Abstract

Following the shift from an industrial economy to a capitalist and consumerist one, the legacy of an industrial past has left its marks on the landscape of North American cities in the form of disused train yards, spaces on street edges, spaces under infrastructure lines, and abandoned industrial sites. These spaces are often referred to as interstitial spaces (Matos, 2009). While city governments, urban planners and developers see them as an opportunity for urban regeneration and capitalist investment, community members view them as an opportunity to cater their needs and desires. These different visions around the re-purposing of interstitial spaces has rendered them sites of tension. In this study, I seek to understand the tension between the capitalist and community appropriation of interstitial spaces, explore how the community manages this tension and examine the factors that are affecting how the tension is being dealt with. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork based on urban walking, in-depth interviews as well as online content analysis, and building on literature around the topics of assemblage, the right to the city, production of space and interstitial spaces, I explore these questions in Pointe Saint Charles, a post-industrial neighborhood in the Southwest of Montreal, undergoing rapid gentrification and known for its community activism. Analysis revealed that interstitial spaces grappled with the clashing objectives of each force and its subsequent vision for the use of space. In particular, interstitial spaces acted as sites of tension between profitability vs. affordability, identity erasure vs. identity reinforcement and separation vs. inclusion of the population. To navigate these tensions, the community of Pointe Saint Charles deployed a set of tactics that either prevented a certain use of space, reconciled both uses or responded to a certain use. The thesis concludes by providing implications that consider assemblage as a main interpretational tool to study the contested nature of interstitial spaces as more than a simple dichotomy between capitalist and community appropriation. It also reconceptualized the perception of interstitial spaces from meaningless static gaps in the city to dynamic and complex sites.