Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal, this paper explores how new infrastructural developments – situated at the intersection between waterfront speculation and grassroots resistance – can become powerful reminders of an obsolete past, thereby showing their anachronistic qualities.

Paper Abstract:

In times of uneven urban development and environmental degradation, urban waterfront areas have become battlegrounds where different future visions are enacted and contested. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Montreal (Canada), this paper explores struggles over a wasteland – a terrain vague – situated next to the industrial port of Montreal. Although the terrain vague epitomizes the aftermaths of de-industrialization - with its trail of social problems and decline - it is now populated by trees, wooded areas and local residents, who rapidly grew attached to one of the very few green spaces in the area. Yet, spontaneous urban nature is supposed to leave space to a major infrastructural development, which will mainly serve the expanding needs of the adjacent port of Montreal and, more broadly, of the global logistics industry. In the context of pressing environmental concerns, new infrastructural projects, instead of signaling economic growth and “modernization”, can become powerful reminders of an obsolete past, thereby showing their anachronistic qualities or, in other words, their lack of synchronization with the multiple urgencies of our times. Thinking about infrastructure and urban space together, I trace the mismatch between institutional promises of “sustainable” and “resilient” urban futures, and grassroots struggles for the right to inhabit healthy and just urban environments. At the same time, by exploring the reinsertion of a marginal space into the speculative dynamics of capitalism at multiple scales, I show how new infrastructural developments speak about evolving (dis)connections between the city and the river – between people and water.