of acting politically.
These “other” forms of protection are intensely aesthetic and affective. They emerge out of and through the lived conditions of urbanity. They cannot be reproduced by a state leader standing outside of a government building, clapping in front of journalists and recording cameras at the same hour. It does not have the same effect, even if a similar intent might motivate the act. Something is escaping, or perhaps more accurately exceeding, the hyperrational crisis management of the state. And yet, not everyone has the privilege of such balcony, or lives in a dense city environment, or has the means to stay in, checked out of the workplace during a global pandemic. Indeed, this contemporary urban world is uneven and variously affects the conditions of our entangled everyday lives. How can we grasp what is going on, simultaneously and differently, at the street level?
Such a question is why this book is an epistemological intervention in the study of politics. We argue that in an urban world, ethnography is essential to make sense of the political. Even in moments of intense state presence like the one we are currently experiencing, an urban epistemology is very fruitful for understanding the level of integration between state rationality and everyday life; that is, to evaluate the effectiveness of state policies (to put it in public policy language), and analyze the infrastructures that people and other agentic forces make together and out of each other, differently, spontaneously and sometimes autonomously from the state too.
This book is also an empirical contribution to the study of urban youth cultures, mobilizing various voices from Montreal. We see it as a contribution to the transition between two decades. The ethnographic material presented here dates from the 2010s, a period of very rapid urbanization and globalization, excessive mobility, consumerism, and interconnected political mobilizations around the world (Arab Spring and Arab Winter, student strikes, urban revolts, Indigenous Idle No More movements, anticapitalist and anti‐austerity protests, climate strikes led by youths walking out of school…). With 2020, the world has slowed down: the coronavirus has brought air travel to a standstill and there is a strong push for climate change action (slow academia, relocalized, sustainable food systems, energy transitions, carbon taxes). Urban life after the COVID‐19 will not be the same.
Yet, with the interdisciplinary theoretical contribution using cultural and urban studies to understand political processes, we see this book as a reflection on our collective and immediate future. Being sensitive to aesthetic political forms reveals the creative possibilities of urban everyday life. It can inspire collective and concerted action from the local to the global scale. It has become urgently clear that the continued acceleration of an hypermobile, hyperconsumerist lifestyle, fuelled by racial capitalist‐extractivist modes of global urbanization, will bring the world directly to its end. Around the world as we write these lines, states are implementing state‐centred measures based on their imagined “monopoly” of violence, scientific rationality, and disciplining. There are many other possibilities for action that are not state‐centred. As the teenage son of a colleague once said: “Mom, another end of the world is possible.” Such statement seems illogical; yet, it illustrates our argument in this book. Urban life is replete with unexplored potentialities based on different rationalities, rhythms, ways of being, forms of action. In youth urban worlds we can find inspiration for collectively building this immediate future.
This is why we wish to dedicate this book, first and foremost, to youth. They are the ones who will be living through the next six, seven, eight decades of deeply uneven global changes, set to unfold at an unprecedented speed and scale, while having to contend with the consequences of today’s record levels of public debts, in uncertain times. We all have the power and responsibility to influence what these futures may hold. This new decade, we are told, is going to be a crucial one for collectively orienting the conditions for the survival and well‐being of all life‐forms on this planet. Youthfulness is power and agility. The youth urban worlds we have been privileged to partake in, from Montreal, have taught us that beyond the ballot box, beyond political leaders, or the kind of political education that might be received in schools, a youthful collective has its own agentic power to experiment with, to transform what exists, what has come to be known and named, and might come next. More than age or a stage of psychological development, youthfulness can be a way to act politically in the world.
This is what we wanted to represent with our choice of photos for the book cover. Youthfulness of course requires young people, like Arthur Guirand who is posing from the roof of a building squatted for a clandestine Queer humour show in the rapidly‐gentrifying white working class Hochelaga neighbourhood, with Montreal industrial landscape in the background. Youthfulness is also palpable in certain street moments, like this break dance circle in downtown Montreal; a challenge to the all‐white artistic representation of Montreal promoted by the City administration during its 375th anniversary celebrations (the flags on the street lights advertise the city’s 375th anniversary). Finally, with the biosphere, iconic monument of Montreal built for the 1967 International Exhibition, we wanted to visually represent how youth urban worlds are globally‐connected. Its architecture evokes a bubble rising in the air, or what Sloterdijk (2011) would call a sphere, involving human and more‐than‐human agency.
The ethnographies presented here result from collective work that spanned a decade. It is the fruit of collective research projects, seminars, and interactions with the many students who came through the Laboratoire de recherche Ville et ESPAces politique (VESPA): Nathalie Boucher, Frédérick Nadeau, Ajouna Bao‐Lavoie, Julien Rebotier, Godefroy Desrosiers‐Lauzon, Stephanie Geertman, Martin Lamotte, Laurence Janni, Dounia Salamé, Antoine Noubouwo, Muriel Sacco, Alice Miquet, Olivier Jacques, and many others.
Let us say a special word for the students who conducted research with us for this book: Leslie Touré‐Kapo and Désirée Rochat were active researchers and local coordinators in the mapcollab project discussed in chapter 2, Alain Philoctète participated in our ethnographic research conducted in Saint‐Michel in 2008 (also chapter 2), Denis Carlier, Mathieu Labrie, and Alexia Bhéreur‐Lagounaris participated actively in the research project on the 2012 student strikes (chapter 3), Maude Séguin‐Manègre and Marilena Liguori collected data for chapter 5.
It goes without saying that such material was collected thanks to the generous funding of the Canada Research Chair program (2005–2015), the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada for the mapcollab project (chapter 2), the Fonds de recherche Québécois Société et Culture for Joelle’s Master’s scholarship (chapter 4), and the Programa Interinstitucional de Estudios sobre la region de America del Norte for the project on “voluntary risk‐takers” (chapter 5). We wish to acknowledge our coresearchers in these projects, especially David Austin, Steven High, Coline Cardi, and Marie‐Hélène Bacqué.
Although the material has been expanded here, fragments of this book were previously published in different forms: Ateliers mapCollab, 2018. Mon quartier, notre vie. Regards transatlantiques. Montréal: Del Busso Éditeur; Boudreau, J.A. 2017. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge: Polity Press; Boudreau, J.A., M. Liguori, and M. Séguin‐Manègre. 2015. “Fear and youth citizenship practices: Insights from Montreal” in Citizenship Studies. Vol. 19(3–4): 335–352; Boudreau, J.A. and M. Labrie. 2016. “Time, space, and rationality: Rethinking political action through the example of Montreal’s Student Spring” in Human Geography. Vol. 9(1): 16–29; Rondeau, J. 2017. ‘Une autre relève agricole: Analyse des rôles des acteurs d’une formation en agriculture urbaine dans la production d’espaces et de pratiques agricoles alternatives au système alimentaire agro‐industriel en milieu urbain’, Master’s Thesis, Institut national
