Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada's Capital City

Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City Nick Scott Carleton University The street yearns for action nobler than traffic. Leonard Cohen Montreal 1964 ost canadians depend on a car, truck, or bus for everyday Mtravel and worry about congestion and the price of gas. The recent bailout of the auto sector and stimulus spending on roads, bridges, and highways reveal the commitment of Canadian governments to expanding traffic through motor vehicle use. As a shared way of flowing and idling in the world, however, traffic, in spite of mass participation and immense eco- logical import, remains a relatively elusive idea, and one too frequently dominated by a functionalist engineering approach. As a technoscientific attempt to eliminate congestion, this approach overlooks social under- standings of traffic, its politics, and its cultural significance. I aim to extend an alternative understanding of “traffic” as irreducible to either congestion or itinerancy but marked instead by multiple relations of stasis and flow among human and nonhuman actors. To this end I draw on two different literatures, mobility studies and narrative approaches to urban planning, to explore how people imagine and practise traffic in a spatial culture of automobility. ESC 36.1 (March 2010): 149–174 This narrative approach to urban planning highlights the multiplicity of traffic and the agency of material infrastructure (see Latour). By fore- grounding the different voices of streets, I aim to defamiliarize the habitual Nick Scott is a voice of automobility. In contrast to modernization cum motorization nar- doctoral candidate ratives which follow a teleological plot line, the stories that streets tell from in sociology and different temporal and spatial perspectives have the potential to disrupt a anthropology at natural, apolitical culture of car-dependence. The mobilities literature that Carleton University. I will rely on argues that buildings, roads, and other kinds of places gain His research meaning through the ways in which they carry or constrict the flows of interests include subjects, ideas, and objects. It views streets as sociotechnical ensembles travel practices, city of tarmac, electricity, hydrocarbons, values, juridical systems, and habitus. planning, cultures Built for particular bodies and machines, streets evoke the discursive and of mobility, and political construction of traffic alongside hard infrastructure. the politics of car After situating traffic within mobilities and narrative approaches to dependence in planning, I follow the stories of five prominent streets in Canada’s capi- Canada. He is most tal city. Ottawa represents a strategic case study of mobility and plan- interested in emerging ning. Like Canberra, Brasilia, and New Delhi, Ottawa is a living prod- spaces of sustainable uct of muscular, modernist planning of the last century which equated travel as they interact national progress with mass automobility. To a greater degree than other with everyday life. conurbations in Canada, traffic in the National Capital Region reflects a totalizing vision of the good city in which the car is tied to modernity, national identity, and power. By engaging what some have called a rela- tional “politics of mobility” (Cresswell, “Politics”; Simpson; Henderson), I argue that Ottawa’s streets articulate a deeply contested process by which automobility has become systematically invested with forms of material and immaterial power denied to other forms of traffic. To build my case I draw on media discourse, photographs, planning documents, developmen- tese, and field observations. Through these materials I show that, along with the daily lives of street users, cars, and their manifold interactions, a critical if frequently forgotten world of traffic resides in the stories of streets themselves. Assembling a Politics of Automobility Over the last decade, research on the movement of people, goods, and ideas has enjoyed increasing attention. A growing interdisciplinary literature on “mobilities” explores how movement mediates social life and the creation of meaningful spaces in which people live together. The “mobilities paradigm,” as some refer to it, includes “studies of corporeal movement, transportation and communications infrastructures, capi- talist spatial restructuring, migration and immigration, citizenship and 150 | Scott transnationalism, and tourism and travel” (Hannam et al. 9–10). These studies have two things in common. First, they explore the proliferation of mobilities, exploring how interdependent institutions and novel sociotechnical networks, from currency markets and exurban commutes to mobile social networking, bring individual biographies unevenly into contact with globalized flows of people, products, and information. Second, mobility studies just as importantly form a response to dominant conceptions of movement. In particular, mobility contrasts with conceptions in trans- port geography and engineering geared toward maximizing the economic efficiency and productivity of movement. Cresswell usefully distinguishes mobility from movement as one might distinguish place from location: “It is produced and given meaning within relations of power” (“Politics” 20). A definition of mobilities as socially contexualized movement shaped by systemically uneven power relations may well serve a critical understanding of traffic. To strengthen this connection, I now turn to relations between mobilities and space. The mundane mobilities that make up everyday traffic shape the production of space. Traffic models which quantify the relationship between mobility and space conceive of “person-trips” as a predictable outcome, determined by road capacity, desire lines, a matrix of origins and destinations, and traffic control devices. However, people driving together frequently “misbehave” and deviate from the rules of traffic. Fraught with perceptual limitations and asymmetrical communication, car travel resembles a complex play of emotions strewn across disconnected yet intimate moral dramas (Katz 49). In contrast to classic utilitarian actors, coolly processing information and making rational choices, people on the road struggle to project and affirm their identities and often react with strong emotion to perceived slights and acts of kindness. What becomes diminished in an abstract model of traffic, then, is the performative, lived production of space. Different practices of mobility do more than conform to their physical environments; dialectically, they construct cities, streets, and neighbourhoods. In the same way that Henri Lefebvre suggests every society, with its mode of production and unique history, “produces a space, its own space” (31), we can think of mobilities as texturing the built envi- ronment in particular ways. In other words, city space, be it a building, billboard, or superhighway, gains meaning and agency through the way it variously affords and stymies the movement of bodies and other objects. While mobilities help organize city life and urban growth, they do so in dramatically different ways. A prominent area of mobilities research focuses on the difference the automobile makes in terms of actively shap- Storied Infrastructure | 151 ing how people live together. “Automobility” constitutes a hegemonic form of mobility in North America. Road-building consortia, hydrocarbon industries, and real estate developers invest automobility with tremendous economic capital. Cultural representations of car travel, including sym- bolic associations with freedom, autonomy, and domination over nature, pervade the most prolific field of advertising in the world (Conley and McLaren). Automobilities, then, refer to the social worlds built around the private, petroleum-powered motor vehicle following its awkward entrance on narrow nineteenth-century streets cobbled together for foot traffic. As Peters notes, “passages” have been opened over time and widened for automobile flows, often to the detriment of walking, cycling, and public transit (136). Saliently, an ambivalence characterizes the levels of car dependence we now find in wealthy countries such as Canada, where about three out of four people rely on the automobile to reach the majority of their daily destinations (Turcotte 22). Car travel has many individual benefits that come at high collective cost. The car affords efficient, personal, and easy mobility year round for many people and, as a result, contributes immensely to living standards and connections between families and communities that might otherwise languish. Conversely, curtailing car use could severely reduce mobility options in North American cities which currently lack the European- style population densities necessary for good public transit and cycling networks. On the other hand, the sprawling, functionally segregated environments where cars are indispensable were actively constructed to be car dependent. As a result, these environments now underwrite some of the most daunting environmental and health crises of the twenty-first century. The prevalence of high blood pressure, obesity, and associated conditions such as diabetes increase in low-density, homogeneous suburbs that discourage routine walking, cycling, and outdoor play. Sundering biodiverse habitats and migration corridors, car-based suburbs deplete and contaminate watersheds by increasing runoff and removing natural filtration systems. Transportation, moreover, accounts for a fourth of global

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