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May/June 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Futureville Sidebar: Melbourne Principles In-depth: Exploring sustainable cities Feature: Seasons of the city Feature: Environmental scientist Feature: Spotted owl Feature: Waste generation Sidebar: Household waste disposal The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

It is a Saturday afternoon, and I am sitting beside a wide-eyed six- or seven-year-old girl who reminds me of Pippi Longstocking. She is spritely and whimsical, dressed in a green jumper, her hair fashioned into pigtails threaded with a bent coat hanger so that they stick out 90 degrees from her head. Along with a dozen or so others in this fluorescent-lit classroom in one of Montréal’s newest performance venues, we are kneading balls of clay into rough likenesses of ourselves. Over these clay moulds, we will lay gooey, wet strips to make papier-mâché masks for a Haitian-inspired carnival.

An instructor inspects our progress. "Ah, Pinocchio," he says, referring to the long, pointy nose I have just stuck on my egg-shaped clay face. Dozens of finished masks made by previous groups cover a nearby table. Some look like ghouls; others have horns. None resemble humans. But they are charmingly amateurish, reminiscent of folk art, and they represent the ambitious but phenomenally successful goal of Tohu, la Cité des arts du cirque, to democratize culture.

Formed in 1999 by the Canadian circus arts network, the National Circus School and Cirque du Soleil, Tohu is an organization with the simple goal to make Montréal one of the world’s big-top hot spots. Its mandate has since expanded to include revitalizing the former limestone quarry and municipal dump on which the organization’s four buildings, including a cylindrical 840-seat performance hall, now sit and giving people in the neighbourhood of Saint-Michel, where the complex is located, a sense of cultural ownership.

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