Socio-material issues of water resilience planning in urban redevelopment schemes in Montreal

Keywords: stormwater management, climate change adaptation, resilience, materiality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

This contribution is about transformations of the urban hydro-social cycle (Linton and Budds 2014) in projects of green infrastructure for resilient urban redevelopment in Montreal, projects driven by a will to reduce the city vulnerabilities to increasing episodes of heavy rain with climate change. In the transition from grey to green infrastructure for storm water management, old industrial sites anticipated for urban development are key laboratories. In these laboratories, professionals and civic actors work together to transform water management, to integrate in situ and vegetal design in urban planning and link it with social aspirations of residents. If the epistemologies and inequalities involved in these shifts have been discussed (Finewood 2016, Cousins 2017, Karvonen 2011), we wish to go further on how the materiality of urban sites and their underground play out in the conceptualisations of resilience, in interaction with real estate capital development. We are interested to develop on flows and fixity (Ranganathan 2015, Cousins 2017), considering how urban redevelopment schemes and the processes of planning for resilience in Montreal anticipate rainwater movement and fixity in relation to the topography of the city, regimes of property and the underground constraints to its in-situ infiltration. This contribution builds on a two years study involving ethnographic involvement in planning processes (observation, 22 interviews, documentary analysis) as well as on living lab workshops on climate adaptation with municipal, academic and civic actors in Montreal, with the team Labo Climat Montréal.