Inventing Greater Paris: Visual Culture, Regeneration and the Right to the Global City

'Inventing Greater Paris' works on and with socially engaged artists and arts organizations in Seine-Saint-Denis to explore the cultural politics of urban regeneration in this disadvantaged suburb. Principally, it examines the antagonism between the French state's regeneration programme, 'Grand Paris' - a large-scale strategy aimed at transforming Paris into a global megalopolis - and artistic practices that promote the 'right to the city' (Lefebvre 1968) by asserting the voice and visibility in public of socially marginalized groups. Launched in 2007, the Grand Paris programme aims to transform the capital on a scale unseen since Haussmann, and to reassert Paris's hegemony on the global city index by 2025. Central to this programme is the integration, through high-profile infrastructural projects, of suburban satellites, or 'banlieues', with the historical centre. In this context, Seine-Saint-Denis represents a particular challenge: the suburb constituted ground zero of the 2005 urban riots; it is the most heavily surveilled territory in France having housed the Jihadi terror cells responsible for the 2015 attacks on the city; it constitutes the poorest department in the country despite being part of the Europe's richest region (the Ile de France) and, finally, high unemployment, racism and police brutality have consolidated the suburb's image as space of 'threat' to the coherence of the Republic.
The site on mainland France most emblematic of the consequences of decolonization and deindustrialization for urban communities, Seine-Saint-Denis constitutes the project's locus as it here that issues of visibility, visual culture and spatial justice tangibly intersect. Firstly, the rehabilitation of this suburb is crucial to the success of the 'Grand Paris' project. Secondly, recent urban policy, seeking to counter Paris's reputation as a 'museum city', has identified the ethnic diversity and subcultural capital of this 'badland' as central to rebranding a globalized Paris. Given the interlinked drivers of the neoliberalism and integration, culture is at the forefront of state-led regeneration, but the promotion of 'creativity' raises significant questions around whose culture and in whose interests art and creativity operate. Socially engaged public art has a key role to play in articulating these antagonisms which are an expression, on the one hand, of state strategies that work to remake the city's image and, on the other, of localized struggles to make places that promote egalitarian and emancipatory forms of urban belonging.
Where analyses of urban regeneration typically focus on high-profile rebranding enterprises, this project innovates on current scholarship in two primary ways: firstly, in theorizing the relationship between urban policy, visual culture and community action, it positions Seine-Saint-Denis as a contested symbolic space, wherein creative practices reforge the meanings of spaces for communities and produce new bonds of social, political and cultural identification. Secondly, the project's critical impetus lies in reframing the question 'what do images say' to ask 'what can images do?' and how do art practices engage in constituting and contesting urban democracy, recognition, inclusivity within the context of large-scale regeneration? Setting a new research agenda, its value lies in its 'bottom-up' approach to understanding the monumental regeneration currently underway in Paris, exploring the possibilities for art to generate a new 'sense of place' (Agnew 1987). Working with artists and stakeholders across ten arts organizations, the project uses practice-based methods to produce a co-creative visualization, 'Affective Territories', while the project's monograph 'Inventing Greater Paris' explores how socially engaged art practices are remaking the meanings and materialities of the suburbs to suggest models for urban relations that empower marginalized communities in the global city.

'Inventing Greater Paris' is a project that problematizes conventional understandings of the banlieues as 'outsider', riotous or liminal zones, to focus on their centrality to the profound urban transformations underway in 21st-Century Paris. It is the first project of its kind to examine how the suburbs are being reimagined and regenerated through the large-scale state-led 'Grand Paris' project, and the considerable role played by artists in reordering the socio-spatial visibilities of these disadvantaged areas. Through its bottom-up approach to urban regeneration and its co-creative collaboration with artists, it will not only impact traditional academic understandings of Parisian urban space and of state-led regeneration more widely, but will also integrate community artists into its impact strategies.

These strategies target three main non-academic beneficiaries:

The first is public sector government agencies for whom a 3000-word bilingual report outlining the views and approaches of community artists to regeneration will be produced. The government-funded committee, the Atelier Parisien d'Urbanisme (APUR), the key working group dedicated to exploring the socio-cultural and environmental dimensions of Grand Paris projects and policy, have expressed a keen interest in the findings of such a report. This report will also be sent to dedicated members within local government, as well as to the Forum Métropolitain du Grand Paris - a major association of local municipalities who engage the public in debate on 'Grand Paris' planning initiatives.
The second main group of beneficiaries is arts associations whose practice coheres around working with marginalized communities. These associations will be targeted through the production of a bilingual website and a digital visualization, 'Affective Territories'. The website will collate around 30 associations' interventions in Grand Paris, serving as a central hub through which to connect individuals and collectives to one another and to their publics. Strategically organized around practice-based, embodied categories (seeing; walking; playing; building; tracing), the conceptual outline of this site has been developed to appeal both to activist associations (such as Synésthesie) as well as to global private-sector art and design organizations (such as BETC). Moreover the practice-led categorizations will serve to link different artistic communities not normally engaged with one another, for example artists working in local primary schools with those engaged in digital architectural practice. By providing a platform where such diverse practices can encounter one another, this website aims to foster innovative collaborative endeavours into the future.
The final key beneficiary is residents living in three strategic sites in Seine-Saint-Denis (the high-rise estates of Les Courtillières, Les 4000, and l'Etoile), which are the focus of government-led cultural and architectural regeneration. Engagement with these residents will be initiated through the co-creation of a visualization, 'Affective Territories', that works with artists to explore affective responses to regeneration in these sites. Residents will be invited to the screening of this work and to participate in the round-table event at 6B arts centre in July 2019 and sustained engagement encouraged by free access to the visualization on Vimeo.
All of these activities have been designed to facilitate debate on the role of art in regeneration and its potential to benefit vulnerable communities in advance of the 2024 Olympic Games and the World Expo in 2025, for which Grand Paris is a candidate. These major global events promise to impact on the socio-spatial dynamics of housing, visibility and accessibility in Seine-Saint-Denis and, therefore, it is imperative that we begin formulating critical frameworks to engage affected communities and explore creative alternatives to gentrification in advance of such events.