"Grange Canal used to look like a place that was really on the edge of the city." My dad recalls open fields, barns and uninhabited buildings.
"It's now fully urban," he continues, explaining that dense apartment blocks and new roads have replaced most of the fields and barns. "It's overwhelmed by cars," he adds, which would have certainly had an effect on populations and distributions of animals, such as squirrels or deer, that may have been separated by the busier roads.
Exploring barns and gardens just a few minutes from the classroom was a popular activity back then.
Today, the heavy traffic makes for hours spent at every red light, while the current students of the International School have to be more wary of cars. The football pitch at the school has also changed from an open park to various synthetic sports fields. Some nice parks and old houses still exist around campus; however, the scarcity of these means that children have to share the fringe spaces with other users, such as junkies.
Interviewer: Hi, dad. I’m just gonna ask you a few questions about Grange-Canal, the area in Geneva, Switzerland where you grew up as a kid and went to school, and generally about what changes you’ve noticed there over the years. To start off, what did Grange-Canal used to look like?
Interviewee: Grange-Canal used to look like a place that was really on the edge of the city. You were reminded of the fact that the city was just gradually extending to that place but that before this it was just a bunch of farms and farmland and open fields and barns and buildings that weren’t inhabited anymore.
Interviewer: Okay. And how would you say that’s changed? What has that become today?
Interviewee: Today it’s lost the look of a place that used to be agricultural, it’s now fully urban. All of the fields have been built on, all of the old buildings that were disused have been either torn down or converted to something useful. And it’s just a lot denser. Homes, single family homes have been replaced by apartment blocks. And the biggest change is probably the number of cars that are there at any given point. It’s just overwhelmed with cars. The road is not a wide road and there are just too many cars. So they’re constantly at a standstill.
Interviewer: Yeah, the traffic is terrible, I think Geneva is the city in Europe with the worst traffic, which is crazy considering its size. And I’ve also noticed in my lifetime, buildings being built on what used to be football fields for example, where we used to play. So I’m wondering, what did you use to do in Grange-Canal when it was a much more open and agricultural area?
Interviewee: When I was a kid, this place, which is just across the street from the place I went to school, was a fun place to go explore. When we were old enough to leave campus, we would go walk around there in the fields, play soccer in the fields, play hide and seek in the old buildings, in the barns. It was more or less a kind of playground.
Interviewer: Okay and how would you do there now?
Interviewee: Well, I don’t go to the school there anymore but my kids do and I don’t think they can use the area the same way we used to, it’s just all being used for other purposes. Today the only thing we really do in Grange-Canal is sit in traffic when we forget how bad it is and forget to avoid the area, but we don’t really do much else there. I kind of remember the way it was when I was a kid every time I’m there and kind of look for indications that it was once agricultural and unbuilt but those signs are…have almost completely disappeared now.
Interviewer: Yeah. Thank you very much.