War of Streets and Houses

by Sophie Yanow, Tom Kaczynski (Editor)

2015 Doug Wright Spotlight Award Nomination Ignatz Award Nomination for Outstanding Graphic Novel An American artist witnesses the Quebec spring 2012 student strike on the streets of Montreal. The brutal police response and their violent tactics trigger an exploration of urban planning and its hidden connections to military strategies. Marshal Bugeaud’s urban warfare tactics in Algeria, Haussmann’s plan for Paris, planning and repression in the New World; theory and personal experience collide into an ambitious and poetic cartoon memoir. Sophie Yanow was born north of San Francisco in 1987. In 2011 she moved to Montreal, and with the Colosse collective published In Situ , her acclaimed autobiographical comics series. She was an invited artist- researcher for the Canadian Center for Architecture’s “C for Condo” workshop, and her work has been exhibited throughout the US and Canada. She lives in Montreal.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, Memoir, Architecture, Politics, Graphic Novels Comics

60 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2013

Reviews

[Jan Philipzig]

"YES IT'S FUCKING POLITICAL!!!," Skunk Anansie screamed back in 1996, and the song would make a great soundtrack for this little firecracker of a comic book. Yes, I enjoyed its brief guerilla-style reflections on the politics of youth and architecture and gender from a youthful queer perspective. Sure, it's all a bit random and sketchy and underdeveloped in both theoretical (urban planning, etc.) and practical (storytelling) terms, but that's also a big part of the book's charm: it feels fresh and spontaneous and energetic and urgent and rebellious - not a bad feeling at all!

[Dave Schaafsma]

This is short, more poetic than historical, as in you don't know exactly what all the issues are in this conflict, but there's a kind of poetic linking to Algeria, other political conflicts. It's more like a pastiche, a journal that evokes thoughts and feelings with respect to urban planning, rural vs urban space, white privilege, social change, youth movements…. But you know, with minimalist sketching and just as minimal verbal language, you get more of a feel for what it's like for her to be young, queer, politically inclined, etc than anything else. This feels "young" to me in that it asks more questions than anything else. The central impression is young people learning to push back against the cops, but why? What are the specific political issues involved? It's more about principles and inclinations, a sketchbook of that… but it's attractively sketched and sort of interesting as a way of raising some issues, it's evocative. I'm not saying I wanted it to be a detailed guidebook to youth political action or urban planning or a specific argument; I just felt it was a little too sketchy for what it seemed to want to set out to do, especially for something 70 pages….

[Maia]

In this slim memoir comic, Yanow reflects on living in Montreal in the early 2010s during a period of student riots and police retaliation. Yanow bikes around the city, intending to attend protests but often missing them or backing out from fear of violence or deportation. Conversations with friends lead into introspection on urban planning and the militarization of cities, including the French invasion of Algiers in 1840, after which a French Marshal wrote a pamphlet on how to destroy and overcome civilian barricades. This book has little plot and no conclusions, but has stirred up thoughts I keep returning to.

[Oriana]

Oh whoa, how cool is this? A nonfic graphic novel about urban planning by a queer chick from Montreal! Yes yes yes.

Here's a Q&A with her on Atlantic Cities, in case you need further encouragement.

[Amy]

I've wanted to read this book for a very long time: Yanow's experiences of being a Northern Californian in Canada, fear of deportation when attending protests, missing nature in the midst of the big city all spoke to my own experiences as a Canadian living in Southern California. Similar to her experiences participating in the Spring 2012 student protests in Montreal, I've been reflecting on my own positionality as an outsider during the racial justice/ George Floyd uprisings erupting around the United States in Summer 2020, and ongoing evictions blockades and housing/anti-rent related protests.

Yanow intersperses her own experiences being in the protests with some of her meditations on the history of urban planning and architecture as tools of oppression. Her sparse, simple lines are particularly effective at spotlighting Montreal's brutalist architecture, and Yanow muses about Haussman's involvement in transforming Paris between moments in the protest, as she stares up at imposing Montreal buildings (Haussman's redesign of Paris gave the city its distinctive boulevards-- but was also intentionally built to discourage protest and congregation of "the people"-- something that he felt particularly compelled to do after similar North African projects).

Yanow's book is very simply illustrated, but sometimes jarring in its disjointedness. At times, the book leapt quite drastically between her reflections in Montreal to her meditations on Haussman and architecture-- but I also saw that as the nature of living and participating through moments of upheaval, and in societies becoming increasingly overpoliced. Yanow described her experiences of being kettled (when police trap protestors in an enclosed place like an alley by lining themselves up) and I remembered that one of the first things my partner spoke about after returning from a protest was the visceral feeling of being closed in on. Our thoughts don't always form smooth, logical narratives when we experience moments of potential trauma.

The book ends with Yanow and her friends at the farm, speaking about the protests as if they were far away, long before. I see some sisterhood between War of Streets and Houses with Eleanor Davis' The Hard Tomorrow: both feature characters involved in the movement, protesting, and reflecting on the ramifications. Both end in relatively peaceful moments, with memories of these protests far behind them, and perhaps reflect how many people in the mainstream eventually let go of the movements that they were initially committed to (for a variety of different reasons). It echoes the ways in which many of the racial justice protests from earlier this year are spoken of in the mainstream-- as moments that have taken place in the past. The real work comes in keeping them front and center long after people have gone home--which is the more difficult task at hand.

[Rod Brown]

I picked this book off the new graphic novels shelf at one of my local libraries, mostly because it was thin and would be a quick read. I plucked it off my to-read shelf before bedtime and didn't even glance at the description on the back before I started reading. I fell asleep ten minutes into it, about halfway through. In the morning I started reading again and realized I didn't really understand the point of this book from what I had read so far, so I read the first paragraph on the back cover. It's set during a 2012 student strike in Montreal and examines how modern city planning is intended to thwart citizen uprisings and revolutions, giving tactical advantages to the police and military. Huh. Well that seemed interesting, and indeed the second half of the book starting touching on the architecture stuff. But as in the first half of the book, the writing and art were so sketchy I felt as if I were reading a rough thumbnail guide or outline of what could have been an interesting graphic novel. It was a disappointing mix of moments, vignettes and memories that didn't make me care about the protagonist, the strike, or Montreal. The Notes section at the book's end, hinted at how much potential the author had squandered as far as the city planning/citizen suppression information. Finally, to demonstrate either how little I engaged with the book or how poorly the author executed it, after I finished reading the book I read the second paragraph on the back cover and only then realized that the protagonist of the book had been female. I had not picked up on that from the story or the art.

[Phobean]

My two favorite aspects of this graphic novel about a student strike in Canada (I think), are the title and the cover. What's within . . . I'm not sure I understood. I enjoyed the art --spare, geometric, compelling in its black, gray and white. Otherwise, I really, really could NOT figure out what was going on, and barely understood which character I was looking at. There's a sense of danger (police violence, young adults getting thrown in jail) and also a fair amount of ennui, but trying to figure out what was happening from panel to panel --nope. (At one point, there's a bunch of young adults on vacation, kicking around what I think is a cabbage while they talk. Kinda hard to feel bad for students on vacation playing with cabbages. Even THEY'RE ambivalent, as stated in one panel "I mean I'm just not sure a bunch of privileged queers on a farm creates systematic change--") Still, the novel is a small enough and handsome enough book to keep around, which is good, because I own it.

[Cait]

Looking back from atop the smoking wreckage of 2020, this book seems all the more urgent and applicable. I first read this back around when it was first published and Yanow's thoughts on the intersection of architecture and politics have undeniably helped plot a course for and shape my own thinking in the intervening years. It was good to revisit it and recharge.

In the same vein as her later work in "What is a Glacier?" and "The Contradictions" Yanow examines the political via the personal. Larger events echo down into her personal life and we track the student protests through her fractured experience, sometimes at the front lines, sometimes far removed from the action. It's a book that presents a lot of hard questions and interesting thoughts on staging a revolution in an environment designed to suppress them.

[Nicolas Lontel]

Une courte BD intéressante pour des réflexions sur les liens entre l'urbanisme et la répression politique, appliquée à Montréal pendant la grève étudiante de 2012 avec la violence policière, en référence à la répression qui été facilitée à Alger et à Paris par les design d'urbanistes comme Thomas Robert Bugeaud et Georges Eugène Haussmann. Le propos est fascinant et intéressant, on en apprend quand même beaucoup (et il est intéressant de lire les notes de fin d'ouvrage), mais le dessin n'était pas au niveau où je m'attendais et à certains endroits je ne comprenais pas trop ce que je voyais (pp.40-41) alors qu'à d'autres (pp.54-55) le rendu était vraiment meilleur.

[Grg]

Beautiful and expressive comic book about how cities are designed to quell protests and unrest, with an interesting afterthought about why we live in cities in the first place when the countryside is so much more pleasant.

[Amber]

Interesting exploration of the intersection of resistance, state violence and suppression, imperialist architectural history, and the ennui of youth. There was a poetry to it - meaning found in between the lines in the expansive white spaces.

[Alex Kudera]

Touches upon some Foucault and other ideas that interest me but quite spare. . . sounds like In Situ is the one to read from this artist.

[Charlotte Haq]

I loved this! So different from what I typically read, but beautifully done and with a good political narrative

[Alexander]

Revolution, privilege-checking, urban planning, the overlap between Algeria, Paris and Quebec. I have a lot of extra homework to do from the first read of this book, but I'm glad I already started reading even the smallest bit about Algeria. As I'm not Canadian, there might be some people out there who might be able to better engage with the narrative around the student strike, which I frankly hadn't heard about until I decided to pick this up (reading this, I had to look up more about it, it has a kind of 'you had to be there' vibe). But there's so much to confront and think about with this book as far as the politics and the theory it touches on. I'm glad the author was able to use their identity (specifically, acknowledging their privilege when discussing things with other students) to clarify how their perspective could be challenged by the diversity of the movement rather than ignore it and just smooth out the uncomfortable parts - Maybe acknowledging that they're seeing things from a position of relative safety? Again, I have no idea about their experience, so I don't want to make assumptions.

I'm reminded for some reason of when Camus, a French Algerian, tried to write about a moderate solution to the war there; he was reviled because his ideas were too compromising while his peers, from a detached position, readily took sides on life-and-death matters that more directly affected Camus. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...). Maybe I'm conflating things.

[Rohan]

War of Streets and Houses is a memoir(?) that flits between three different times - Yanow's childhood in rural California, her time as a student in Montréal during the 2012 Quebec student protests, and the aftermath of the protests. Yanow uses her architectural training to observe how urban planning and design is used to control, suppress and quash protest in a Foucaultian manner. This commentary is overlaid with her hesitance to take part in the protests (she fears deportation), with an abridged history lesson of how the French general Bugeaud suppressed Algerian resistance by turning the country's cities' architecture against their forces, and with a reflection on how Haussmann modernised Paris, leaving it soulless and banal. Though the book is very short (around 60 pages) and can be flipped through in around 10 minutes, it's quite dense. A couple of pages at the end provide references for further exploration of topics mentioned in passing earlier. The artwork is gorgeous. Bordering on the abstract, it still manages to convey a lot of emotion. Yanow plays with the 6-panel format; her drawings often extend over several panels — sometimes the entire page spread — but always the panel grid remains in place, conspicuous even when it's being defied.

After I finished the book, I immediately re-read it.

[Loki]

It's interesting, but ultimately rather superficial. It's been praised as an examination of the modern police practice of kettling and also of urban design (and the interaction between the two), but in truth, it's barely an introduction to either concept. (A failing I would be more forgiving of had it provided a bibliography.)

The art work is simple, yet expressive - it reminded me a little of the art of Andi Watson, although not as refined.

[Coralie]

Not very thought provoking, but I found the contemplation as to how space plays a role into shaping our lives interesting. Its main fixation is upon this rebellious spirit of upheld systems. However, in my opinion, it is not nuanced enough.

"Landmarks, irregularities tell you where you are." (55)
"We can do with space whatever we like. Dilute the 'purity of the form'. Uphold it. Scale may play a role. In the end, it's a question of ownership."(61)

[Jessica Lewis]

I got this book hoping it would shed a first-person account on the student strikes in Montreal, but what it really came down to was an observation of white privilege and urban planning. I read it in about 20 minutes.

[Patrick Tierney]

One of the more interesting architecture books I've read in a long time. It asks the right questions in the right tone.

[Liz Yerby]

whoa

[Nicolas]

3,5/5
Quick read en un trajet d’autobus.
Un court flirt plutôt qu’une véritable entrée en matière sur les questions relatives à l’urbanisme comme stratégie et à la production de l’espace. Je choisis de croire que c’est une intention délibéré, visant à ne pas trahir l’aspect poétique du récit. J’ai l’intuition que l’autrice est familière avec les théories de l’espace et la géographie dite radicale (Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey et cie), la politique urbaine du baron Haussmann, les grid cities et tout cela, même si l’incursion est brève et timide. Mais il ne s’agit pas d’un essai alors pourquoi être si sévère? Fun read overall quand même !

On doit en retenir une chose: la ville est le lieu de toutes les contingences.

[M]

In thin, squiggly lines, alternating between crowded and simple planes, Sophie Yanow tells us a blended story of urban theory, activist protest, and personal involvement, starting from the Montreal student protests and involving meditations on the oppressive architecture of cities and the military conquest in Algiers. It reads quickly but opens up questions about architecture and military infrastructure, and especially about the ways in which modern cities are designed, in part, with the intent to crush protests and civil disobedience. It's kind of like a graphic essay, so quite interesting in that regard. I read the Romanian version, published at Dezarticulat.

[len]

touches on a lot of stuff i resonated with (like moving from a rural small town to a city to find more community as a queer person; becoming more involved in protests & activism for different socio-political movements) and stuff i have been thinking about lately (occupation of indigenous lands, the architecture of oppression, the privileged dream of leaving urban areas to find solitude in the countryside) + La Haine is a great film!!

love the abstraction of the images and the placement of the text, it fit well with the ideas about mapping & urban planning/design. i just wish it was longer! there were so many great concepts, but as soon as i got excited about them the story ended

[Athena]

I really like Sophie Yanow's drawing style -- angular, spare, all lines and space. Feels like the illustration equivalent of post-punk music. The book overall is OK. It reads like Yanow kept a diary while taking an undergrad class on cities and revolution and going to her first big protest. It's a disjointed assemblage of narrative bits, focused on observing cops discipline protestors, and reading notes from urban theory/history. Seems like the superficial sweep of the macro and the micro has led readers to infer more complexity than is actually there.

[Maria]

panoplie de réflexions illustrées maladroitement (les plans avaient un style cool, mais les gens…… bof) par une artiste intéressée par l’architecture. je trouvais ses pensées intéressantes, mais faut vraiment les prendre comme telles, car elles ne sont pas super poussées (je n’appellerai pas ce livre un essai). ce fut une petite lecture agréable faite par hasard qui coïncide avec un projet d’uni en architecture.

[Minjeong]

A graphic novel that places young, queer, rebellious student protesters in a cityscape that feels larger than human scale and reminiscent of urban planning done by oppressive colonialists.

The loose sketchy style and loose associations among various historic events helped me step into the author’s experience in Montreal and learn new things about the history of urban planning in Algeria and Paris.

[Julie Gagné]

Lu la traduction française ("La guerre des rues et des maisons). Si on n'a pas vécu la grève étudiante de 2012, on comprends rien au récit puisqu'il n'y a pas de mise en contexte... Sauf à la toute fin, dans les notes. Ça n'a pas été un problème pour moi puisque j'étais étudiante en 2012. Par contre, j'ai quand même trouvé ça un peu "meh" vu qu'il n'y a pas vraiment de début ni de fin; on dirait le chapitre au milieu d'une autre bd.

[C.S. Malerich]

Giving this only three stars feels like damning with faint praise, but it's really such a simple little volume with easy, relaxed artwork, that it's more of a nibble than a feast. But a really good nibble--a meditation on the way urban planning is used to confine, police, and control. And yet escape to the countryside doesn't always work. Could easily be the belle of any Zinefest.

[Visola]

I was having a hard time getting into this graphic novel. It's about ½ back story and build up to understanding what's happening without ever being concrete. The other ½ though is this lovely tapestry of anarchist influence, life and building. It's amazing and happy making.

[Tom Scott]

Participation in a student strike leads to an investigation and meditation on how, historically, those in power have occupied and conquered spaces. The writing is airy, often poetic, and takes about an hour to read. It's an intriguing hybrid of autobio, history, and theory. Read it!