Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the notion of ‘heritage’ is used by different actors claiming the space of Montreal's Lachine Canal. While heritage is being produced by government and business sectors to increase the commercial value of the area, it is also used by activists to reclaim patrimonial sites.

Paper long abstract:

In Montreal, the reopening of the Lachine Canal into a place of recreation by Parks Canada was central to the condo boom of the mid-2000s, as industries, warehouses and silos were repurposed into business incubators and luxurious lofts (High, 2022). During this process of transformation, the notion of ‘heritage’ has been used by different actors claiming the space to contest the meanings of its past. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst community activists, archeologists, condo dwellers, business owners and Parcs Canada officials, I will demonstrate how the narrative, symbols and meanings of heritage differ while they have developed around a similar ‘language of contention’ (Roseberry, 1994). On the one hand, heritage is being produced by government and business sectors in order to increase the commercial value of the area. On the other, local activists, like the collective À nous la malting (mobilising since 2013 to save Quebec's last remaining decommissioned malthouse), resist the hegemonic gentrification narrative around heritage which commodifies the past. Instead, they use the concept to (re)claim local patrimonial sites like that of the Canada Malting Co. which they argue should be dedicated to community use. Taking a critical urban theory approach and concerned with the effects of gentrification on marginalised communities’ place-attachment (Harmon & Putney, 2003; Turan, 2018), I will show how the urban landscape mediates the claims of those who are competing over what the future will look like, and therefore what the past ought to mean.