"The written record signed, sealed, and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were writen into large states and states were consolidated into empire."

Harold Innis, Empire and Communication, 1950

Paper, as a physical medium of space easily and rapidly transported through great distances, was one of the primary instruments in the expansion of the British empire. This mediatic expansion and the exploitation of its raw material, wood, have marked the territory of Quebec through deforestation and pollution—most patently in what we have called "resources regions". For a long time dominating the international newsmedia market, Quebec’s newsprint is now undergoing a prolonged period of crisis provoked by the rise of digital communications. At the molecular level, however, paper pulp has more recently been at the center of rising interests articulated around the promises of (nano)cellulose. Suddenly, with sprawling infrastructures of extraction already in place, resources regions could be reimagined at the forefront of the nanotechnology transition. Yet, climate change and the demographic decline of industrial cities require that we forgo a solely extractivist approach to economic development: we need both to care for and nurture our environment as well as ensure the diversification of jobs and activity sectors depending on it. Cellulose, approached under all of its scales and throughout its lifecycle, allows for the possibility of an ecosystem that would simultaneously incorporate the ecologies of the city, the industrial parc and the forest. This new ecosystem would act as a medium between these three ecologies, a "third space" within industrial cities often lacking it. The (re)mediating milieu of these polluted sites would then be transformed into a learning and research laboratory, a place of shared leisure and discovery allowing for the generation of new knowledges.

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