Abstract
Since its introduction in North America, the automobile has reshaped the economy, transformed the way people travelled around, changed urban landscapes, and been a powerful symbol of freedom, prosperity, and progress. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, this symbolism was seriously challenged. This article explores the process by which the car came to be perceived as an environmental risk in Montreal and the responses to manage this risk. It identifies two groups of social actors that were instrumental in shaping perceptions of the automobile as a risk – namely, municipal experts and an ensemble of five local environmental groups. Both actors believed that the environmental risks of the car were real dangers arising from modernity. While the municipal experts narrowly focused on the health risks of automobile pollution, which led to technical and technological solutions to reduce this risk, the environmental groups put forward a much broader critique of the place of the car in our culture, cognizant of the ways it magnified class, gender, and other inequalities. While they tried to transform the ways that we moved through cities, they also attempted to improve participatory democracy mechanisms to ensure the citizen’s right to participate in decisions that affected their environment. Hence, this article argues that the two groups’ vision of this risk and their responses were historically specific, in that each of them was anchored in, and shaped by, the groups’ knowledge, set of values, rationality, objectives, social position, and relation to power.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Subject
Religious studies,History
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