Item – Thèses Canada

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Numéro d'OCLC
1117447273
Lien(s) vers le texte intégral
Exemplaire de BAC
Auteur
Mikadze, Vladimir,
Titre
Phenomenologies of border and humble public space making : Tactical urbanism, non-compartmentalizing urban development, and guerrilla gardening in Montréal, Canada
Diplôme
Ph. D. -- McGill University, 2019
Éditeur
[Montreal] : McGill University Libraries, [2019]
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Thesis supervisor: Nicholas Luka (Supervisor).
Includes bibliographical references.
Résumé
"The present research primarily concerns two general topics: spatial justice and the right to the city. More specifically, it focuses on bottom-up tactical urban movements (i.e., guerrilla gardening), while critically deconstructing the subjects of representations of nature in the city, urban governance, and collective agency building. The ultimate pursuit behind the research is to explore guerrilla gardening as a socio-spatial practice that, on the grounds of liminality, offers an alternative to the fragmenting urban space-making logic in favour of more flexible--non-exclusive--urban space formulation and structure. What is so gripping about guerrilla gardening as a spatial practice is that it can contest without disrupting the meaning and functions of affected spaces. Instead, it makes multiple overlapping geographies of urban vegetation possible and simultaneously open for different modes of engagement, agency, and deliberation. In this manuscript, I explore the ways in which the creation of a series of guerrilla gardens in Montréal, Québec, laid bare the competition between three different contexts (and representations) for vegetation in the city: 1) an urban green space, itself an outcome of the 19th century Park Movement, 2) municipal initiatives for sustainable green practices and urban food production (i.e., composting sites and community gardens), and 3) illegal activist-enacted challenges to the ways in which vegetation is allowed in North American urban settings. An overlap of these contexts enabled me to explore the terms on which distinct representations of vegetation simultaneously co-existed in a shared physical location, yet each on their own terms: with distinct design and structure of spaces, systems of signs and meaning, functions, and agency. The major outcomes of the present study are threefold. First, in analyzing contested sites as the space of phenomenological reduction (i.e., due to the rejection of the established meanings of built form by guerrilla gardeners), I explore the results of contestation as instances of liminality. Second, I explore the resulting liminality of the contested sites as a spatial resolution of one's right to the difference and to the city on phenomenological rather than marxian terms. Third, practically, I turn to Edward Relph's concept of environmental humility in order to see beyond the illegal aspect of guerrilla gardening and to outline the terms on which the competing representations managed to co-exist. Fourth, politically, I consider revitalization effects that the studied guerrilla gardening sites aimed to create through one of the most recycled notions of urban development--that of 'catalyst'. I contrast the informal space of continuous contestation with a formal 'catalyst' project, and after articulating some of their striking similarities, I point out paradigmatic differences in terms of how they facilitate urban development. Specifically at the human scale, the outcomes of the present study have the most direct implications for landscape urbanism and its preoccupation with the shift from fragmented and object-oriented understandings of urban development to a landscape-centred approach. Spaces that have no fixed territory are one way to witness and to explore the emergence of urban environments that encompass both human and non-human actors whose agency co-develops across various domains and scales while avoiding rigid hierarchies."--
Autre lien(s)
digitool.Library.McGill.CA
escholarship.mcgill.ca
escholarship.mcgill.ca
Sujet
Architecture