image #3: Spaces of conflict
"Urban space is the product of conflict. This is so in several, incommensurable senses. In the first place, the lack of absolute social foundation - the 'disappearance of the markers of certainty' - makes conflict an ineradicable feature of all social space. Second, the unitary image of urban space constructed in conservative discourse is itself produced through division, constituted through the creation of an exterior. The perception of a coherent space cannot be separated from a sense of what threatens the space, of what it would like to exclude. Finally, urban space is produced by specific socioeconomic conflicts that should not simply be accepted, either wholeheartedly or regretfully, as evidence of the inevitability of conflict but, rather, politicized - opened to contestation as social and therefore mutable relations of oppression" (Deutsche Evictions, Art, & Spatial Politics, 278).
Throughout this project I did not wish to celebrate the history of Lachine Canal as some romanticized period in time, where conflicts were less evident, and people gathered together by the canal living a healthy and happy social life. Far from that. What I have tried to show here, is that a whole set of conflicts have been replaced by new ones. In the 18th, 19th to mid 20th century the working class and poor neighborhoods surrounding the canal went through very intense times of social injustice, slavery and horrific standards of living. What brought them together, made them go on a strike and assemble was the highly visible symptoms of this injustice and underdeveloped health systems. However today's set of conflicts and sources of power and control in society are layered so densely within politicized spaces, (i.e. with so many institutional attachments) that identifying the problems and their source becomes much more difficult. So our struggle seems to appear in the form of class struggle.
Someone who is jobless, in dire need for care and attention might look at this wealthy and healthy residential building and question his/ her own failures on climbing the capitalist latter to freedom and democracy, and therefore fail to notice or question who these buildings, and public places really represent. Were they built for basic human needs? Or rather purely for economic interests? So occupied with the struggles of life that it gets hard to look past the body, the image of this healthy and wealthy body which is purely an invention, to the corrupt, deceiving, and misrepresentational body of the body-politik. This wasteful and privileged way of life that Myst promotes can only survive with the use and abuse of the body of others who are dealt with like commodities: the body of labor and social injustice.
Someone who is jobless, in dire need for care and attention might look at this wealthy and healthy residential building and question his/ her own failures on climbing the capitalist latter to freedom and democracy, and therefore fail to notice or question who these buildings, and public places really represent. Were they built for basic human needs? Or rather purely for economic interests? So occupied with the struggles of life that it gets hard to look past the body, the image of this healthy and wealthy body which is purely an invention, to the corrupt, deceiving, and misrepresentational body of the body-politik. This wasteful and privileged way of life that Myst promotes can only survive with the use and abuse of the body of others who are dealt with like commodities: the body of labor and social injustice.
"There are more votes in reducing taxes and creating misery for a minority of uninfluential people than in bearing the ever increasing costs of raising standards of service, comfort, and hygiene for all. We’re going to see more drunks and more dogs, more urine and dog shit on the streets, as the vestigial idealism of the bourgeois architect and planner retreats behind the defensible space of the individual family unit" (Benton Urban Planning and the Facts of Life, 4)