Capter les significations paysagères d’un territoire d’infrastructures

During our journey across our contemporary metropolis, it’s hard to decipher the landscapes that unravelled before our eyes. The multiple highways become viewpoints from which an over-equipped city showcase its technical and infrastructural prouesse. Those strange and vast landscapes occupied by technical installations are often designated as ¬non-places, i.e. places that are neither relational nor concerned with identity in their relationship to the human experience. With this problematic in mind, infrastructure areas are currently at the core of major redevelopment projects underway in numerous large cities. These projects often have the same idea: enhance these underused spaces and design a new part of the city that is based on ecological principles and able to reinvigorate the experience of its citizens. However, little is known about the real and broad influence of infrastructure areas on urban experience and life. In the context of planetary urbanization, where the infrastructures that serve to support urban networks (e.g. transportation, energy, communication) have become the most determinant object of the contemporary metropolis, there’s an urge to consider those infrastructure territories not only as spaces that serve technical purposes, but also as social spaces that contribute to the urban imagination. This is the main purpose of this research. The study area concerned by the research is the highway gateway corridor between Montreal - Trudeau Airport and downtown Montreal. Given the importance of this highway corridor and the fact that its various infrastructures currently require redevelopment, citizen concerns and aspirations for this area need to be taken into consideration. For that purpose, a methodological framework situated at the intersection of ethnographic approaches, visual studies and mobility methods was applied in the interest of investigating infrastructure areas as moving landscapes. More specifically, go-alongs were carried out to gain access to the views of the highway corridor users. The routes experienced by ten participants were documented with a digital camera and their content was subject to an innovative analysis of both the discourse and the video. Through this narrativization of the urban space, the notions shared by the participants made it possible to draw a radically new portrait of the highway corridor as a social space that is experienced and loaded with symbolism. In that sense, the results of this research have made it possible to approach infrastructure territories according to multiple dimensions, whether they are lived experiences, urban processes, specific and recognized places or even more subjective aspects of their experience such as urban ambience. Methodologically, the strategy which utilized the spontaneity of a moving approach, seemed to grant access to unique and unprompted discourses about the urban landscapes that were travelled through. Finally, this investigation of the urban space based on local knowledge and movement seems essential to contribute to a critical reflection on the future of the urban space marked by technology, technologies and infrastructures.

Keyphrases: landscape, social space, mobile methods, visual research, ethnography, infrastructure, urban planning