Youth Urban Worlds

Both theoretically informed and empirically rich, Youth Urban Worlds explores how urban cultures affect political action amongst youth.

• Argues that urban cultures challenge the very meaning and contours of the political process
• Includes ethnographies, delving into the perspectives and knowledges of racialized youth, urban farmers, and “voluntary risk takers,” like dumpster divers, building climbers, and student protestors
• Theorizes that aesthetics are an increasingly crucial form of political action in the contemporary urban setting and explains the impact of aesthetics on the political
• Examines the centrality of fun, warmth, aesthetics, and embodiment to these youth’s experience of being in the world
• Explains how youth are able to practically and concretely impact the political process through the performance of risky and disruptive behavior

List of Figures vii

Series Editors’ Preface x

Preface xi

Introduction: Voices From Montreal 2

Space–Time–Affect: The Urban Logic of Political Action 5

Acting Aesthetically: Political Gestures, Political Acts, and Political Action 10

Youth Urban Worlds 21

The Global Urban Political Moment of the 2010s: Youthfulness in Action 26

Montreal in a World of Cities 29

A Methodological Note 31

The Organization of the Book 34

Notes 36

1 Montreal and the Urban Moment 38

Montreal’s Politico‐Sensuous Feel 41

Montreal’s Place in the Global Urban Cultures of the 1960s and 1970s 49

Changing Relations to Time 52

Changing Relations to Space 54

Conclusion 61

Notes 64

2 The Urban Political World of Racialized Youth: Moving Through and Being Moved By Saint‐Michel and Little Burgundy 69

Moving Through Saint‐Michel and Little Burgundy with an Epistemology of Blackness 75

Being Moved: Representations and Affective Aesthetic Relations 88

Racialization: Disembodied Profiling Entangled With Embodied Racist Encounters 94

Conclusion 98

Notes 101

3 The Urban Political World of Student Strikers 107

Becoming a Striker: Pregnant Moments ‘Breaking the Real’ 110

Walking the City: Space During and After the Strike 117

The Political Effects of Seduction and Provocation 123

Conclusion 133

Notes 135

4 The Urban Political World of Urban Farmers: ‘It’s Not Just Growing Food, It’s a Lot More Than That’ 143

Embodied Experiences of the Spatialities and Circulation of Food Commodities in the City 150

The Urban Logic of Action of Urban Agriculture Practices 157

Seduction and Attraction in the Garden 161

Conclusion 164

Notes 165

5 The Urban Political World of ‘Risk‐Takers’: Provocative Choreographic Power 169

The Risk‐Management Context 171

Urban Dancers and Diviners: Choreographic Power as Political Action 172

Voluntary Risk‐Takers? Fear and Youth Politics 177

Collective Edgework: Distributed Agency Through Provocation and Seduction 186

Conclusion 192

Notes 193

Conclusion 198

Forms of Aesthetic Politics Influenced by Youthfulness and Contemporary Conditions of Urbanity 201

Montreal in a World of Cities 206

Note 207

References 208

Index 220

Julie-Anne Boudreau holds a Doctorate in Urban Planning from the University of California in Los Angeles. She is Professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in Montreal, where she held the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005-2015.

Joëlle Rondeau holds a master’s degree in Urban Studies from the National Institute of Scientific Research in Montreal. She is pursuing a doctoral degree in Indigenous Studies at Trent University, focusing on the urban food transformation and the resurgence of Indigenous foodways and governance systems.

Youth Urban Worlds: Aesthetic Political Action in Montreal grapples with the interaction between urban environments and cultures and the political process. Authors Boudreau and Rondeau argue persuasively that urban cultures challenge the very meaning and contours of the political process. With ethnographies delving into the perspectives and knowledges of racialized youth, urban farmers, and “voluntary risk takers,” like dumpster divers, building climbers, and student protestors, Youth Urban Worlds theorizes aesthetics as an increasingly crucial form of political action in the contemporary urban setting.

This interdisciplinary work, weaving together aspects of philosophy, critical geography, political sociology, urban anthropology, urban studies, and cultural studies, examines the centrality of fun, warmth, aesthetics, and embodiment to these youth’s experiences of being in the world. Aesthetics serves as the predominant lens through which the lived reality of the subjects of the book is understood. It also explains how youth are able to practically and concretely impact the political process through the performance of risky and disruptive behavior. Moving from a contemporary history of urban Montreal from 1960, to an ethnographic description of the realities of urban youth in that city today, Youth Urban Worlds describes and explains the impact of aesthetics on the political.

‘This ethnographically immersive book draws you into a world of slam poets and urban farmers, skateboarders and graffiti artists, attending to the embodied forces of attraction that animate youth political action. Examining charged urban experiences such as student protests and police encounters, Boudreau and Rondeau show the transformative power of youth aesthetics, revealing the hidden traditions of experience they cultivate.’
Asher Ghertner, Rutgers University, USA

‘This book’s rich, textured text captures Montreal urban inhabitants consciously theorizing the space they live and experience. That the main interlocutors are young(er) folks, in dialogue with scholars, but as equals - at least as equal as is possible under the circumstances - makes for a remarkable expression of urban agency and transgression in the face of repression, incertitude, and the absence of absolutes.’
David Austin, author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (2018) and Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal, winner of 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize