Environmental gentrification and emerging collectives in uncertain times

ended

This project is an anthropological study of emerging forms of collective care at a moment where the interlocking crises of capitalism, democracy, and the environment have become more apparent than ever before. In the Global North, there is an increasing sense of urgency to enhance cities' sustainability. Yet, top-down paradigms of urban regeneration can contribute creating enclaves of environmental privilege, thereby excluding lower income and minority groups from their benefits. Much recent scholarly debate has focused on the multiple effects of evictions and displacements, as well as on active practices of resistance. But what happens if, after years of protests, grassroots groups become the main actors in processes of collective re-appropriation and management of urban spaces? TAKEBACK is based on an ethnographic study of collective reappropriations of vacant ex-industrial buildings, retrieved from top-down reconversion by activists and local residents in Montreal, Canada. By going beyond a view of social movements as bounded and organised entities, it explores the understudied topic of the “afterlives of a movement”, namely what happens when a heterogeneous political collective reaches some of its goals and, thus, changes shape, ambitions, and setting. It examines evolving trajectories and practices of collective care within activism, in order to contribute to debates on the shifting meanings of urban citizenship in an increasingly vulnerable world. TAKEBACK will allow me to gain new knowledge in the areas of urban geography and visual ethnography, to combine this with my previous expertise in political anthropology and ethnographic research, and to further my career prospects with a book monograph as major output of the fellowship. The project also speaks directly to EU missions directed at supporting the European Green Deal and Just Transition Mechanism.