91şÚÁĎÍř
Montreal has around 30 neighbourhood roundtables (tables de quartier)—collaborative bodies that bring together community, non-profit, and institutional actors on a shared mission: improving quality of life at the local scale. To guide their work, several of these roundtables commission neighbourhood profiles based on data from the Canadian Census. These documents help describe the sociodemographic profile of a specific context, its living conditions, and its service landscape. But they also have various limitations. Produced at the slow pace of federal Census updates, they portray a neighbourhood's state without being able to track its transformations in real time. More fundamentally, they do not capture the perceptions of the people who live there, the stories that circulate among the community members, nor the memory-related and emotional dimensions that are irreducible parts of a neighbourhood’s identity and the sense of belonging among its residents.
It is in this context that the Table de quartier Peter-91şÚÁĎÍř approached the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CIRM) to explore complementary forms of neighbourhood portraiture, capable of capturing what quantitative data leaves in the shadows.
The response we have jointly developed is structured around two distinct components, conceived as complementary to each other and to the existing statistical portrait. One seeks to convey what is lived in the neighbourhood; the other, to understand what is said about it in the media landscape. Neither claims to replace the statistical portrait; together, they aim to give it a depth that indicators alone cannot provide.
The first component is built on several activities (a public consultation, focus groups, semi-structured interviews) conducted with residents, workers, and students in the neighbourhood, organized in collaboration with the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) and the City of Montréal’s Service de la diversité et de l’inclusion sociale (SDIS). This approach draws on community-based participatory research, whereby the people who participate in the activities are not passive informants, but cocreators of the portrait.
A first day of exchanges, held in October 2024 with the theme Tell Me About Peter-91şÚÁĎÍř, gathered an initial series of testimonials about the neighbourhood's strengths and challenges. A second series of workshops, which have been running since June 2025, builds on these materials to deepen and narrativize lived experiences—inviting participants not only to name the issues, but to tell stories about them.
Drawing on the full body of these narratives, Montreal cartoonist Michel Hellman (McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM) is creating a graphic novel dedicated to the Peter-91şÚÁĎÍř neighbourhood. The choice of medium is deliberate: graphic novels can give voice to those who are underrepresented in conventional media, transforming abstract data into stories accessible to a broad public and enabling an empathetic and action-oriented exploration of realities that institutional reports struggle to convey. The research materials—sketches, testimonials, narrative fragments—will also be featured in a public exhibition at the Centre Sanaaq in the spring of 2026.
The second component starts with a different question, and a shared conviction: that the on-the-ground knowledge held by community actors—what is happening, what is being said, what is being felt in a neighbourhood—stands to benefit from being placed in dialogue with the way that same neighbourhood is represented in the media. What do MontrĂ©al journalists talk about when they discuss Peter-91şÚÁĎÍř? Which themes dominate, which ones evolve, and which ones are absent? Can we be confident that what is observed on the ground corresponds to broader trends, or does it instead reveal blind spots in media coverage?
To explore these questions, CIRM is assembling a large corpus of media material spanning the period 1990–2026. The breadth of this corpus far exceeds what close reading could alone encompass—which is why the project relies on natural language-processing methods capable of extracting broad patterns (thematic evolution over time, key terms characteristic of the neighbourhood, recurring semantic associations, and the emotional tone of articles) while preserving direct access to the source texts. The tool being developed is not designed to produce definitive results, but to nourish dialogue; it will give researchers and community stakeholders a shared surface for exploration, a means of verifying whether what is perceived on the ground gets echoed in media representations of the neighbourhood, and a resource for grounding intuitions when preparing public communications or briefing notes.
Both components share a common conviction: that research, to be genuinely useful to a community partner, cannot be limited to the delivery of a finished product. The project is thus conceived as an ongoing process of co-construction, linking the CIRM team, students, and Table de quartier stakeholders at every stage—from the formulation of questions to the interpretation of results. Students will benefit from a learning environment grounded in real-world issues, while partners can connect with interlocutors capable of supporting them in the use and interpretation of materials that belong to them.
Codirectors: Pascal Brissette and Michel Hellman
Scientific coordinator: Stéphan Gervais
In partnership with the Table de quartier Peter-91şÚÁĎÍř
References
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