts of the city.

    The smaller scale of these older cities creates what seems to me the conditions necessary for urban vitality. Even though they may look to be museum pieces, they aren’t. They are living examples of urban design that puts human experience first.

    Public Spaces as the City’s Living Rooms

    Perhaps nothing distinguishes these gritty, beloved cities more than the quality and accessibility of their public spaces. Not just parks or grand plazas, but the everyday spaces where public life unfolds: the stepped streets of Damascus that become impromptu gathering places, the piazzas of Palermo that serve as outdoor living rooms for entire neighbourhoods, the casual sidewalk life of Mexico City where sidewalks and public spaces encourage people to meet and relax”.

    These cities understand something fundamental: public space isn’t just about recreation, it’s about democracy. It’s where different social classes, ages, and backgrounds encounter each other naturally. When public space works well, it becomes the foundation for social cohesion and civic engagement.

    ▲ Preparation for Women’s Day March International Women’s Day has been commemorated in Mexico City since the 1930s, but the massive street mobilizations began gaining momentum in more recent decades as a response to Mexico’s epidemic of gender-based violence.

    Mexico City is often dismissed as sprawling and car-dependent, but alongside that reality I see a lot more going on. The city’s downtown areas have spacious parks and sidewalks, accommodating an unending ballet of commuters, tourists, and street vendors. On Sundays, major arteries like Paseo de la Reforma are closed to cars and opened to pedestrians and cyclists, temporarily transforming the large parts of the city into one enormous public space.

    ▲ Mexico City’s less romantic side The city government has tried different approaches at reducing car traffic, all with little success. Nevertheless, there is an inexpensive and well-used public transport system used by 14 million people a day. The open lane is a reverse direction lane for buses.

    What these cities understand is that public space isn’t a luxury – it’s infrastructure. Just as essential as water pipes or electrical grids, public space is the network that allows urban society to function, providing the venues for the informal encounters and casual sociability that bind communities together.

    Walkability as a Way of Life

    In these cities, walking isn’t exercise or a lifestyle choice – it’s simply how you get around. This creates a fundamentally different relationship between residents and their urban environment. When you walk regularly, you notice things: the quality of surfaces, the presence or absence of shade, the rhythm of street life, the small businesses tucked into ground floors.

    ▲ Damascus Old City Bakery Man carries away hot bread purchased from a small bakery.

    Thessaloniki, despite its challenges with broken pavements and sidewalks, illegally parked cars and motorcycles, kiosks and coffee tables, has a vibrant street culture. I look forward to going back soon to see how the city has adapted to its newly-opened metro system, which hopefully will reduce the perpetual gridlock many of its streets experience during the day. Hopefully the ongoing integration of walking and public transit has created an even more layered urban experience.

    Mexico City exemplifies this integration beautifully. Despite its size and complexity, the city maintains an impressive pedestrian culture. Under the leadership of mayor Claudia Sheinbaum (who has a background in environmental engineering) the city dramatically expanded its network of public transit, bolstering its generous public spaces with wide sidewalks and creative public squares.

    ▲ Mexico City’s Metrobus System provides rapid transit with a two dedicated lane system. Multi-unit buses (some all electric) load in stations much like a metro line. Claudi Sheinbaum was instrumental in launching the system as Secretary of the Environment (2000-2006) under then-mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who went on to be President, as she has too.

    Next week: Housing.
    The Damascus photographs in this post are taken from a book I’m just finishing on an experience I had with my father, returning to where he was born.

  • The Driver’s Dilemma: My Racing Dreams in a City of Bike Paths

    ▲ Formula 1 weekend, Montreal, 2025.

    There’s something beautifully absurd about dreaming of Formula One glory while religiously using the metro and my bike in the city. It’s like being a vegetarian who fantasizes about winning hot dog eating contests – technically possible, but requiring some serious mental gymnastics to reconcile the contradiction.

    The Making of a 36-Horsepower Speed Demon

    My personal journey to Formula One dreams began in the most modest way possible: behind the wheel of my parent’s 1958 Volkswagen Beetle. While other kids were playing touch football or watching TV, I was sitting in our family’s parked Beetle, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, shifting through imaginary gears with the precision of someone who was still more than ten years away from having a driver’s license.

    It was an ironic situation even then. Here I was, fantasizing about joining the ranks of Stirling Moss – while my automotive reality consisted of a parked car that even when running took roughly the same time to reach highway speed as it takes to get from Lionel-Groux to Snowdon (stops on our metro).

    Those BBC radio reports crackling through our family’s shortwave radio painted vivid pictures of Monaco’s glamour, but they somehow missed mentioning the modern issues of environmental rape and pillage tied to petro use. They certainly didn’t prepare me for the cognitive dissonance I’d experience many decades later as a Montreal resident torn between childhood racing fantasies and an adult commitment to sustainable transportation.

    Montreal’s Great Transportation Transformation

    Moving to Montreal in 2003 was like stepping into a city caught between two realities. The Montreal public transit system was already one of North America’s most heavily used systems. Yet Montreal remained (and remains) a city where cars dominate the landscape. There’s a dream of urban sustainability but even in me there’s a conflict with secret Formula One fantasies.

    The Annual Montreal Contradiction

    Every June, when Formula One descends upon Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal experiences a total ethical meltdown. The small island in the Saint Lawrence that hosts our Grand Prix was originally created for Expo 67, then re-purposed into a racing circuit that celebrates everything Montreal’s current transportation policies are trying to discourage.

    The race circuit itself embodies this paradox perfectly. The city lavishly hosts a sport that burns fossil fuels at obscene rates while promoting electric vehicles and public transit.

    The Netflix Effect and Modern Racing Culture

    The popularity of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” has created a new generation of Formula One fans who, like me, experience the sport primarily through screens rather than exhaust fumes. It’s not exactly socially acceptable to be interested in a sport that represents everything we’re supposed to be moving away from, but secretly I am.

    When my wife mentioned to a very close friend that we’d watched all seven seasons, the look of bewilderment that crossed her face was eloquent. Even if it was brief before she masked it. It was the expression of someone trying to reconcile how two people who take public transit everywhere and enthusiastically support biking could simultaneously be enthralled by the world’s most environmentally questionable sport.

    Living with the Paradox

    Montreal’s approach to transportation politics reflects a city that deals in nuance. We promote walkability through indices that measure access to employment and amenities while simultaneously maintaining one of Formula One’s most visible venues. Somehow, both realities coexist in the same metropolitan area without the universe completely collapsing from the contradiction.

    Embracing the Contradiction

    Perhaps the real wisdom lies in accepting that humans are complicated creatures capable of holding multiple truths simultaneously. I can genuinely believe that Montreal’s future depends on reducing car dependency while still hoping Lewis Hamilton will win as I hear the obnoxious bellowing of Formula One engines echoing across the St. Lawrence River.

    There’s no doubt though that Montreal’s approach to transportation doesn’t adhere to ideological purity. The city that gives us extensive bike networks also gives us a yearly walk on the dark side. It’s an approach that acknowledges that progress is perhaps served by not abandoning everything from our past in our quest for purity.

    After all, even as a committed environmentalist I can still appreciate the engineering marvel of a Formula One car, just as I hope the most dedicated tourist racing fan can get on our fancy new metro trains and wish they had them in their city. Montreal has figured out how to celebrate both, and maybe that’s the a sophisticated approach for where we are now.

  • Unfiltered Montreal

    Montreal is a city that refuses to be reduced to picture postcard clichés. Here, the gritty dep and styled food-market, the narrow ruelles and the wide boulevards, the laughter and longing, all exist side by side, unposed and unrehearsed. Montreal Unfiltered is an invitation to witness the city as it truly breathes: raw, restless, and radiant in its imperfection.
    These photographs trace the pulse beneath the surface, capturing moments where the city’s true spirit flickers – in the crunch of a cyclist powering through snow at night, in the quiet dignity of a solitary reader, in the small sidewalk flower plots and community gardens. This is a city of contradictions: winter’s hush and the noisy summers, solitary figures and crowded streets, languages colliding and coexisting.
    Let these images draw you into Montreal’s daily poetry – its grit and grace, its shadows and sudden bursts of color. Here, nothing is staged, nothing is concealed. This is Montreal, seen not through a filter, but through the honest lens of life itself.

  • A 23-year streak, broken

    Exceptionalism exists in Canada too

    Last weekend I was at a friend’s party in Montreal and sitting next to a man I had never met. It was noisy, a lot of people speaking excitedly and simultaneously, so the man leaned over towards me and asked me my name. I told him and he looked me straight in the eyes with narrowed pupils while still leaning forward, and let loose The Question: “what kind of a name is that”? I almost fell off my chair. I’ve been living in Canada now for twenty three years and I’ve never been asked that question. When I lived in the United States it was common follow-on to an introduction, but not here. He seemed kindly enough so I explained that my father was Syrian blah blah blah but I was pretty shocked, and I was (and I am) sorry that my multi-decade string of non-exceptionalist Canadian behavior has ended.

    Canadian-US border crossing in different times.

    Crossing the border

    Yesterday my wife drove down to the Canadian/US border. We hadn’t gone across it since the new US president’s inauguration but she needed to have a paper notarized. Faced with the choice of either driving to Ottawa (183km) and presenting herself at the US embassy (50USD fee) or going across the border (100km) to the always-friendly town clerk in Champlain NY (∅USD), it was a no-brainer.

    She found the main border crossing a desolate place, not a single other car waiting. There’s been a lot of talk in Canada about phones being searched and hostile border control guards, but she had no problem entering the US. Returning to Canada she was asked to roll down her back window and given a one-over, so it’s pretty obvious that Canada is not encouraging its citizens to enter the US. And why should it? Things have happened quickly since January 6, on both sides of the border, and a lot has changed.

    A different view

    As a dual Canadian-US citizen I get to see things from an unusual vantage point, having lived in the US until I was fifty, and then having lived more than two decades in Quebec. It’s only been during the Vietnam War, and now more recently, when some few Americans have looked seriously to Canada as an alternative place. We left earlier than the current wave, but for similar reasons – we saw what was coming, and thought that the move north to a saner country would be a good idea – even if we didn’t know quite what we were getting into.

    The lead-in to the second Iraq war, New York City demonstration February 2003. The names change, but the issues remain.

    The federal election this week, where Mark Carney was elected the new Canadian Prime Minister, has capped a rude Canadian awakening to the dangers of sharing a border with a rogue elephant of a state. It’s been a revealing election. Nothing has done more to make me feel Canadian than this period, and the election results reinforced our choice (though we were pretty blind) in making Quebec our home province. The election vote stripped away the weepy rhetoric that often prevails in Quebec, and what was revealed was a province that supported Carney and the Liberal government (43%) versus the American-Elon-Musk inspired Conservative party of Pierre Poilievre (23.4%) by a margin not even closely matched in any of the other provinces. In December of last year you would have been hard pressed to find anyone in the province who would call themselves a Liberal. That’s an exaggeration, but not much. So it’s been quite a change. I don’t see Carney quite as positively as I’d like to, but I was still pleased.

    Prior to Trump II many Canadians possessed a romantically foggy view when looking south. So the last few months have been like the breakup of a formerly “idyllic” marriage: first disbelief, then anger. Trump’s ascendancy this time has only been lightly garbed in reality show politics. His second ascent represents an amplified and aggressively threatening continuation of the bullying conservatism that, over the years, has shown its face in many guises – from the blatant McCarthyism of the Forties and Fifties, through the filth and duplicity of Nixon, morphing into the smoothly front-facing corporate faces of Reagan and the Bush family. That’s not even getting into the Democratic side, which has had its share of failings too. The toxicity has always been around, either in the foreground or just below the surface. The difference now is that it’s fully out and fully vengeful, with a clear road map driving its behavior. Whether Trump II will “succeed” in its destructive course is no longer in question, the damage has already been widespread and generational in scope. The question for us in Canada is how to minimize its effect while steering a way through the geo-political/economic storm. Even if the US courts reign in the Executive branch, and Congress reasserts itself instead of playing dead, trust has been broken. Canada has largely been able to avoid the militarization of society and social breakdown that’s been happening in the United States for decades. However, even though the economic consequences of tariffs have been enough to dramatically accelerate political change here, dealing with them is nothing compared to prospect of having to deal with an increasingly aggressive and politically fragmented country thrashing around to the south. That’s the scary prospect. Let’s hope a path can be found, both internally in the US as well as for us and others.

  • All roads? Perhaps not …

    I’ve never been totally comfortable with Rome. To be honest, I’ve always had problems with authority and authority figures, and there’s no city more populated with both than the old Roman capital. And that’s not even saying anything about the Vatican. I can be relatively sure that my ancestors paid a price to the Romans, and it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when I walk down the present-day beautiful and elegantly-appointed streets and see the wealth and power that’s the product of that price.

    On the other hand, the world has moved on, and I have too. I’ve always been attracted to temperate zone cultures, and Italy is no exception. But all my previous experiences were in the northern tier of the country, especially in the Veneto (Padua, Vicenza, Venice).

    So Rome was a new experience for me. I’ve posted a ⊕portfolio of photographs of the city. The old part of Rome is really set up to be a tourist magnet. As such, it certainly doesn’t let one down. There is a casual, un-curated feeling that makes being there a pleasure. Overlaying the old is the modern jumble of chaos that passes for Italy, complete with savory and unsavory overtones. I am always trying to scratch under the surface and see what I find, and I found a lot.  I have no blood history with Italy but it’s easy to see the racism, the governmental chaos, and excesses along with the society’s appreciation for living life and the long and real investments in art and culture. In short, it’s a fun place to be as a person and a photographer who doesn’t have to live there, and has the privilege of being able to dip in and out.