Events

Study day: Is the Festive City Inclusive?

sonia.blanksaint-cyr@mail.mcgill.ca — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:57:54 +0000

Study day: Is the Festive City Inclusive? sonia.blanksai… Tue, 11/04/2025 - 15:57

Like Lyon, Montreal has, over recent decades, established itself as an event-driven and festive city — hosting numerous celebrations and festivals. Yet festivity, like everything else, is political: for whom are these glittering times and spaces created? What processes of spatial and social exclusion are activated during these urban events? How might we make the festive city inclusive? These questions framed the 2025 edition of the Entretiens Jacques-Cartier, an annual interdisciplinary forum established in 1987 that brings together academics, business leaders, policymakers, and cultural actors from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (France), Québec, and the Canadian Francophonie to debate major societal and scientific issues.

The event took place on October 6, 2025 and was hosted by Lou Herrmann and Valérie Disdier, co-founders of Cité Anthropocène — a Lyon-based non-profit association committed to mobilizing society, science, and the arts in response to the socio-environmental upheavals of the Anthropocene — at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSA Lyon). Both the 9I�� and Université de Montréal (UdeM) teams were invited to participate. Representing the 9I�� team, I presented reflections on night-time realities for marginalized communities, while Jean-Pierre Chupin and Laurène Smith, respectively professor and master’s student representing UdeM, discussed notions of quality in festive events and processes.

The study day was structured around two sessions: the morning examined spatial and social exclusion in urban festivities, while the afternoon explored strategies for fostering inclusion. More than 75 participants attended — including students, faculty, association members, city staff, and researchers. This cross-sectoral composition was also reflected among the panelists, in line with the partnership’s objective to foster dialogue and mutual “contamination” across disciplines and practices.

The event took place at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSA Lyon), on October 6, 2025. © Cité Anthropocène

The event offered a clear view of the landscape of inclusion in France. Florie Bresteaux (Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva, focusing on the inclusion of people with disabilities) presented the Paris Olympics/Paralympics, while Julien Pavillard (Director of Events and Animation for the City of Lyon) discussed the Lyon Fêtes des Lumières. Municipal bodies often portray accessibility as a first step toward inclusion. However, as noted by Florie Bresteaux during the event, “By prioritizing accessibility, we risk neglecting participation.” Accessibility — sometimes approached purely from a marketing perspective — can obscure the need for meaningful engagement. Accessible events with unequal participation are common, particularly due to oversimplified categorizations of people with diverse and intersecting situations and identities.

Building on that discussion of accessibility, a key takeaway was the challenge of including everyone: as more specific categories are considered, some groups are inevitably overlooked For example, elderly people and children are often neglected in architectural design and planning except in those facilities that are specifically for them such as schools and playgrounds for children. Many presenters emphasized the over-fragmentation of categories, which rarely reflect lived identities. Can a single space ever be truly welcoming to all? Attempts to over specify risk creating new norms that inadvertently exclude others. Some of the afternoon’s interventions by Jean-Pierre Chupin and Antoine Trollat (Architect and cofounder of Looking For Architecture) highlighted the importance of integrating lived experience — in both research and practice — into the creation of festive spaces. Yet this focus on individual experiences can be in tension with the need to develop collective approaches toward a just and equitable city.

During the discussion, I argued that preserving and respecting existing spaces, reorganizing temporal access to infrastructure, and redistributing resources are crucial — yet these points did not resonate strongly in the room. Recognizing when not to act or disrupt is vital but often overlooked. It was only in the afternoon that Pascale Bonniel Chalier (Teacher of Cultural Policy at ENSATT and Regional Counsellor for Auvergne Rhône-Alpes) reiterated that so-called “inclusive festivities” can, in fact, produce harm or destruction.

My reflections focused on surveillance, the instrumentalisation of design, hostile architecture, and the lack of services for marginalized communities, including unhoused individuals, Indigenous communities, sex workers, and night-shift workers in Montreal. These reflections resonated with Louana Lattanzi (Anthropology student and member of the Karnaval Solidaire student association), who organizes safe festive spaces for women and gender-diverse individuals through harm reduction, prevention of sexual and gender-based violence, and shared values grounded in care.

Our exchanges revealed tensions and contradictions around the notion of “safety.” Punitivist approaches were debated, and I was surprised that some participants and speakers at the event still consider chosen non-mixed spaces as exclusionary. This perspective often reflects a broader societal entitlement to 'feeling safe'—one that can obscure the structural roots of violence. In contexts marked by systemic racial, sexual, gender, and class-based violence, marginalized groups need spaces where they can experience safety and solidarity among peers.

In my presentation, I offered a path of reflection: rather than focusing on “inclusivity,” a concept often tokenized, could we reimagine spaces grounded in mutual aid, care, and solidarity? Participants engaged with the idea of “Decolonizing the Night,” which resonates differently in France given its historical relationship with citizen groups from formerly colonized countries compared to Quebec with its distinct historical relationship to Indigenous peoples. Rethinking the relationship between occupants and visitors may also help question the role of festivals and urban spaces in relation to distinct forms of coloniality in our present.

Pascale Bonniel Chalier proposed moving beyond inclusion toward the concept of habitabilité, extending the framework to encompass land and natural systems. Her intentions were clear, but the concept itself remained somewhat ambiguous. Although this perspective aligns with frameworks stemming from decolonial thought, I remain critical of such discourse: framing habilitability primarily as an ecological issue risks reproducing social inequalities.

Temporality was also discussed as an opportunity. According to Laurène Smith, the ephemerality of the festive city makes it an ideal research ground, allowing for the testing of new, more creative forms of inclusion and enabling iterative improvements from year to year. In our own 9I��-based project, this translates into recognizing the night as a key temporal dimension in urban governance and planning. Temporality can indeed be an opportunity — but it remains essential to ask who benefits from the urban spaces being created.

Finally, while the study day provided an invaluable opportunity to compare realities, case studies, and approaches to the festive city across Quebec and France, it also revealed many contradictions and tensions. As Jean-Pierre Chupin noted, inclusion always implies the existence of a “centre” to which people must conform to participate. Perhaps, then, there is also a need to unlearn — to confront spaces with radical thought — so that we may collectively imagine a more just and caring city.

Countermapping Workshop

renee.li@mail.mcgill.ca — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:26:34 +0000

Countermapping Workshop renee.li@mail… Wed, 05/14/2025 - 14:26

Our Counter-Mapping Workshop took place March 20, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 2:30 PM on the 5th floor of the MacDonald Harrington Building. We invited members of two counter-mapping projects, Queering the Map and the Parc-Ex Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, to discuss the possibilities, limitations, and ethical implications of their work.

Counter-mapping can be a powerful tool for promoting social and spatial justice. It can make visible what is often invisible and shed light on issues and stories that otherwise remain hidden. In addition to visualizing spatial data, counter-mapping can be used to record and archive community-based stories.

Featuring:

Lucas LaRochelle (they/them) is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, co-creative media, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of “Queering The Map,” a community-generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. Anyone can anonymously record their queer experiences at specific locations on a collective map.

Yannick Baumann (he/him) is a PhD student at Université de Montréal's Geography Department in co-direction with the Geomedia Lab at Concordia University. Drawing on participative and activist methodologies, his research focuses on the potential of (digital) data and (digital) tools to foster community relations and to support housing struggles. His primary interests are housing justice, financialization of housing, data activism, and alternative cartographies.

Nuzhat Niaz (she/her) is a community organizer at the Comité d’action de Parc-Extension (CAPE), a tenants’ rights association based in the Montreal neighbourhood of Parc-Extension, and a research assistant at Concordia University. She has a long experience in community organizing and advocacy, having worked with Oxfam, ActionAid and Teach for Bangladesh. Baumann and Niaz created the Parc-Ex Anti-Eviction Mapping Project to highlight the evolution and distribution of evictions in the Parc Extension neighborhood of Montreal.

You can find the work of our guests here:

Queering the Map

Parc-Ex Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

Night Walk

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:08:29 +0000

Night Walk alexandre.nero… Mon, 02/05/2024 - 12:08

On Monday, November 13th, the ‘Night-time for/with marginalized communities’ research group organized a night walk to explore the area surrounding the Berri-UQAM metro station from 9 PM to 12 AM. Dr. Julius-Cezar Macarie, an expert in night-time research and more specifically in night workers, was leading this excursion into the night. Among the 15 participants, there were members of the research group, partners at ‘Architecture Sans Frontière Québec,’ and various friends interested in night-time research. Interests from the participants ranged from migrant/night workers, unhoused populations, law enforcement, safety, and queer populations.

The main interest for the walk was to observe and interact with people who frequent the night. Although we didn’t cover much distance, it did not stop our group from making many valuable observations. What surprised me the most was discovering the different rhythms that existed in parallel. In the streets, you could notice different users/groups that were experiencing the night at different speeds.

Passers-by would go through space very quickly, as if to remain distant from the environment, like in a separate bubble. Having a destination in mind, the city street is a space of transition. The environment they cross on the way blurs altogether. They are usually people of the day. At night, you can sense passers-by becoming more distant. Is this distance taken subconsciously or on purpose? In the context of this walk, we were also passers-by. We would distinguish ourselves by confronting the usual distance taken by passers-by, trying to break from it, and interacting with the surrounding environment.

There were also workers going to or leaving work. Some seemed more hurried than others, but they distinguished from passers-by in how they appeared to interact with the environment. Even though they also go through space, they are part of that environment. They frequent it often and have a familiarity with their route, the people they cross, and the vitrines they pass. They themselves are also familiar with the environment in reciprocity. Contrary to the passers-by, they noticed the presence of our group. We, the unfamiliar, stood out from their usual experience of the night.

The people who inhabit the night are the ones who linger and experience the night at much lower speeds. From the perspective of a passer-by myself, especially during the day, they are the people who are ignored, who are discarded, and who become an invisible part of the city landscape. At night, it seems like the city becomes more theirs. Coming into their space/time, you feel like an intruder. Even though we were trying to break our distant position by interacting with people who frequent the night, we did not interact directly with this group. Having done this walk and reflecting on it, I now understand that it was simply out of place, like coming into someone’s privacy.

The beauty of this exercise appears in its simplicity. Although we only walked around 2-3 city blocks, the simple act of mindfully doing so allowed us to uncover precious observations. I will carry this lesson with me in future work.

Queering the Night Workshop

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:27:10 +0000

Queering the Night Workshop alexandre.nero… Mon, 02/05/2024 - 10:27

The second activity of our two-part Queering the Night events took place on Wednesday, November 29th, from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM. Set on the 5th floor of the MacDonald Harrington Building of Montreal’s 9I�� Campus, we queered the space throughout a drawing workshop. Among the 15 participants were architecture students, artists, newcomers to Montreal, and members of the Night-time Design with/for Marginalized Communities research group. The workshop was divided into two parts: the first focused on ideating and brainstorming, and the second on drawing and imagining.

The room configuration was important for the event’s success. It provided a sense of privacy and fostered togetherness. Participants were welcomed into the room with a single coat rack and snacks table, setting a warm and friendly atmosphere from the start. Movable screens were arranged around a long common table on which a scroll of paper was unrolled, with colored markers and post-its spread along its surface. Combined with the exposed roof trusses, the space felt intimate and convivial. The view of the sky, out of the dormer window, changed from day to night and referenced Queering the Night.

In the first part of the workshop, attendees were asked to reflect on what spaces of queer connections mean to them. They individually wrote down their ideas on post-its, which later came together during a group discussion that connected each person’s answers under common themes: Freedom, fantasy, play, art, discovery, security, (in)visibility, access, identity, community, solidarity, connection, chosen family, care, fun, pleasure, and bodies.

What do spaces of queer connections mean to you?

In the second round, we brainstormed on the challenges and opportunities of making inclusive spaces for our communities. Ex/inclusion, vulnerability, (dis)comfort, accessibility, support, mental health, neurodiversity, reliability, safe sex, sobriety, sustainability, third place, politics, finances, capitalism, rejection, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and ageism.

What are challenges and opportunities to make queer spaces inclusive?

Although thematic identifications were useful to orient and group reflections, the workshop’s richness was in the nuances of each multifaceted answer and the discussions they spurred.

After taking a small 5-minute break for snacks and socializing, we came back to smaller groups of 3 for drawing and imagining utopian spaces of queer connections. Using ideas and themes from the brainstorming as a foundation, each group was encouraged to imagine fantasy programs, activities, and spatial devices: Transformations, flexibility, specificity, proximity, temporalities, access, freedom, discovery, creativity, care, support, joy, beauty, growth, and nature.

What would be your utopian inclusive queer space?

In celebrating queerness through vivid discussions and creative envisioning, our workshop became a brief utopian haven of queer connections. The shared experiences and diverse perspectives brought fantastical realms to life, transforming the event space into a momentary celebration of queerness. Queering the night transcended the workshop, becoming a powerful, ongoing affirmation of the richness of our connections.

Scroll cropped

Cropped portion of the utopian space scroll.

Queering the Night Screening

alexandre.neron@mail.mcgill.ca — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 14:54:11 +0000

Queering the Night Screening alexandre.nero… Mon, 02/05/2024 - 09:54

On November 28, we gathered in 9I��’s Peel Street Cinema to watch three carefully selected films that focus on LGBTQ+ nightlife design, safety practices, and community-building. This was the first half of "Queering the Night", a captivating and thought-provoking two-part event that tackled a rather complicated question: what should the future of queer nighttime spaces look like? Through film, we wanted to provide insight into the historical and contemporary landscapes of LGBTQ+ nightlife and to offer a starting point for thinking about the challenges and potential of queering the night.

The event was curated by Research Assistant Iris Pintiuta, who organizes regular film screenings under the collective name Exposures, and was open to all students and community members. The centerpiece of the program was Wildness (2012), the first feature film by transgender artist Wu Tsang, a compelling documentary that focuses on the Silver Platter nightclub which has served as a hub for LA’s Latinx queer and trans communities since the early 1960s. The film focuses on the transformation the Silver Platter undergoes when it becomes the site of Wildness, a weekly party thrown by Chicago transplant Wu Tsang and their friends. This new party attracts young, white (though not exclusively) hipster city-dwellers, a demographic not typically hosted by the club. Although the popularity of Wildness leads to some devastating consequences for some of the bar’s old regulars, it also forces the bar’s splintered community to question and renegotiate its shared identity. The film takes us through the trajectory of Wildness at the Silver Platter, the legal activist work that emerged from it, and the uncertain future the Silver Platter has in the face of changing ownership, gentrification, and inner-community conflict.

We selected Wildness as part of our program because it challenges the popular notion that "safe spaces" are utopic and homogenous. The film reminds us that if these spaces are to function in reality, they must be risky and contested, even dangerous. Moreover, it draws attention to how difference impacts queer spaces, and how these differences can be felt along lines of race, class, ethnicity, locality, educational background, etc. There is a marked difference between the older, mainly trans femmes of color that patrons the Silver Platter, and the younger, artsy crowd that frequents Wildness. Having said that, the film showcases the potential for unity amid diversity too. The Silver Platter regulars and the new Wildness partygoers share a common desire for a safe haven away from mainstream scrutiny, necessitating a delicate balance of intergenerational needs.

The event continued with a screening of The Lesbian Bar Project, a short documentary supporting a broader initiative documenting the history of lesbian bars in America. In the 1980s, there were roughly 200 Lesbian Bars in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 30. Filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street established The Lesbian Bar Project as a rallying point to celebrate, support, and amplify the remaining lesbian bars, emphasizing their unique role in prioritizing space for marginalized genders, including cis and trans women, non-binary individuals, and trans men.

The event concluded Pxssy Palace, a short documentary by Laura Kirwan-Ashman that took the audience behind the scenes of the London club night of the same name, an event specifically designed for London's QTIPOC community. Kirwan-Ashman’s provided a contemporary lens into the resilience, creativity, and community-building within queer nightlife. It also underscored the historical significance of LGBTQ+ spaces and illuminated the ongoing challenges faced by queer communities of color.

As the lights dimmed in the Peel Street Cinema, "Queering the Night" achieved its goal of bridging the past and present of LGBTQ+ nightlife, and cultivating a space for rich conversations about the future of queer nighttime spaces. Beyond celebrating the resilience and creativity inherent in the history of queer nightlife, the event encouraged participants to actively contribute to shaping the trajectory of queer spaces, ensuring they remain vibrant, diverse, and resilient in the face of gentrification, increasing levels of transphobia, and other evolving challenges.