Article ID: CBB288892399

The Big Flush of Montreal: On affective maintenance and infrastructural events (2023)

unapi

This article is about a brief controversy that erupted in 2015 around the City of Montreal’s plan to divert 8 billion liters of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River while it conducted critical maintenance on its sewer infrastructure. In the end, though, the Flush was non-eventful: It went ahead as planned and with no lasting effects or complaints. We suggest that the best way to understand how the City averted the crisis is through the concept of ‘affective maintenance’. If infrastructures are meant to be uneventful (i.e. narratively stable and generally lacking in surprise ruptures) then the maintenance of public affect is as important to their functioning as the physical work that keeps sewage flowing in the right direction.

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Authors & Contributors
Hird, Myra J
Carse, Ashley
Dagenais, Michèle
Jeon, Chihyung
Krebs, Stefan
Kuyvenhoven, Cassandra
Journals
Environmental History
Business History Review
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology
Journal of Historical Geography
Publishers
MIT Press
Cornell University Press
Duke University Press
McGill-Queen's University Press
Transcript
UBC Press
Concepts
Waste disposal
Infrastructure
Environment
Rivers
Urban planning
Water resource management
People
Latour, Bruno
Marres, Noortje
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
20th century, late
Medieval
Places
Canada
Japan
Tokyo (Japan)
Ontario (Canada)
Panama
Asia
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