Mapping 50 years of memories of expropriation. The case of the Mirabel airport in Canada

Keywords: Expropriation, urban memory, cartography
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Urban memory studies has become a more common political and social way of approaching the restoration of wounded urban territories and cities (Till 2012). By seeing urban spaces as unique memories holders’, it expands the possibility of thinking about the relationships between memory and places (El-Abiad 2020). From memory place to urban memory work, numerus researchers and local actors envision memory as an essential domain of study to address collective traumatic past, urban inequalities, and rethink urban development and its multiple consequences (Collins, Healy et Radstone 2020). Cartography has been playing an active role in this rethinking process, both as an artistic and technical tool and process to reveal urban memory traces, to better understand the past, and to open collective reflections about urban planning (Roth 2021). In this presentation I discuss the potential of mapping memory to better understand territorial identities through the case study of Mirabel, a small city with a big airport near Montreal, Canada. In an attempt to build the new Mirabel’s international airport in 1971, 11 000 inhabitants have been expropriated. While the airport never reached its full capacity and closed in 2004, fifty years after, memories of the expropriations are still living, marking the physical and symbolic landscape of the municipality. Through oral history and the creation of sensitives maps, my doctoral research aims to answer the following questions: what memories remain of the expropriations of the 1970s, and how do they affect the residents' attachment to place and territorial identity?