“The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry”.[1]
Introduction: Artists and the Banlieue in Paris’s Collective Imagination
Paris’s artistic heritage, willingness to invest in public infrastructure, and urban-rural divide make it a unique case study in larger debates surrounding creative city marketing and sustainable development projects. Ever since the popularization of the capitalist art market in the 19th century, Parisian artists have largely remained embedded within the middle and working-class milieu. Liberated from the preceding system of aristocratic patronage, living and working in this new urban context were seen as “the basis of recognition for the professional artist” in the 19th century.[2] Paris remained the world’s artistic capital until the mid-20th century, and the presence of artists largely defined certain neighborhoods across Paris, from Montparnasse to Montmartre. This period is thus closely entwined with the development of urban bohemianism, a concept now associated with the artist enclaves of lower Manhattan in the late 20th century and the popular redefinition of Brooklyn in recent years.[3]
The French federal government has maintained a commitment to invest in the arts industry since the end of World War II. Established in 1959, the Ministry of Culture enacted major programs like the un pour cent z law, forcing one percent of the budget of all new public buildings to be directed towards the purchasing or commissioning of new French artworks.[4] The Ministry also enacted a project to construct Maisons de la culture where the public and highbrow art met by building cultural amenities such as libraries, theaters, and cinemas in small towns across France.[5] In Noisy-le-Sec, a town in the Seine-Saint-Denis département outside Paris, basic commercial services such as food stores and late-night cafés are disappearing, yet the town’s contemporary arts center and cinema remain successful.[6] This phenomenon exemplifies what Sandrine Mahieu describes as the French state’s “notion of cultural exception.”[7] Even while federal spending has shifted towards an austerity model over the past three decades, government-funded support of culture remains an essential part of the French identity. The federal government’s direct and continuing involvement in local centers of cultural production differentiates France’s arts policy from that of other capitalist countries, especially considering their continued support for the arts in the face of economic downturn or in otherwise stigmatized areas, like the banlieue.
Paris has long been organized in a center-periphery manner, separating the city’s 20 urban districts from its suburbs: the walls formerly surrounding Paris were destroyed after the first World War and replaced by the Boulevard Périphérique freeway completed in 1973. The Périphérique represents a physical and administrative border between the city of Paris and the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). There are dozens of small banlieues surrounding Paris, organized into three larger administrative zones: Hauts-de-Seine, Val-de-Marne, and Seine-Saint-Denis. Although there are a range of economic outcomes in the Parisian banlieues (fig. 1), the word has grown to take a pejorative meaning in France. “Banlieue” immediately conjures a specific image: an area of concentrated social decay, a segregated population of unassimilated immigrants, and aging, brutalist housing blocks called grands ensembles (fig. 2). This negative image was most notably aggravated by the riots of 2005, sparked by the accidental death of two innocent youths running from the police in Clichy-sous-Bois—a commune of Seine-Saint-Denis.
Despite the stigmatization of the banlieue, artists and cultural institutions are increasingly taking root outside the city due to the increasing unaffordability of the central city and the development of Paris’s extensive commuter rail system. This essay aims to identify the complex role art spaces play in the northern area of the Seine-Saint-Denis département, caught between larger narratives of socio-spatial stigmatization and city redevelopment objectives in the area.
Methodology
This essay begins with a wider background of Seine-Saint-Denis and then focuses on culture-led redevelopment policies in an area of Seine-Saint-Denis called the Plaine Commune. I particularly focus on the Plaine Saint-Denis area, an area lying between three towns (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, and Aubervilliers) just north of Paris. A city redevelopment plan named “Grand Paris” recently earmarked the Plaine area as a creative production cluster, further highlighting this zone as an essential case study when considering artist spaces and redevelopment initiatives in the Paris banlieues.
I conducted research in academic journals and online media, complimenting this with walks through the aforementioned neighborhoods and an interview with artists at Le Houloc, an artist-run studio space in Aubervilliers. My research took on a wide scope, aiming to find intersections between narratives of city rebranding, artist geographies, gentrification, and social mixing throughout Paris. However, it is necessary to mention that a substantial amount of research and media attention regarding these subjects is conducted in French and not available in English, which somewhat limited the scope of my findings.
Finally, the essay provides the framework for a further look at this subject matter. With ongoing debates surrounding sustainable redevelopment strategies currently occurring in most major cities, I believe a more detailed study in this vein would be worthwhile.
Effects of Globalization in Seine-Saint-Denis
Socio-Spatial Segregation and Stigmatization of the Banlieue
Immediately following World War II, France experienced an exodus of its rural population towards its cities and an increase in intra-European, North African and post-colonial immigration. Although inner Paris did not experience the most direct impact of the War, the city had put aside housing investment for decades. Standards of living were poor: many apartments were deteriorating and most lacked modern amenities like refrigerators, private bathrooms, and gas heating.[8] [9] The sub-par condition of the city’s housing stock caused a massive crisis; as a result, additional waves of migration into the city created bidonvilles, massive shanty-towns which mainly housed workers of North African origin on the outskirts of the city. The suburb of Saint-Denis recognized the situation as early as 1946, calling the housing shortage and living conditions in the bidonvilles a “serious crisis” and launching a 25-year campaign to “promote the rights and welfare of migrant workers in Saint-Denis”.[10] The federal government took notice of the bidonvilles a few years later, acknowledging that their presence helped influence 1953’s Courant Plan, which encouraged “the rapid and massive construction of low-cost standardized housing”.[11] Much of Paris’s new housing fell in the banlieue, and with the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954, state officials considered social housing for North Africans a necessary form of surveillance to prevent the bidonvilles from serving “as a second front for Algerian nationalists”.[12]
The thirty years following World War II, nicknamed the Trente glorieuses (thirty glorious years), were a period of massive infrastructural development throughout France. The country shifted its economic structure from an agriculture-based economy to one reliant on industrial production and service labor.[13] Partly due to its geography, the local economy of Seine-Saint-Denis—one of the three departaménts which surround the city of Paris—had long been dominated by industry: on one hand, the Canal de Saint-Denis, the Porte de Pantin, and the entire area’s proximity to many of Paris’s major rail hubs gave factories favorable access to transportation; on the other hand, northeastern winds caused industrial smells to drift away from the city.[14] Many people working in these factories settled in the new housing projects built in Seine-Saint-Denis. North African migrants were joined by a “complex mix of national groups,” including single men, families, Portuguese, Spanish, postcolonial territories and the “ethnic French,” for whom this new housing represented a substantial increase in living quality.[15]
Seine-Saint-Denis’ increasing economic reliance on industrial production made it particularly “vulnerable to the post-Fordist transformations that started in the 1960s,” which generally created “a path of economic crisis and population decline from [then] onwards.”[16] Those who could afford to move back to more centralized and newly refurbished housing within Paris did, causing a substantial period of spatial self-segregation among class lines.[17] Beginning in the 1960s and gaining pace in the 1980s, —labor migrants largely became superfluous to the French economy due to effects of globalization, which outsourced most industrial working-class labor abroad. This led to “the concentration and isolation of the poorest populations” outside Paris, in large part forcing them into the prefabricated grands ensembles of the banlieues.[18] By the early 1970s, with the process of globalization beginning and an economic crisis looming, Saint-Denis became “overwhelmed by the sheer number of migrant workers seeking residence and aid”.[19] In 1974, Saint-Denis and six other cities petitioned their départament Seine-Saint-Denis to block new migrants’ entry into their communities altogether.[20]
The approach described above can be loosely justified by the French rhetoric of mixité sociale, an abstract notion suggesting that there is a proper, integrated social mix to which every neighborhood should strive to have. According to Stefan Kipfer, most of the academic research on the banlieues has focused on analyzing this ideal of mixité, fundamentally underestimating “the ethnically absolutist and racialized dimensions of urban policy in France,” which have long been “entrenched in state practices that re-articulate French histories of class warfare and imperial colonialism”.[21] Since the French government does not collect racial statistics, most analyses of Seine-Saint-Denis are derived from spatial and economic considerations. The départament ranks last in the Île-de-France region in terms of median and average taxable income, with 37% in social housing, 22.3% of households below the poverty line, and nearly half of all households untaxed,. (figure 3).[22] Two-thirds of the housing in the area is at least partially state-subsidized.[23] Its concentrated immigrant population implies a lack of the proper mixité sociale, largely preventing the area from attracting private investment, as its relatively small number of taxed households has turned local governments away from investing in public infrastructure projects.[24]
The result has been a long period of disinvestment throughout Seine-Saint-Denis and an entrenched population of working-class residents with low economic mobility and little social integration; citizens of the banlieues are often seen as a “threatening, ‘abnormal’ population, and are rarely approached as ‘normal French citizens’”.[25] There has been some resistance to this depiction: in 1983, the March for Equality and Against Racism, often referred to as the March of the Beurs (slang for Arabs), sought to combat discrimination by critiquing the hegemonic system of integration in French society and raising awareness of the issues faced by second-generation citizens.[26] However, social divisions have only exacerbated in recent years—with the development of international anxiety around Islam since the late 1990s, the riots concentrated in the banlieues in 2005, the economic crisis of 2008, the immigration debate which engulfed Europe in recent years and the 2015 attacks in Paris— forcing a profile of Seine-Saint-Denis in the New Yorker to ask, “are the suburbs of Paris incubators of terrorism?”[27] [28]
The Creation of Artist Spaces in Seine-Saint-Denis
Simultaneously, the post-industrial landscape of Seine-Saint-Denis proved to be an attractive space for artists to inhabit. Elsa Vivant’s “in” vs. “off” cultural production framework provides a worthwhile framework to explain this history: she characterizes “in” spaces as those which are organized and planned, such as the aforementioned Maisons de la Culture spread throughout France by the Ministry of Culture, while “off” spaces are spontaneous and opportunist, largely operating free from commercial or academic constraints.[29] Vivant describes the two as interdependent and embedded within a larger network of cultural production, since “the off needs the in to build its legitimacy,” but “the in draws from the off new ideas and new talents”.[30] Gradually, the Overton window shifts, and “the off becomes the real festival,” until “a new off of the off appears”.[31]
In the 1990s and 2000s, Paris increasingly began to use “off” cultural initiatives as part of urban development projects, notably including artist squat Les Frigos in the Rive Gauche National Library redevelopment project of the 13th arrondissement.[32] Additionally, the inaugural edition of Paris’s now-famous Nuit Blanche project had most of its performances located at Le 104, an ongoing redevelopment project in the 19th arrondissement, as a way of promoting the project and making Parisians visit an area of the city, Stalingrad, most would otherwise avoid.[33] Support for these projects was in part spurred by a 2001 report commissioned by the city and written by Fabrice Lextrait, in which Lextrait proposed the adoption of a new cultural policy and argued that Paris should support artist-led redevelopment initiatives[34] This report has since explicitly and tacitly helped support the establishment of dozens of cultural venues across Paris.
However, with the cost of living in Paris rising by 370% between 1998 and 2012, most neighborhoods inside the city have now been rendered inaccessible to the middle class.[35] Additionally, with Paris’s extremely high population density—21.32 thousand people per square kilometer, compared to 4.98 in London and 3.92 in Berlin—there is a small amount of uninhabited space for artists to use.[36] Consequently, dozens of cultural spaces have taken root throughout Seine-Saint-Denis in recent years due to its inexpensive cost of living and wealth of mostly unused industrial architecture.
In some cases, this has led to the wholesale reevaluation of a neighborhood’s image, with the eastern suburbs of Montreuil and Pantin becoming more attractive to developers and Parisians alike. Their change in reputation “proves that change is possible” for the banlieue—the implication being, an area can change if there is an influx of people who would traditionally prefer to live in Paris.[37] Here, the concept of mixité sociale represents an ideological disposition against displacement—a bulwark from “becoming the next boboland” (the word “bobo” is a portmanteau of “bourgeois-bohemian”), referring to the rapid processes of gentrification as seen in Brooklyn and in many other cities.[38] As a result, development has remained uneven in areas like Stalingrad, Montreuil, and Pantin, resulting in a “scattered process of social upgrading.”[39]
Redevelopment Projects and Artist Narratives within the Plaine Commune
Creating the Plaine Commune Administrative Zone
The history of the Plaine Commune, a multi-commune administrative unit north of Paris, largely follows the same patterns of industrialization and stigmatization common in Seine-Saint-Denis. In the Trente glorieuses, the Plaine Saint-Denis area was once one of Europe’s largest industrial zones with an employment of 50,000 people, but by 1990, the number of jobs had fallen to 27,000, causing high unemployment.[40] With its 200 hectares of vacant land and location close to the Périphérique, La Plaine Saint-Denis was identified by a government study as a strategic sector in 1990.[41] [42] The French government soon decided to build the new Stade de France stadium, which would host the World Cup in 1998, in La Plaine Saint-Denis. The goal was to re-energize the area by attracting media attention and private investment with the construction of the stadium.
Assisted by the French team winning the World Cup, this plan largely succeeded. Peter Newman and Melanie Tual estimate that the arrival of the stadium created 500 video and 6000 written pieces on the commune of Saint-Denis; tour companies added the stadium to their itineraries; 92% of locals were happy with the stadium’s location; the area attracted private developers and, by 2009, became the third-largest service center in Île-de-France with over 800,000 square meters of office space constructed.[43] [44] Between 1999 and 2006, 9,741 new housing units were built, 35% of which were marked as social housing, and 5,766 units deemed dilapidated were demolished.[45] [46] After 38 consecutive years of decline, the population of the surrounding area increased by 33,000 between 1999 and 2006.[47] In 2000, Saint-Denis was the only commune in Île-de-France which saw its number of residential sales increase—by 15.8%, compared to only 1% in the city of Paris.[48]
The stadium’s construction in 1998 motivated several adjacent municipalities to form a new inter-communal administrative zone called the Plaine Commune, containing Saint-Denis, Épinay-sur-Seine, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, and Villetaneuse, which represented the largest regional authority in the Île-de-France region at the time.[49] The Plaine Commune has since attracted several more members including Saint-Ouen in 2013. This larger administrative unit allows communes to pool their resources to achieve projects unattainable at a smaller scale, from urban planning initiatives to transportation policy and sanitation services.[50] Although it was spurred by a substantial federal investment in the Stade de France, administrative agglomeration represents one strategy to combat the spiraling disinvestment which has long characterized the Seine-Saint-Denis region.
Announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, the ambitious Grand Paris development project has marked the Plaine Commune area as a cluster of cultural activity, called the Territoire de la Culture et de la Création (fig. 4).[51] It plans to add five new metro stations to the area and a major new transport center, the Hub Pleyel, in La Plaine Saint-Denis.[52] Several additional projects have been announced for the greater Plaine area under the auspices of the Grand Paris plan: building 4,200 residential units every year, extending the Millénaire shopping center, developing an eco-housing district in Saint-Denis—as well as broader, more abstract goals, such as “bolstering economic growth by aggregating digital creation activities.”[53]
Creative Placemaking in The Plaine Commune
Today there are a wealth of artist studios, offices, galleries, theaters, and interdisciplinary spaces spread throughout the Plaine Commune. The arrival of Les Entrepôts et Magasins Généraux de Paris (EMGP) in 1987 marked the beginning of this era. Housed in former food warehouses just north of the Périphérique, the EMGP complex now contains more than 25 film and TV studios and has become the most popular location for TV shoots in France.[54] Le 6B and Mains d’Œuvres, two of the largest cultural institutions in the Commune area, also inhabited disused spaces—the former is a large, brutalist office building west of Saint-Denis, and the latter a former social center for the car manufacturer Valeo in Saint-Ouen. Both were established with minimal government support and have become essential hubs for the creative industry in the Plaine Commune.
Le 6B, Mains d’Œuvres and the EMGP each represent a unique way to engage with larger questions surrounding the Plaine Commune and its arts community. Le 6B gradually developed a symbiotic relationship with the city and a private real estate company involved in the area. After its integration into the Grand Paris plan, Le 6B hosted a space dedicated to disseminating information about the creative clustering plan for the Plaine Commune, titled L’atelier du Territoire de la Culture et de la Création, in 2013.[55] Le 6B created a “presentation center” for the nearby urban development project in collaboration with the real estate developer, who, in return, funded Le 6B’s Fabrique à rêves events through their corporate foundation.[56] Le 6B is therefore seen as a “good squatter” by the city and developers: although it attracts a few noise complaints, it is simultaneously “a means to avoid building dereliction” and to “provide services and activities that would benefit the urban project.”[57] From the perspective of the local government and many residents, Le 6B has thus integrated well into a quickly-changing neighborhood, helping propel creative efforts in the Plaine Commune region and incentivizing the development of previously vacant land.
Mains d’Œuvres has taken a substantially different path than Le 6B. In 2014, after more than 70 years under a communist local government, the city of Saint-Ouen elected a centrist mayor who cut funding to Mains d’Œuvres and threatened to relocate the project elsewhere.[58] Mains d’Œuvres managed to stay open after generating substantial public resistance to the mayor’s plan. In response to this controversy, Mains d’Œuvres established a cooperative called Le SCIC Main 9-3.0 in December of 2017. The goal is to minimize the precarity of cultural spaces and eventually buy around a dozen cultural spaces throughout Seine-Saint-Denis. As with the idea of the Plaine Commune, agglomeration would bring political power and increased revenue; moreover, owning their own property would ensure that cultural spaces do not face eviction as a result of changing political fortunes or rising rents. Several organizations have already joined Le SCIC or expressed support, including the bank BNP Paribas, Le 6B, and a community organization called Les Poussières.[59]
Support for cultural spaces and local artists is no longer just coming from the “off” or formerly “off” arts spaces. For example, the studio complex EMGP is owned by Icade, one of France’s largest real estate development companies. In La Plaine Saint-Denis alone, Icade owns the EMGP studios, the Millénaire shopping center, and is building a nearby “Icade park”. In 2017, Icade initiated an artist residency where a local artist is paired with a designer and an architect to develop a project for the park.[60] That a real estate developer as large as Icade is interested in integrating cultural projects into their “politics of constructing,” for better or worse, shows the substantial importance the “in” gives to creative placemaking redevelopment projects in the Plaine Commune.
Interestingly, cities in the Plaine Commune are increasingly utilizing their Droit de Préemption Urbaine, which gives the city a right to preempt any purchase of a property, often at a below-market value. Aside from the area’s massive redevelopment efforts and the ongoing presence of creative producers, the threat of valorization in the Plaine Commune is particularly high due to the approaching 2024 Olympics. Paris plans to host the opening and closing ceremonies at the Stade de France and build the Olympic village steps away from Le 6B on L’Île-Saint-Denis.[61] Consequently, many of the cities in the Plaine Commune are invoking their droit de préemption as a way to discourage real estate owners from selling their property. One warehouse in Aubervilliers acting as a shared studio space and workshop, Le Houloc, was established in 2016 and has since secured a nine-year lease at a rate of only about 200€ per person. Celia Coëtte, one of Le Houloc’s founders, estimates that they pay about 60% of what a similar space would in Paris, although it is unlikely to have the same amount of space within the city.[62] Although there is a new development being built directly across from the warehouse, Coëtte believes that the city’s droit de préemption is the primary reason their property owner has no intention to sell the building.[63]
Along with Camille Le Chatelier, another artist at Le Houloc, Coëtte immediately pointed to several ongoing examples of creative placemaking in Aubervilliers, both top-down government policies and ground-up community initiatives. Although Le Houloc receives no regular subsidies, it has had consistent communication with the city of Aubervilliers since opening in 2016. They both explained that “the few contacts we had with the city of Aubervilliers were quite good before we came here […] we also knew from the politics of other cities which we saw before, that it would be better for us to go here.”[64] Indeed, as a way to incentivize Le Houloc opening at this location in Aubervilliers, Le Houloc first received a small stipend allowing them to build a storage space and interior walls within their warehouse, and later received a 10,000€ grant to build a workshop space from the local government.[65] These resources helped attract a wider variety of artists working in various mediums to take part in the space.
Although Le Houloc is not usually open to the public, the city of Aubervilliers has made an effort to integrate Le Houloc into the local community wherever possible. As a form of place marketing, the city organized an open-studios event in September 2018, creating a map of cultural venues throughout Aubervilliers and encouraging local residents to mingle with artists working in their neighborhood.[66] This ideal of artist-community integration dovetails with the common French practice of local arts funding as a form of eliminating spatial segregation in the banlieue. To this end, Coëtte and Le Chatelier highlighted Les Poussières, an organization in Aubervilliers which focuses on connecting artists with members of the local community. One of Les Poussières’s most popular events is their annual Lanternes festival, for which they host lantern-making workshops in their theater followed by a 1,200-person parade through the streets of Aubervilliers.[67] Several members of Le Houloc participated in the parade last year, and they described it as a successful way to bridge the gap between local residents and newer arts spaces, an ideal sought after by many of the Parisian banlieues but rarely realized.[68]
The Plaine Commune: A Creative Cluster?
The traditional creative city narrative predicts that an influx of artists and cultural producers often leads to the revalorization and gentrification of an urban area. If culture is considered both a “prerequisite for social change,” and a “motor for transformation,” it makes sense that real estate developers like Icade and cities in the Plaine Commune want to integrate artists into their projects.[69] Cities typically endorse redevelopment projects because they can “counter deindustrialization by attracting new employers, workers, and residents” who generate additional tax revenue for the city.[70] Many cities across the world see cultural production as an increasingly useful replacement for industrial production in a post-globalization world because creatives derive a new form of value from these now-disused warehouses and undervalued urban districts. Quoting Jamie Peck, Carl Grodach argues that Floridian creative city policy is often “indicted for working ‘quietly with the grain of extant neoliberal development agendas’ geared towards gentrification and upscale consumption […] this program biases forms of creativity that are more easily commercialized, disregards the intrinsic value of the arts, and fails to support creative development.”[71] Claire Colomb concludes in her book Staging the New Berlin that “the process of explicit mobilization (by the local state and by investors) of cultural and artistic innovation for urban development purposes” turns artistic subcultures from social movements into brands, eventually causing the artists’ own displacement through the area’s ensuing valorization.[72]
The Plaine Commune has all of the characteristics of a creative city: industrial architecture, an artist population, inexpensive rents, and convenient transit—especially with the impending Grand Paris expansion. However, certain negative effects of redevelopment are beginning to be felt. Marie-Fleur Albecker defines the area as a hotspot of “scissor-integration,” a phenomenon characterized by “simultaneous economic integration and social marginalization.”[73] Less than one in four new residents of the Plaine Commune works within the territory; in some new buildings over 70% of owners don’t occupy their residences, artificially creating housing precarity for short-term renters; there is a significant mismatch between new jobs offered in the Plaine Commune and the skill level of existing workers in the area.[74] [75] These issues have created a culture of “persistent unemployment related to the mismatch between local skills and new jobs,” and a “sometimes uneasy cohabitation between new and old residents.”[76] Despite 40% of new apartments being reserved for social housing, the population of the Plaine Commune is increasing 3.6 times faster than its housing stock, causing the vacancy rate to drop from 11% to 5.5% between 1999 and 2006—this is “proof of a massive return to uncomfortable conditions in the old degraded housing stock” as urban residents contend with housing shortages throughout Île-de-France.[77]
The ongoing “scissor-integration” represents a vital issue the Plaine Commune must solve—but it is not equivalent to the systematic process of property valorization and displacement of the local population common to creative city narratives. With the extremely high population density of Paris and limited possibility of new construction, Paris’s housing shortage is a larger problem affecting many of the first suburbs just outside the Périphérique.[78] Another explanation becomes clear simply by walking through the Plaine Saint-Denis neighborhood. Exiting the RER B station La Plaine—Stade de France and heading south—in the opposite direction of the stadium—visitors are greeted by a large sign making clear the city’s massive efforts to redefine the image of the area, including improving and diversifying the housing supply, opening access to the canal and creating a new public square, with the aim to “recreate a real heart” of community life (fig. 5). Indeed, in its current state, the area completely lacks the bohemian character which has typified past Parisian arts neighborhoods and feels largely desolate (fig. 6). Restaurants, boulangeries, and pharmacies are few and far between, and clearly exist to serve offices located nearby rather than the small local population. The heritage of these industrial sites, while appealing to artists, has created an area effectively segregated by building usage. The effect is similar to a grand ensemble: businesses are located in one region, shopping is in another, and people live in a third area. Exceptions exist in older neighborhoods such as east Aubervilliers near Le Houloc, and central Saint-Denis. However, both of these areas are the central focus of the cities’ invocation of the droit de preemption, explicitly being used in order to prevent accelerated real estate speculation.[79]
Conclusion
Without the concentrated bohemian character which attracted artists to Montmartre in the past—or Bushwick, Kreuzberg, or Shoreditch—and the city government’s willingness to prevent real estate speculation, it would be a misstep to describe the Plaine Commune as following a creative city trajectory. Urban development in the Plaine Commune has undoubtedly attracted a significant number of businesses to the area and generated increased revenue for the territory. However, the ideal of mixité sociale remains resilient: like Ministry of Culture’s Maisons de la culture, local governments are fundamentally interested by the possibility of arts spaces as sites of cultural integration, especially in the often-stigmatized banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis. Coëtte and Le Chatelier immediately agreed with this assessment, explaining that whenever people visited Le Houloc, the subject of cultural integration was brought up: it remains a “running question every time that we receive people who live here,” and the city consistently asks them “if we are working with people from the neighborhood—if there is mixité first, and then if there is a way to develop projects.”[80]
The same ideal is reflected on the tourism websites for Seine-Saint-Denis and the Plaine Commune, which both provide extensive English documentation of cultural associations in their neighborhoods. One page titled “Alternative Paris” lists “off” cultural spaces throughout Seine-Saint-Denis, noting that they are “not part of subsidized ‘institutional’ cultural venues” despite being promoted by the city.[81] Crucially, the website explains that a central goal of these spaces is to “fit into their environment, set up projects with the local population and relate to, in general, the ecosystem of the area they are in,” and in summary, to find “new ways of introducing art into society.”[82] This rhetoric—of culture as a form of social integration and local engagement—is inescapable on the website of nearly every arts space in the Plaine Commune area and in Seine-Saint-Denis at large.
In 2017, Carl Grodach noted that a community-based approach to urban policy has started to develop worldwide in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This new approach, which he calls “creative placemaking,” “appropriates the creative city language with the intent of redirecting creative city policy towards arts-led, place-based community development.[83] Arts-based community initiatives from Les Poussières to Le SCIC Main 9-3.0 are excellent examples of this phenomenon—the former provides a creative approach to issues of social integration unique to the banlieue, while the latter stands in direct opposition to the valorization and displacement common in redevelopment areas.
The Plaine Commune still faces severe issues, from jobs mismatched to their workforce, a worsening housing shortage, and the enduring stigmatization of its population. Likewise, whether creative placemaking represents a model which can successfully combat urban inequality, address social polarization, and prevent arts-led displacement remains difficult to answer. Nonetheless, creative placemaking, with its explicit goal of synthesizing urban development objectives with the needs of artist organizations and a marginalized population, presents an alternative to hegemonic austerity and a new model to fight socio-spatial inequality.
Figure 1: 2007 map of median annual salary revenues in Greater Paris (in €). Data from INSEE and APUR[84]
Figure 2: Grand Ensemble housing blocs in Bobigny, Seine-Saint-Denis.[85]
Figure 3: Economic comparison of Seine-Saint Denis, the city of Paris, and the Greater Paris region.[86]
Figure 4: Proposed metro lines and economic clusters of the Grand Paris Plan in 2008.[87]
Figure 5: Development and Rehabilitation Plans outside the Plaine Stade de France RER B station.[88]
Figure 6: A warehouse complex on the Rue de Saint-Gobain
***
[1] Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialetic of Enlightenment. New York: Verso Books, 1944.
[2] Billier, Dominique. “Artists’ Studios in Urban Areas: A Comparative Study between Paris and London.” Urban Sociology, Vol. 15 (2017): pp. 129–131.
[3] Ibid., 132.
[4] Mahieu, Sandrine. “The Impact of Public Funding on Contemporary Visual Arts.” The Political
Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2017): pp. 623.
[5] Vivant, Elsa. “How Underground Culture Is Changing Paris.” Urban Research and Practice, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Mar. 2009): pp. 37.
[6] Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, et al. “The Middle Class ‘at Home among the Poor’ — How Social Mix is Lived in Parisian Suburbs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 38, No. 4 (July 2014): pp. 1225.
[7] Mahieu, 625.
[8] Langley, Elizabeth. “The Changing Visage of French Housing Policy and Finance: A Half-Century of Comprehensive, Complex and Compelling Home Building.” Housing Policy in the United States (2002): pp. 3.
[9] Murphy, John. Yearning to Labor: Youth, Unemployment, and Social Destiny in Urban France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017: 8.
[10] Byrnes, Melissa K. “Liberating the Land or Absorbing a Community: Managing North African
Migration and the Bidonvilles in Paris’s Banlieues.” French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 31, No. 3 (2013): pp. 1.
[11] Cupers, Kenny. “The Expertise of Participation: Mass Housing and Urban Planning in Post-War France.” Planning Perspectives, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan. 2011): pp. 31-2.
[12] Byrnes, 3.
[13] Murphy, 8-9.
[14] Packer, George. “The Other Paris.” The New Yorker. 31 Aug. 2015.
[15] Byrnes, 9.
[16] Albecker, Marie-Fleur. “The Effects of Globalization in the First Suburbs of Paris: From Decline to Revival?” Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol. 23 (2010): pp. 103-4.
[17] van de Wetering, Simone Antonia Lucia. “Stigmatization and the Social Construction of a Normal Identity in the Parisian Banlieues.” Geoforum (2017): pp. 5.
[18] Albecker, Marie-Fleur. “The Effects of Globalization in the First Suburbs of Paris: From Decline to Revival?” Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol. 23 (2010): pp. 106-7.
[19] Byrnes, 12.
[20] Ibid., 10.
[21] Kipfer, Stefan. “Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris.” Antipode, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2016): pp. 611.
[22] Desponds, Didier, and Pierre Bergel. “ Real Estate Transactions and Socio-Residential
Substitutions in Seine-Saint-Denis.” L’Espace Géographique, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2013): pp. 112.
[23] Albecker, 119.
[24] Kipfer, 612.
[25] van de Wetering, 5.
[26] Escafré-Dublet, Angéline. “Art, Power and Protest Immigrants’ Artistic Production and Political Mobilisation in France.” Diversities, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2010): pp. 5.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Packer.
[29] Vivant, 40.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 43.
[33] Ibid., 45.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Gunther, Scott. “How and Why ‘Bobos’ Became French.” French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2016): pp. 112.
[36] Morgner, Christian. “Fragmentation and Solidarity in the Artistic Milieu of Contemporary Paris: A Perspective from Emile Durkheim.” City, Culture and Society, Vol. 7 (2016): pp. 127.
[37] Bacqué, 1225.
[38] Levine, Joshua. “Thriving on the Edge.” Travel and Leisure Europe (2017): pp. 28–32.
[39] Préteceille, Edmond. “Is Gentrification a Useful Paradigm to Analyse Social Changes in the Paris Metropolis?” Environment and Planning A, vol. 39, 2007, pp. 20.
[40] Lecroart, Paul. “The Urban Regeneration of Plaine Saint- Denis, Paris Region, 1985–2020:
Integrated Planning in a Large ‘Urban Project.’” Global Report on Human Settlements (2009): 4.
[41] Ibid., 9.
[42] Newman, Peter, and Melanie Tual. “The Stade De France: The Last Expression of French Centralism?” European Planning Studies, Vol. 10, No. 7 (2002): pp. 831.
[43] Ibid., 835-6.
[44] Lecroart, 17.
[45] Lecroart, 18.
[46] Lebeau, Boris. “From Industrial City to Sustainable City: The Northern Suburbs of Paris
Yesterday and Today.” European Spatial Research and Policy, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2013): pp. 33.
[47] Ibid., 35.
[48] Newman, 838.
[49] “Qui Sommes-Nous?” Plainecommune.fr
[50] Ibid.
[51] Desjardins, Xavier. “Greater Paris and Its Lessons for Metropolitan Strategic Planning.” Town
Planning Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (2018): 9.
[52] “The Territoire de la Culture et de la Création CDT.” JLL. www.grand-paris.jll.fr/en/grand-paris-project/
[53] Ibid.
[54] Aubry, Anna, et al. “The Promotion of Creative Industries as a Tool for Urban Planning: the Case of the Territoire De La Culture Et De La création in Paris Region.” International Journal of Cultural Policy. Vol. 21, No. 2 (2015): pp. 124.
[55] Ibid., 127.
[56] Ibid., 128.
[57] Ibid., 128.
[58] Dussert, Margaux. “Mains D’Œuvres, La Friche Où Vous Allez Aimer Passer Vos Week
Ends.” L’ADN.eu. 15 May 2018.
[59] Idelon, Arnaud. “Pour Durer, Le 6b Et Mains d’Œuvres Choisissent La Coopérative.” Makery.info. 6 Feb. 2018.
[60] Coëtte, Celia and Camille Le Chatelier. “Interview at Le Houloc.” Interview by Ian Berman. 27 Nov. 2018.
[61] “The Olympic and Paralympic Village.” Paris2024.org.
[62] Coëtte.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Ibid.
[65] Ibid.
[66] Ibid.
[67] “Le Projet.” Lespoussieres.com.
[68] Coëtte.
[69] Kagan, Sacha, et al. “Culture in Sustainable Urban Development: Practices and Policies for Spaces of Possibility and Institutional Innovations.” City, Culture and Society, Vol. 13 (2018): 34-5.
[70] Kipfer, 610.
[71] Grodach, Carl. “Urban Cultural Policy and Creative City Making.” Cities, Vol. 68 (2017): 86.
[72] Colomb, Claire. Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban
Reinvention Post-1989. Routledge, 2012: 290.
[73] Albecker, 118.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Lebeau, 36.
[76] Lecroart, 18.
[77] Lebeau, 35.
[78] Morgner, 127.
[79] Boccara, Laurence. “Le Cas Pratique : « La Mairie Veut Préempter Mon Logement ».” Le
Monde (Paris). 3 Mar. 2015.
[80] Coëtte.
[81] “Alternative Creative Spaces.” Tourisme93.com.
[82] Ibid.
[83] Grodach, 86.
[84] “Revenus à Paris Et Petite Couronne.” Wikimedia.org.
[85] Janin, Carine. “Banlieues : Macron Change La « Méthode ».” Ouest-France.fr, 2018.
[86] Desponds, 112.
[87] Desjardins, 9.
[88] “Development Objectives.” La Plaine—Stade de France. Photo by author. 27 Nov. 2018.