| Following Foucault's and other's line of inquiry into the modern forms of governementality (Foucault, 1984), this thesis consists in an analytics of the current regime of liberal government of the circulation of people and goods in Montreal. It shows that two events primarily inform the problematization through which this regime is organized. The first is the installation, in the mid 1940's, of a problematization centered on the automobile as the predominant mode of circulation within the city. The second is the questioning of four dimensions one of the privileged solutions put forth to act on this circulation: the highway grid. My analysis of this second event shows that it has participated in the installation of four "discursive lines of force" (Hall, 1996) which current actors in the field must negotiate in order to be "in the true". (1) A tension between capacity and fluidity, whereby an addition of capacity is said to be posing the danger of causing more congestion. (2) A specific regime of distribution of the population and its activities which carries the threefold objective to consolidate the downtown core, to "revitalize" the old central and "pericentral" neighborhoods and to augment the density of the suburbs. (3) A citizen "expert of its home environment", which poses as legitimate and competent a non-profesionnal subject of discourse that can question expert's power-knowledges. (4) A montrealness, that is an identitaire of the city, which has at its core a built environment that is said to sustain a specific way of life.;Keywords: problematization, governmentality, liberalism, population, milieu, discourse analysis, mobility, identitaire, way of life, citizenship/expertise... |
