Place‐framing against automobility in Montreal

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the dynamic processes of place‐framing through struggles against automobility in Montreal, bringing place discourses in dialogue with mobilities scholarship. We explicitly consider the dynamics of place‐frames' development and emergence from the myriad of different meanings of activists engaged in a mobilisation, in interaction with the hegemonic transportation discourse. We analyse the mobilisation for car traffic‐calming in Montreal through three dynamic moments of place‐framing: naming and blaming (voicing a certain experience of place), claiming solutions in space and practising the desired place. Each moment consists of a discursive struggle through which selective meanings are being given to place in relation to mobility. In Montreal, these moments were crucially associated with new network connections: (1) a coalition around the association of car traffic with vulnerability, (2) the targeting of local regulators for traffic‐calmed places when dismissed by auto‐oriented space regulators and (3) performing a community of practice for walking and cycling in neighbourhoods, with tensions between the utopian local way of life and regional flows. This study demonstrates the relational linkages of mobility and place. Place‐frames are not immutably linked to existing landscapes and experiences, but are shaped through nodal and network articulations that emphasise communities of practice in (imagined and desired) place(s) of everyday movement.

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