“Parks Not Parkways”: Contesting Automobility in a Small Canadian City

Abstract

This case study of a dispute over a project to construct a road through green space in a small Canadian city brings together two hitherto separate theoretical approaches to mobility disputes: "culture stories" and "regimes of engagement". The stories opponents tell, in interviews and documents, concern their mobilization against the project, the value of environmental preservation, and the costs of expanded automobility, culminating in contrasting visions of urban development. The culture stories approach examines how stories varied on a narrative dimension of informational formats, temporal structures, causal mechanisms, and plot institutionalization, and a place dimension of relational geography and physical attributes. The pragmatic conditions of the different narratives of contestation, and of the challenges faced by opponents are analysed in terms of the relation between regimes of engagement: a regime of familiarity based in slow mobilities, a regime of planned action based in automobility, and the clash of industrial and green orders of worth in a regime of justification