Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City

The street yearns for action nobler than traffic.

Leonard Cohen Montreal 1964

Most canadians depend on a Car, Truck, or Bus for everyday travel 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 ecological 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 understandings 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.

This narrative approach to urban planning highlights the multiplicity of traffic and the agency of material infrastructure (see Latour). By foregrounding the different voices of streets, I aim to defamiliarize the habitual voice of automobility. In contrast to modernization cum motorization narratives which follow a teleological plot line, the stories that streets tell from different temporal and spatial perspectives have the potential to disrupt a natural, apolitical culture of car-dependence. The mobilities literature that I will rely on argues that buildings, roads, and other kinds of places gain meaning through the ways in which they carry or constrict the flows of subjects, ideas, and objects. It views streets as sociotechnical ensembles of tarmac, electricity, hydrocarbons, values, juridical systems, and habitus. Built for particular bodies and machines, streets evoke the discursive and political construction of traffic alongside hard infrastructure.

After situating traffic within mobilities and narrative approaches to planning, I follow the stories of five prominent streets in Canada’s capital city. Ottawa represents a strategic case study of mobility and planning. Like Canberra, Brasilia, and New Delhi, Ottawa is a living product of muscular, modernist planning of the last century which equated national progress with mass automobility. To a greater degree than other 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 relational “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, developmentese, 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, capitalist spatial restructuring, migration and immigration, citizenship and 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 transport geography and engineering geared toward maximizing the economic efficiency and productivity of movement. Cresswell usefully distinguishes mobility from movement as one might...