aesthetic relations. A pragmatist understanding of local action” in W. Salet (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Planning and Institutions in Action. New York: Routledge; Boudreau, J.A. 2019. “Informalization of the State: Reflections from an Urban World of Translations” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. DOI:10.1111/1468‐2427.12701.
We wish to highlight the incredible work of the Studies in Urban and Social Change Editorial Board in providing feedback on this manuscript, and especially the two anonymous reviewers. Never had we received such detailed and thoughtful comments. Some of their insightful formulations have made their way to the following pages.
Working in Montreal involves constant switches between French and English. Because we wished with this book to locate Montreal in global debates about urban politics, we decided to first write this book in English. But because we also wanted to converse with Montreal youths, we also wrote the book in French. The contemporary urban world is a polyvocal and multilingual world of translations. This is something young Montrealers taught us. And our warmest acknowledgement goes to them, to all those who speak in the following pages.
As we finish writing this book, youths already bring us on another adventure. TRYSPACES: Transformative youth spaces is the collaborative research project emerging from these ethnographies (funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Partnership Grant, 2017‐2023). This is why we briefly discuss in the conclusion the theme of transgression, which will be the focus of our next adventure.
References
1 Boudreau, J.A. (2017). Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2 Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles. Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Los Angeles: MIT Press.
FIGURE I.0 Map sketch by Joëlle Rondeau, based on ‘Map of Montreal sociological neighbourhoods in 2014’, published by Service de la diversité et de l’inclusion sociale, Ville de Montréal (5 October 2014), under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Introduction: Voices From Montreal
Montreal, what makes it beautiful is simply its diversity, but also the place it opens for alternative expression, be it from an ecological, artistic, or … political … point of view.1
(Ivan, student who participated in the 2012 strikes)
MAKE‐UP
They put make up on her.
Who you may ask.
Ils ont mis du maquillage sur elle.
Qui, demandes‐tu?
I’m talking about the planners, the renovators.
They put make up on her. My home is what I mean by her. The building where I have spent 95% of what I now refer to as my conscious life.
I feel it’s a ploy to attract investors, to attract the rich, to attract money and prestige.
…
We live there, have lived there, and will continue to live there. That is, if permitted. We are the ones who carry stories. We are the ones who inflict pain and have had pain inflicted upon us.
We are the fighters, the protecters, the by‐standers.
We are the listeners, the see‐ers, and the gossipers. We have fought the battles and continue to fight …
The new windows, new balconies, new backyard, new everything presents a new beginning. The open wounds covered up, never mended. A new beginning that doesn’t include us. A new beginning that neglects the historic warriors.
(Kabisha, 14 June 2014, mapcollab.org)
Ivan is one of the students who opened his urban world to us, one year after the 2012 student strikes that came to be known as the Maple Spring (Printemps érable; see Chapter 3). He describes political action in Montreal with reference to its history and culture of social mobilization – ‘the space for alternative … ecology, … art, … politics’. Such description is consistent with the way most youths who will speak in this book describe Montreal. In the second excerpt from Kabisha, produced during our MapCollab workshops,2 Montreal’s diverse cultures are described in more sour terms. Her words are highly political, screaming against gentrification and exclusion. Like Ivan, she highlights aesthetics. Allow us to let another young Montrealer speak before coming back to Kabisha:
It’s also a city where we witness and we easily see just by being there … You know, there are big contrasts of human realities that coexist in this city. And this, I think, creates tensions that are palpable, that favor people’s involvement when they have the occasion maybe.3 (Hubert, student who participated in the 2012 strikes)
Like Kabisha, Hubert speaks of spatial contrasts and socioeconomic inequalities. And like her, he emphasizes their embodiments: ‘Just by being there’ we can ‘witness and see … contrasts in human realities’. ‘We are the ones who carry stories. We are the ones who inflict pain and have had pain inflicted upon us’, writes Kabisha, ‘We are the listeners, the see‐ers, and the gossipers’. Politics is something we feel and live, just by wandering in the city. Montreal, as these youths whom we will meet express, is the globally connected urban milieu where their lives unfold. More than just the backdrop for their actions in the world, this place affects and is affected by their experiences and various engagements. It gives shape and malleability to their reality, a canvas and a medium to speak their truths, to experience and understand their lives in relation with the worlds they inhabit, with which they engage and communicate. What can we learn from these voices from Montreal, interconnected in an increasingly urbanized sociopolitical global order that both transcends and exceeds the international order of sovereign nation‐states?
David Harvey (1985a, p. 266) was concerned with the need to better understand how ‘the urban milieu, considered as a physical and social artefact, mediates the production of consciousness in important ways, thus giving urban life and consciousness many of their distinctive qualities’. He published Consciousness and the Urban Experience as a companion volume to the perhaps more well‐known The Urbanization of Capital (1985b). His starting point was the recognition that the ‘particular kind of urban experience’ resulting from the production of an increasingly urbanized space necessary to the survival of capitalism in the twentieth century is ‘radically different quantitatively and qualitatively from anything that preceded it in world history’ (Harvey 1985a, p. 265). While his studies on the urbanization of capital focused on the production of a ‘second nature’ of built environment with particular kinds of configurations under capitalist processes (Harvey
