Julie-Anne Boudreau - Youth Urban Worlds

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 de la recherche scientifique, Montreal; Boudreau, J.A. 2018. “Contextualizing institutional meaning through 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.

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.0Map 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.

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)

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: