"J'te parle du Nord" Mapping and giving voice to youth in a stigmatized neighborhood (Montreal-Nord)

Keywords: Critical Mapping, Youth, Stigmatization, Media, Counter-narrative
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper presents a collaborative research and mapping conducted with young North Montrealers aged 18 to 23 at the time of the research.
Montréal-Nord, a stigmatized neighborhood of the Montreal agglomeration, is often portrayed by the media and political actors as a neighborhood in decline, a no-go zone, where street gangs are rampant. This dominant discourse contributes to a process of othering and homogenization of the neighborhood even though it has more than 84,000 inhabitants and presents an important socio-spatial diversity. Thus, the neighborhood is often reduced to a sector: the Northeast, and to its socio-economic vulnerabilities and high concentration of immigrants and newcomers.
With "J'te parle du Nord" (I'm talking to you about the North), produced as part of the TRYSPACES project, the idea was to counterbalance these representations by not speaking for the young people of their place of life. Thus rather than othering the place and assigning identity and territoriality to its residents (Hancock, 2008; Jolivet, Khelifi, Vogler, 2021; Maynard, 2018) these collaborative mappings, both made on "Instagram" (their eyes) and through the audios of commented walks (their places), present alternative narratives and another neighborhood: their own.

The methodology based on collaborative mapping wants to go beyond the narrative limits of classical cartographic representation and conventional formats (Mekdjian and Olmedo 2016) and analyzes their geographical knowledge(Poplin et al. 2017). This interactive cartography allows for a "situated" but also embodied approach to places and to apprehend, through individual points of view, the collective making of Montréal-Nord.