Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
For a few years now, Quebec seems to be experiencing an urban planning frenzy like it has rarely experienced. Major infrastructure projects are multiplying, arousing as much hope as criticism. We are talking here about an aboveground REM de l’Est, there about a “carbon neutral” extension of Autoroute 19, there about a 3e ecological link. Elsewhere, the possibility of a baseball stadium is mentioned, while an amphitheater in the shape of a smoke detector still awaits its hockey team. And that’s not to mention the Royalmount shopping center, which is finally settling in at the crossroads of the Trudeau interchange, the concrete amphitheater for which 1,000 mature trees were razed by the Coderre administration in Parc Jean -Drapeau, or the container transshipment center that Ray-Mont Logistiques is trying to impose in the heart of the Hochelaga district.
Each time, tons of metal and thousands of cubic meters of concrete for a few job promises and above all significant financial benefits quickly privatized. Each time, economic issues described as absolutely necessary are opposed to social and environmental issues that are just as crucial at a time of ecological emergency that is ours. The debates are therefore raging, in the territories concerned, in the Blue Room or in the “Free Opinion” columns of the various Quebec dailies, but without succeeding in getting the decision-makers or the general public to lean on one side or the other of the balance, despite the relevance of the urban planning arguments put forward as well as the quality of the historical demonstrations presented.
Projects imposed from above
To get out of a debate that has become sterile due to the very absence of possible discussions (we are not even talking about a consensus yet), we need to change perspective and adopt new tools to think about the situation. However, a recent philosophical concept seems capable of enlightening us: that of “negative commons”. First stated in English in a 2001 article on reinventing the commons published by sociologists Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in the Canadian magazine development studiesthe term was then taken up by the French philosopher Alexandre Monnin, who made it a concept in its own right designating “material or immaterial “negative” “resources”, such as waste, nuclear power plants, polluted soils or even certain cultural heritages (the right of a colonizer, etc.)” (Legacy and closure. An ecology of dismantling, Paris, Editions Divergences, 2021). Just as the commons, revalued by the American economist Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), are material or immaterial resources shared and collectively managed by a community with a view to preserving or maintaining them, the negative commons are those resources that we produce and which we must take care of, despite their negative impact on the community and its environment. This qualification, which can be debated as some of the initiatives mentioned above are less a matter of collective decision than of vertical taxation, and therefore less of the common than of the “uncommon”, nevertheless has the advantage, according to Monnin, of favoring the democratic reappropriation of subjects and objects that had previously escaped the community, with a view to changing or even discontinuing their use. Such are pesticides, fossil fuel reserves, nuclear power plants, but also digital technology, explains the philosopher. These are also the major urban projects.
Indeed, beyond the pollution they generate, directly through their production (we know that concrete today contributes to the growing scarcity of the world’s sand resource), or through their existence (on the 3e link will thus contribute, according to experts, to increasing, as does any new road, car traffic and therefore the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with it), these “resources” are intended to last, to become major elements of our living spaces, our environments. These projects will therefore become part of our landscape, our daily lives, often upsetting the established order of our lives (such is the case of the aerial REM in the east of Montreal or the transshipment center project of Ray-Mont Logistiques , which will dump thousands of trucks on the streets of Hochelaga). Their often harmful aesthetic, ecological and existential consequences will have to be suffered/lived for decades by the populations, especially since these infrastructures will tend, if we are to rely on other achievements in Quebec, to deteriorate rapidly, thus becoming, like certain bridges or motorway sections, the “ruinous ruins” of which Alexandre Monnin speaks to explain his notion of “negative commons”.
Undemocratic character
We are therefore in the process of choosing, or even already building, the common goods of tomorrow, and this, without much democratic consultation. However, this is also the whole point of this notion of “negative commons” to draw our attention to this failure to take into account the opinion of the population.
The paradoxical character of this denomination (to call “common” what is not one) underlines Converselythe lack of democratic management of the infrastructures described: the negativity, far from being confined to a rejection motivated by fear, could well be due first and foremost to the undemocratic nature of the management of infrastructures deemed necessary for the point of view of the general interest. (Alexandre Monnin, “The “negative commons”. Between waste and ruins”, Studies2021).
This notion of “negative commons” is also interesting, specifies the philosopher, because it signals the “loss of the sense of community” and the “break with the cycles of life”, therefore inviting us to judge the projects undertaken at the against these two essential criteria. Unlike the communal goods to which the notion of “commons” refers and which have a utility, that is to say positive effects for the community which takes care of it and which fights against the privatization of certain resources by affirming collective ownership of work, production or living spaces, the notion of negative commons “focuses on the problems raised by the management of certain realities whose effects are negative, particularly in the environmental field” (Ibid., p. 59) .
However, these infrastructures that we are building with our public funds (even when they are operated by the private sector, as in the case of the amphitheater in Parc Jean-Drapeau) are common properties, goods belonging to us in common and for which we are both responsible and responsible. It is moreover the whole idea of the notion of “negative commons” to help us look at these projects from the future, to help us “problematize the question of heritage and rethink political action by this yardstick”, specifies Monnin in the book Legacy and closing. If we know that Quebec has, as Marie-Hélène Voyer has so beautifully shown, “the habit of ruins”, the concept of negative commons can help it think, upstream, of the consequences of its choices.
Metropolitan natural corridor
The Metropolitan Autoroute, which divides the north of the island of Montreal like a concrete scar, perfectly exemplifies this notion. While repair work was needed, targeting in particular the busiest section located between Saint-Laurent and Pie-IX boulevards, audacious projects emerged from the pen of architects to transform these ruinous ruins into picturesque ruins. There was talk of burying the traffic lanes to make the concrete apron a “huge park in which we would grow fruits and vegetables” (24 hours, January 24, 2020). In 2017, in a text entitled “Accoter les auroras”, the ecofeminist writer Pattie O’Green had already painted the portrait, then still imaginary, of this reappropriation of the metropolitan highway, this “horrible mastodon”, in a “corridor metropolitan park”, democratically chosen, a kind of green highway linking Montreal to Ottawa. A common good that should then be said to be positive instead of the negative common that the 1960s bequeathed to us.
If we are not there yet, it is nevertheless clear that the notion of negative commons helps us to think about the present and the choices we have to make according to their future impact and the collective responsibility we have to our achievements and our world.
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].