A paper in the journal Social Studies of Science describes the importance that affective maintenance had in managing a sewage system controversy in the City of Montreal, Canada in 2015, according to Concordia University’s Patrick Lejtenyi.
That year, referred to by news outlets at Montreal’s Big Flush, the City of Montreal announced that serious repairs were needed to the municipal sewage system. To carry out critical maintenance work, eight billion liters of raw sewage were to be diverted into the St. Lawrence River over a 70-hour period in mid-November. The outcry from environmentalists, aquatic sports fans, residents and media was sustained for months. Nevertheless, after countless arguments in public and at City Hall, photo ops of the mayor in a hazmat suit, spats with federal authorities and the convening of a panel of scientists, the diversion proceeded as planned with no lasting ill effects on the health of the river.
Kregg Hetherington, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology in Concordia University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and PhD student Élie Jalbert had published the paper examining the incident through the lens of what they call “affective maintenance.”
If infrastructure is meant to be uneventful in the public eye, then the maintenance of public reactions is as important as the maintenance of sewage management itself. In the paper, they describe affective maintenance as a set of practices that “includes disqualifications of counterarguments, populist appeals that reorient emergent publics and deferrals and delegations to expert knowledge.”
“You could see the administration of then-mayor Denis Coderre play it out in real time,” Hetherington recalls. “The first step is to just say there’s nothing to see here, everything is fine, and then deploy those narrative strategies. When that didn’t quite work, there was a populist attempt to say well, now that everybody is interested in sewers, everybody ought to take responsibility for them. Hence Coderre going down into the sewers in a hazmat suit, to show himself as one of the people rather than as a removed technocrat. That backfired, and there was a host of scatological memes afterwards. That was followed by a back and forth with the federal environment minister, who had issues of her own, and finally the convening of a panel of experts telling us that this is the right thing to do.”
Expert advice didn’t add anything new to the conversation, but diluted criticism and bought the city time until the work was done and public attention moved on, according to the paper.
Better unseen
The study grew out of a project Hetherington began developing in 2017 that examines social encounters that Montrealers have with water.
“The event was still fresh in people’s minds but nobody in our group really understood what had actually happened,” he says. “This research project began with the desire to dig into it, and it turned out to be a story that was full of characters that seeped into Montreal politics in a bunch of different, interesting ways.”
Infrastructure, he points out, works best when a city’s population does not think about it. When it does enter the public imagination, it is rarely good for municipal authorities, particularly in Montreal. At the time of the Big Flush, the Charbonneau Commission into the construction industry was just wrapping up, after laying bare systemic corruption in the way municipal construction contracts were managed.
But the event also serves as a warning for the way climate change will change the relationship that Montreal — like every other city — has with water.
“We’re going to be much more aware of our sewers over the next couple of decades as we experience increased precipitation and flooding,” he notes. “I think the Big Flush stands as one of those moments where light bulbs went off for some people about how the city is built and how it is being managed.”
