Like Lyon, Montreal has, over recent decades, established itself as an event-driven and festive city — hosting numerous celebrations and festivals. Yet festivity, like everything else, is political: for whom are these glittering times and spaces created? What processes of spatial and social exclusion are activated during these urban events? How might we make the festive city inclusive? These questions framed the 2025 edition of the Entretiens Jacques-Cartier, an annual interdisciplinary forum established in 1987 that brings together academics, business leaders, policymakers, and cultural actors from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (France), Québec, and the Canadian Francophonie to debate major societal and scientific issues.
The event took place on October 6, 2025 and was hosted by Lou Herrmann and Valérie Disdier, co-founders of Cité Anthropocène — a Lyon-based non-profit association committed to mobilizing society, science, and the arts in response to the socio-environmental upheavals of the Anthropocene — at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSA Lyon). Both the McGill University and Université de Montréal (UdeM) teams were invited to participate. Representing the McGill University team, I presented reflections on night-time realities for marginalized communities, while Jean-Pierre Chupin and Laurène Smith, respectively professor and master’s student representing UdeM, discussed notions of quality in festive events and processes.
The study day was structured around two sessions: the morning examined spatial and social exclusion in urban festivities, while the afternoon explored strategies for fostering inclusion. More than 75 participants attended — including students, faculty, association members, city staff, and researchers. This cross-sectoral composition was also reflected among the panelists, in line with the partnership’s objective to foster dialogue and mutual “contamination” across disciplines and practices.
The event offered a clear view of the landscape of inclusion in France. Florie Bresteaux (Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva, focusing on the inclusion of people with disabilities) presented the Paris Olympics/Paralympics, while Julien Pavillard (Director of Events and Animation for the City of Lyon) discussed the Lyon Fêtes des Lumières. Municipal bodies often portray accessibility as a first step toward inclusion. However, as noted by Florie Bresteaux during the event, “By prioritizing accessibility, we risk neglecting participation.” Accessibility — sometimes approached purely from a marketing perspective — can obscure the need for meaningful engagement. Accessible events with unequal participation are common, particularly due to oversimplified categorizations of people with diverse and intersecting situations and identities.
Building on that discussion of accessibility, a key takeaway was the challenge of including everyone: as more specific categories are considered, some groups are inevitably overlooked For example, elderly people and children are often neglected in architectural design and planning except in those facilities that are specifically for them such as schools and playgrounds for children. Many presenters emphasized the over-fragmentation of categories, which rarely reflect lived identities. Can a single space ever be truly welcoming to all? Attempts to over specify risk creating new norms that inadvertently exclude others. Some of the afternoon’s interventions by Jean-Pierre Chupin and Antoine Trollat (Architect and cofounder of Looking For Architecture) highlighted the importance of integrating lived experience — in both research and practice — into the creation of festive spaces. Yet this focus on individual experiences can be in tension with the need to develop collective approaches toward a just and equitable city.
During the discussion, I argued that preserving and respecting existing spaces, reorganizing temporal access to infrastructure, and redistributing resources are crucial — yet these points did not resonate strongly in the room. Recognizing when not to act or disrupt is vital but often overlooked. It was only in the afternoon that Pascale Bonniel Chalier (Teacher of Cultural Policy at ENSATT and Regional Counsellor for Auvergne Rhône-Alpes) reiterated that so-called “inclusive festivities” can, in fact, produce harm or destruction.
My reflections focused on surveillance, the instrumentalisation of design, hostile architecture, and the lack of services for marginalized communities, including unhoused individuals, Indigenous communities, sex workers, and night-shift workers in Montreal. These reflections resonated with Louana Lattanzi (Anthropology student and member of the Karnaval Solidaire student association), who organizes safe festive spaces for women and gender-diverse individuals through harm reduction, prevention of sexual and gender-based violence, and shared values grounded in care.
Our exchanges revealed tensions and contradictions around the notion of “safety.” Punitivist approaches were debated, and I was surprised that some participants and speakers at the event still consider chosen non-mixed spaces as exclusionary. This perspective often reflects a broader societal entitlement to 'feeling safe'—one that can obscure the structural roots of violence. In contexts marked by systemic racial, sexual, gender, and class-based violence, marginalized groups need spaces where they can experience safety and solidarity among peers.
In my presentation, I offered a path of reflection: rather than focusing on “inclusivity,” a concept often tokenized, could we reimagine spaces grounded in mutual aid, care, and solidarity? Participants engaged with the idea of “Decolonizing the Night,” which resonates differently in France given its historical relationship with citizen groups from formerly colonized countries compared to Quebec with its distinct historical relationship to Indigenous peoples. Rethinking the relationship between occupants and visitors may also help question the role of festivals and urban spaces in relation to distinct forms of coloniality in our present.
Pascale Bonniel Chalier proposed moving beyond inclusion toward the concept of habitabilité, extending the framework to encompass land and natural systems. Her intentions were clear, but the concept itself remained somewhat ambiguous. Although this perspective aligns with frameworks stemming from decolonial thought, I remain critical of such discourse: framing habilitability primarily as an ecological issue risks reproducing social inequalities.
Temporality was also discussed as an opportunity. According to Laurène Smith, the ephemerality of the festive city makes it an ideal research ground, allowing for the testing of new, more creative forms of inclusion and enabling iterative improvements from year to year. In our own McGill University-based project, this translates into recognizing the night as a key temporal dimension in urban governance and planning. Temporality can indeed be an opportunity — but it remains essential to ask who benefits from the urban spaces being created.
Finally, while the study day provided an invaluable opportunity to compare realities, case studies, and approaches to the festive city across Quebec and France, it also revealed many contradictions and tensions. As Jean-Pierre Chupin noted, inclusion always implies the existence of a “centre” to which people must conform to participate. Perhaps, then, there is also a need to unlearn — to confront spaces with radical thought — so that we may collectively imagine a more just and caring city.