Place, pipelines and political subjectivities in invisibilized urban peripheries

Abstract

ABSTRACT Place is often made invisible in infrastructure siting conflicts; this seems particularly the case in the rural–urban fringe and the in-between city. This paper analyses how collectives struggle to give place visibility in debates over large fossil fuel infrastructure projects, in two cases of pipeline opposition. It then focuses on mobilizations in urban peripheries, regarding which there is an enduring assumption of homogeneity in place attachments and in motives for political engagement. Mobilizations in the peripheries of Montreal (Canada) and Boston (USA) metropolitan areas are analysed in the challenges of arriving at a diverse ‘sense of place’. The meanings of the pipeline threat among activists differ in the context of different relations to place in everyday life and in former conflicts, which affect their shared discourses and individual encounters – experiences of colonial urbanism, farmers’ relations with the land, practices of land conservation, as well as relations with the state, grassroots and environmental organizations. Scholarship on the politics of place and the work of Hannah Arendt are used to conceptualize the (trans)formation of political subjectivity when struggling to give visibility to place, and to a diverse sense of place, in the urbanized society.