Paper Short Abstract:

This paper investigates the contested futures of the Champ des Possibles, a rewilded space in Montreal which bears the toxic traces of its industrial past. If collaboration always implies contamination (Tsing 2010), the Champ raises questions: who speaks for a city? For wilderness? For the future?

Paper Abstract:

The Champ des Possibles is a unique urban space: a former railway depot tucked between highrises in Montréal's Mile End neighborhood, the space was abandoned in 2000 and quickly blossomed into an unruly, luscious, and contaminated ecosystem of its own. When that ecosystem was threatened by imminent development a decade later, a group of citizens organized themselves to defend the space. Since then the Champ has served as an uncanny oasis in the midst of the city, offering a vivid and messy experience of wilderness far different than the manicured parks which proliferate through the rest of the city. The organization which emerged from the citizens' movement, Les Amis du Champ des Possibles, continues to steward the site. Yet the future of the Champ is a contested one: its very soil is contaminated by toxins which manifest the trace of its industrial history, and different groups, from the City of Montreal to Les Amis to collaborating ecologists, hold contrasting ideas about what the process of "decontamination" should look like. Meanwhile the Champ has been periodically inhabited by unhoused citizens, leading to conflicts with the City and raising questions of who, exactly, the space belongs to. While the Champ may appear to embody a utopian urban future, it also shows the messiness of this process, with collaboration always intertwined with contamination (Tsing 2010). Who speaks for a city? For wilderness? Whose future is this?

Based on fieldwork during the production of an ethnographic fillm ("An Urban Wild", screened at FIFEQ 2023).