How 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
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.
Scholars have recently advocated going beyond a fetishism for one spatiality to consider a diversity of socio-spatial relations in the study of political mobilization. The objective of this article is to propose an operationalization of the four spatialities framework (networks, scale, place and territory) and use it on the investigation of the mobilization for car alternatives in the Montreal city-region. Our approach is to start with the spatiality and structure of the network, to then identify brokers and focus on them for the detailed analysis of scale, territory and place. The article sheds light on the particular assets which the use of each spatiality, and their combination, offers for mobilization in the city-regional context. The findings also illustrate how city-regionalism is experienced by civic actors building coalitions to defend specific causes.
Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems. These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.
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