Julie-Anne Boudreau - Youth Urban Worlds

In Chapter 5, we encounter ‘voluntary risk‐takers’ and edgeworkers. We begin with the story of Hubert, a skateboarder. We also meet dumpster divers, Greenpeace building climbers, explorers of abandoned industrial buildings, practitioners of extreme sports, and graffiti writers. Here, we move through the world of mostly White, university‐educated, middle‐class youths who choose alternative lifestyles involving variable levels of legal, physical, and social risk. The chapter argues that fear can have a politically empowering effect. It illustrates how fear circulates among these youths, how it is spatialized, how it participates in transforming both youths and the spaces in which they practice, and how this results in distributed forms of political agency. In this chapter, we work with the concepts of choreographic power and urban diviners in order to reflect on provocative subjectivity and the importance of political gestures visible beyond words.

In the Conclusion, we offer an epistemological reflection about ethnography and aesthetics. Responding to structural and dichotomous approaches to politics, we discuss how a situational and performative approach can contribute to better understand how politics unfolds in the contemporary period. This entails adjusting our understandings of agency and power. We insist that class and racial markers are important elements affecting aesthetic political relations. Indeed, looking back at our four ethnographies, we discuss how aesthetic political relations are differentiated in terms of forms and political effects. But, in all four ethnographies, youthfulness is a springboard for political action.

1 1. Most names have been changed, unless the person in question gave us permission to use their real one. Citations in their original language will be presented as footnotes: ‘Montréal, qu’est‐ce qui fait sa beauté, c’est justement sa diversité, mais aussi la place à l’alternatif qui existe, que ce soit d’un point de vue écologique, que ce soit du point de vue de l’art, que ce soit … politique…’

2 2. MapCollab is a collaborative multimedia research project exploring how youth speak and live their neighbourhood, in Saint‐Michel and Little Burgundy (Montreal). It will be extensively discussed in Chapter 2.

3 3. ‘C’est une ville aussi où on constate et on voit assez facilement même juste en étant là … Tsé il y a des gros contrastes de réalités humaines qui cohabitent dans cette ville‐là. Pis ça je pense que ça crée des tensions donc qui sont palpables, qui favorisent l’implication des gens quand ils en ont l’occasion peut‐être.’

4 4. Part of this section was published in Boudreau (2018).

5 5. Magnusson (2010, p. 45) writes: ‘the messy urban order of the occidental city did not simply disappear. In fact, it was extended and replicated in the context of Western colonialism and imperialism. In that context, it connected with other forms of urbanism.’ Researching and presenting the extent to which such processes took place in the context of Ville‐Marie, the colonial city that later became known as Montreal, is a project that exceeds the scope of our present research and, more specifically, the contextualization of Montreal in the next chapter, but it is of timely relevance. On this topic, see Boileau (1991), but also Dorries et al. (2019), referring to different settler‐colonial Canadian urban contexts.

6 6. ‘L’important, c’est que c’est à ce niveau‐là, celui du découpage sensible du commun de la communauté, des formes de sa visibilité et de son aménagement, que se pose la question du rapport esthétique/politique’ (Rancière 2000, pp. 24–25).

7 7. Inspired by Arendt, Dikeç (2015, p. 46) would put it in the following terms: ‘Political action inaugurates space – a space of encounter that at once relates and separates individuals, where the self in her distinctiveness is disclosed in relation to others present.’

8 8. As the global political economic context drastically changed in the following decades, both Castells and Harvey nuanced these arguments and offered important reflections on the urbanity of social movements. While Castells (1999a–c) turned more towards the networked organizational form of social and political claims, Harvey (1989, 2008) revisited Lefebvre’s early claims to the right to the city and highlighted the shifts in the political economic context that had enabled the rise of urban movements around the globe.

9 9. More recently, in the same vein, scholars have used the term ‘urban tribes’ to designate youth groups (Bennett 1999) or insisted on class, race, and gender intersectional power dynamics (Wilkins 2008).

10 10. As opposed to Bourdieu’s (1979) concept of a social field, which supposes people act the way they do because they are structurally predisposed to act in specific ways.

11 11. Most youth we encountered in the following ethnographies are aged between 18 and 35 years old, the millennium generation. But our analysis is not restricted to these essentialized cohort markers.

12 12. ‘Alors que le reste de la société se résigne et la regarde de haut comme si cela ne les touchait pas, elle veut un monde meilleur pour tout le monde … On se demande pourquoi elle ne vote pas. On se demande pourquoi elle a le goût de tout casser … En quelque part, elle a une bannière où il est écrit : «Fuck toute!» On ne comprend pas. On la trouve donc conne cette génération d’enfants‐rois. Fuck‐toute.’

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