The urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure: Mediatization and resistance in energy landscapes

Abstract

From 2013 to 2016, two pipeline projects were vigorously contested in the Tiohtià:ke: Montreal area in Quebec, Canada. These disputes are analyzed as instances of the urban politicization of fossil fuel infrastructure. This politicization involves power struggles for authority in energy landscapes, particularly in relation to the material entanglement of energy in the city-region, that is, which parts of the infrastructure and landscapes come to matter. Drawing on work from political ecologists and scholars pressing for a rematerializing of urban studies, we supplement their insights with a conceptualization of struggles for urban authority in the governance of energy, in two parallel processes: one of performing centralized urban authority (notably with the media) and a second messier politics of multiplicities operating in spaces of urban governance and resistance. Struggles for urban authority are co-constructed with the socio-material realities of infrastructure and involve actors who are engaged in everyday practices of regulating, maintaining and protecting landscapes. Yet, in the mediatization of urban energy landscapes, certain voices, notably of Indigenous communities, remain on the margins, resulting in few challenges to settler colonialism and climate-changing extractivism.