Suchergebnisse

In Quebec, in 2004, a new municipal political party was created in Montreal: the Projet Montréal party. Several aspects distinguish this party from other municipal political parties. Among these—the supposedly particular composition of the party's team and its activists, which brings together academics, environmental activists and experts in urban planning and transportation—attracts attention. The objective of this paper is to verify the specificity of the profiles of elected officials of the Projet Montréal political party by comparing them with those of other elected officials affiliated with municipal political parties between 2009 and 2017. Based on an extensive documentary survey of the 103 elected officials of the City of Montréal during the last three municipal elections, we will present how the profiles of elected officials differed depending on whether or not they belonged to Projet Montréal. More specifically, we will show that the profiles of Projet Montréal officials are more pronounced in the area of "mobility, urban planning, and environment" understood as one broad entity, whereas those of the other parties are stronger in the fields of administration and commerce. That said, the characteristics of the Projet Montréal team did shift over the course of the elections, insofar as officials with an education in the respective mentioned fields have made way for participants with more of an activist and volunteer profile. This research thus offers a first different and longitudinal look at the evolution of a municipal political party, the project it carries and the way in which the elected officials who compose it contribute to the identity of the party. By doing so, this study also shed light on municipal democracy and the conditions of entry into political office in that context.

AbstractHow do claims for rights to mobility intersect with grievances pertaining to spatial justice in the city? This article addresses the issue by studying the concrete connections made by activists promoting car alternatives in Montreal. The activists' discursive categories point to the centrality of their conditions of inhabitance in their claims for certain rights to mobility. The discourses are analysed in the context of demands for safe spaces to walk and cycle in Montreal, and in the context of opposition to the rebuilding of the Turcot highway interchange. The article discusses internal dynamics of collective action, as well as the external influences and controls on activists contesting automobility to various degrees and with different spatially grounded priorities. The claims for rights to mobility rely on locally articulated priorities for better conditions of inhabitance, yet with a transversal reliance on a shared sense of threat and vulnerability, and on the representations of a community (whether local or multi‐scalar), enabling changes in the physical framing of mobility.

From 2013 to 2016, two pipeline projects were vigorously contested in the Tiohtià:ke: Montreal area in Quebec, Canada. These disputes are analyzed as instances of the urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure. This politicization involves power struggles for authority in energy landscapes, particularly in relation to the material entanglement of energy in the city-region, that is, which parts of the infrastructure and landscapes come to matter. Drawing on work from political ecologists and scholars pressing for a rematerializing of urban studies, we supplement their insights with a conceptualization of struggles for urban authority in the governance of energy, in two parallel processes: one of performing centralized urban authority (notably with the media) and a second messier politics of multiplicities operating in spaces of urban governance and resistance. Struggles for urban authority are co-constructed with the socio-material realities of infrastructure and involve actors who are engaged in everyday practices of regulating, maintaining and protecting landscapes. Yet, in the mediatization of urban energy landscapes, certain voices, notably of Indigenous communities, remain on the margins, resulting in few challenges to settler colonialism and climate-changing extractivism.