Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the extension of logistics into urban spaces transforms local ecologies and sparks social contestation. It shows how contamination operates as a top-down justification for new polluting projects, as a language of protest, and as an alternative socio-ecological imaginary.

Presentation long abstract

The ongoing expansion of logistics infrastructures and port facilities is reshaping urban environments, generating new disconnections between city dwellers and water landscapes, encouraging the spread of non-native species, and producing diverse forms of pollution. This paper traces the web of ecological transformations and contestations emerging from the gradual extension of the port of Montreal into neighborhoods in the city’s Southeast – areas often referred to as the “black lung of the city”. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine the ways in which urban residents and grassroots organizations work to render visible the largely undetected and indeterminate effects of global commodity flows on their everyday lives. In urban spaces marked by long histories of toxic exposure, I show how contamination operates simultaneously as a top-down justification for new polluting projects, as a language of protest, and as an alternative socio-ecological imaginary. As official decontamination efforts enable further cycles of destruction and exploitation, polluted urban natures increasingly become catalysts for collective attachments and emerging practices of care and conservation.