Abstract

Once Canada’s main manufacturing center, Montreal’s Lachine Canal supported more than six hundred factories from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, becoming an incredibly diversified “industrial park” (Desloges & Gelly, 2002). Following deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, its surrounding neighborhoods experienced economic decline. In the early 2000s, Parks Canada reopened the canal as a recreational corridor. This sparked a wave of condo development and the conversion of old industrial spaces into luxurious lofts and business hubs. These new spaces offer young professionals a curated lifestyle—one associated with living in a park, close to water, and in a heritage-conscious environment. Amid this rapid transformation, conflicting visions of the canal have emerged. Developers, government actors, and long-time residents assign different meanings to its landscape. Some emphasize environmental renewal and economic growth, while others fight to preserve working-class memory and public access. Acknowledging these tensions, this thesis explores how competing narratives of the Lachine Canal coexist within a rapidly gentrifying landscape. It focuses on how different meanings shaped by heritage, green aesthetics, and the symbolic significance of water are expressed and contested. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews—with municipal actors involved in the canal’s transformation, as well as with new and old residents who frequent the space—I show how these divergent meanings play out in everyday practices and interactions. This research also examines the role of material traces in remembrance, particularly of the canal’s industrial past. A key element of Montreal’s culture, the canal offers insight into the history, politics, heritage, power dynamics, and social life of the South-West borough. The project presents a nuanced account of how urban landscapes become contested arenas where the past, present, and future are negotiated.