Читать книгу Youth Urban Worlds - Julie-Anne Boudreau - Страница 11

They put make up on her.

Who you may ask.

Ils ont mis du maquillage sur elle.

Qui, demandes‐tu?

I’m talking about the planners, the renovators.

They put make up on her. My home is what I mean by her. The building where I have spent 95% of what I now refer to as my conscious life.

I feel it’s a ploy to attract investors, to attract the rich, to attract money and prestige.

…

We live there, have lived there, and will continue to live there. That is, if permitted. We are the ones who carry stories. We are the ones who inflict pain and have had pain inflicted upon us.

We are the fighters, the protecters, the by‐standers.

We are the listeners, the see‐ers, and the gossipers. We have fought the battles and continue to fight …

The new windows, new balconies, new backyard, new everything presents a new beginning. The open wounds covered up, never mended. A new beginning that doesn’t include us. A new beginning that neglects the historic warriors.

(Kabisha, 14 June 2014, mapcollab.org)

Ivan is one of the students who opened his urban world to us, one year after the 2012 student strikes that came to be known as the Maple Spring (Printemps érable; see Chapter 3). He describes political action in Montreal with reference to its history and culture of social mobilization – ‘the space for alternative … ecology, … art, … politics’. Such description is consistent with the way most youths who will speak in this book describe Montreal. In the second excerpt from Kabisha, produced during our MapCollab workshops,² Montreal’s diverse cultures are described in more sour terms. Her words are highly political, screaming against gentrification and exclusion. Like Ivan, she highlights aesthetics. Allow us to let another young Montrealer speak before coming back to Kabisha:

It’s also a city where we witness and we easily see just by being there … You know, there are big contrasts of human realities that coexist in this city. And this, I think, creates tensions that are palpable, that favor people’s involvement when they have the occasion maybe.³ (Hubert, student who participated in the 2012 strikes)

Like Kabisha, Hubert speaks of spatial contrasts and socioeconomic inequalities. And like her, he emphasizes their embodiments: ‘Just by being there’ we can ‘witness and see … contrasts in human realities’. ‘We are the ones who carry stories. We are the ones who inflict pain and have had pain inflicted upon us’, writes Kabisha, ‘We are the listeners, the see‐ers, and the gossipers’. Politics is something we feel and live, just by wandering in the city. Montreal, as these youths whom we will meet express, is the globally connected urban milieu where their lives unfold. More than just the backdrop for their actions in the world, this place affects and is affected by their experiences and various engagements. It gives shape and malleability to their reality, a canvas and a medium to speak their truths, to experience and understand their lives in relation with the worlds they inhabit, with which they engage and communicate. What can we learn from these voices from Montreal, interconnected in an increasingly urbanized sociopolitical global order that both transcends and exceeds the international order of sovereign nation‐states?

David Harvey (1985a, p. 266) was concerned with the need to better understand how ‘the urban milieu, considered as a physical and social artefact, mediates the production of consciousness in important ways, thus giving urban life and consciousness many of their distinctive qualities’. He published Consciousness and the Urban Experience as a companion volume to the perhaps more well‐known The Urbanization of Capital (1985b). His starting point was the recognition that the ‘particular kind of urban experience’ resulting from the production of an increasingly urbanized space necessary to the survival of capitalism in the twentieth century is ‘radically different quantitatively and qualitatively from anything that preceded it in world history’ (Harvey 1985a, p. 265). While his studies on the urbanization of capital focused on the production of a ‘second nature’ of built environment with particular kinds of configurations under capitalist processes (Harvey 1985a, p. xvii), his concern with the publication of a companion volume was to examine the implications of the urbanization of social relations on political and intellectual consciousness, a parallel process to the urbanization of capital which produces the physical and material space of the city. His contention was that capitalism ‘has also produced a new kind of human nature through the urbanization of consciousness and the production of social spaces and a particular structure of interrelations between the different loci of consciousness formation’ (Harvey 1985a, p. xviii). Harvey shed light on the importance of taking the ‘urbanization of consciousness’ as a real social, cultural, and political phenomenon in its own right.

In doing so, and although he was criticized for its superstructural model of consciousness, Harvey was bringing the insights of thinkers of urbanity, or urban ways of life, such as Louis Wirth and Henri Lefebvre, to bear on a Marxian interpretation of the urban process under capitalism. Indeed, living in a world of cities requires a profound rethinking of how we act politically, how we engage with our world and create meaning through urban research.

This book explores how urban cultures affect political action from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Based on four ethnographies of youth political action in Montreal, it shows that urban cultures are challenging the very meaning and contours of the political process. Using the perspectives of racialized youth, ‘voluntary risk‐takers’ such as dumpster divers, Greenpeace building climbers, students taking to the streets during the 2012 ‘Maple Spring’, and urban farmers, it develops the theoretical idea of aesthetics as a an increasingly important dimension of life and mode of political action in the contemporary urban world. The embodied forces of attraction and desire that animate youth political action are too often ignored in studies of urban politics. This is especially true in cities of the so‐called Global North. This is why in this book we wanted to engage with theoretical frameworks developed in the Global South and from Black studies in order to understand Montreal. This scholarship helps to shed light on the diverse forms of aesthetic political action perceived in the different yet interconnected youth urban worlds in which we have been immersed. These diverse ways of acting politically, through aesthetic relations, are not all consistent with one another and tell us much about the transformation of the political process in a world where the state can no longer pretend to have sole monopoly over the channelling, organization, and mediation of conducts and resources.

In order to understand these urban political forms, we are moved to ‘look’ for and be affected by politics in places that political scientists would not generally identify for political analysis. Understanding the urban culture behind action cannot come from observing political campaigns, ideologies, political organizations, or interviews with the leaders of social movements. Instead, the ethnographic work presented in the following pages delves into the common symbols, sensations, and perceptions that structure the individual and collective imaginary, youth political gestures, and the implicit ‘grammar’ that gives meaning to these multiple gestures and feelings in different youth urban worlds situated in Montreal. We argue that living in an urban world transforms conceptions of time, space, and rationality, and that these emerging notions based on nonlinearity, mobility, and affectivity have a significant effect on political actions (Boudreau 2017).