Contested Ecologies: Environmental Activism and Urban Space in Immigrant Paris

Contested Ecologies: Environmental Activism and Urban Space in Immigrant Paris ANDREW NEWMAN Wayne State University

Abstract In 2007, the City of Paris unveiled the Jardins d’Éole, a new park built in a low-income, predominately immigrant district of the city. The park resulted from an environmentalist mobilization led by residents and is an innovative example of sustainable urban design. This article highlights the spatial contestation surrounding the mobilization to build and design the park, and its impact upon class-based, gendered, and ethno-racial inequalities in Paris. It suggests that a complex environmental arena is reshaping the urbanization process in contradictory ways, at times providing residents a new means to confront injustices, while at other moments reproducing socio-spatial inequalities. [Environmentalism, sustainability, social movements, urban space, Paris, France]

Introduction

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n the past three decades, neighborhood-based mobilizations for environmental justice have emerged as an important force in urban politics around the world. Such movements often articulate environmental politics in combination with existing demands for urban justice. Partially in response to these mobilizations, many actors in the urban planning and policy establishment have taken up the notion of sustainable urban redevelopment, at times embracing neoliberal schemes of “green gentrification” (Checker, this volume; Dooling 2009), even though this can lead to the displacement of the very populations demanding environmental rights. Green politics are therefore reshaping cities in multiple and contradictory ways as environmentalism manifests itself less as a singular, coherent movement and more as a broader arena of urban spatial contestation in its own right. In other words, if urban environmentalism was once viewed as transformative due the arrival of green politics in urban communities, it is now significant as an emerging front in long-standing forms of struggle that are central to capitalist urbanization. This article’s core argument is based on an ethnographic case study1 of a residents’ campaign that transformed a brownfield site called the Cour du Maroc into a 4.2 hectare $26 million public park known as the Jardins d’Éole in the predominately West African and Maghrebi neighborhoods of Paris’ 18th and 19th arrondissements. The impetus for this transformation was provided by a neighborhood-based mobilization known as the AJE (the Alliance Jardins d’Éole). I demonstrate that the AJE drew on environmental politics—and specifically the demand to construct a green space—as a way to spatially express and contest a variety of long standing social demands in this largely low-income community of immigrant-origin residents. The vision for a new green space, which was met with varying degrees of acceptance by policy makers and urban planners, was explicitly linked to needs for cleaner air, as well as a need for ciso_1062

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City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 192–209, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2011.01062.x.

Contested Ecologies childcare facilities (specifically, gathering spaces for parents and children outside of deteriorated, overcrowded apartments), a space for political associations to meet, housing rights, and a space of cultural production for residents of diverse ethnic, national, and cultural origins. However, the process by which the former industrial site (the Cour du Maroc) was transformed into the new park (the Jardins d’Éole) illustrates to degree to which activists are not the only players in the environmental arena of urban politics. In the creation of the new park, the AJE’s political goals were re-codified by architects and municipal agencies into a new urban vision based on ideals of urban sustainability and green design. As I will show, urban policy makers, designers, and planners responded to the needs of residents in some respects but they also contributed to processes of gentrification and displacement that are eroding the housing situation of Paris’ economically precarious immigrant-origin communities. Indeed, the changing of the space’s name from the Cour du Maroc (Moroccan Court) to Jardins d’Éole (the Gardens of Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of wind) is symbolic of the broader transformation affecting Paris’ northeastern neighborhoods. This process has led to a deepening housing crisis for working-class and low-income residents, and in particular, those of Maghrebi and West African origin.

The urban environmental arena and spatial contestation in the city

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any anthropologists have long disputed the assumption that environmentalism refers to a distinctly bounded set of issues or type of social movement. Scholars have instead shown that environmental politics are frequently imbricated with a variety of demands made by movements for civil rights, human rights, feminism, and others (Agarwal 1992; Milton 1993; Johnston 1994; Fischer and Hajer 1999; Brosius 2001; Tsing 2001; Checker 2005). These analyses, along with studies addressing the increasing institutionalization of environmental politics (Brosius 1999), support the view that enviThe ronmentalism is better understood as “a complex social and institutional arena” (Vivanco 2006:7) that encompasses social movements as well as community- institutionalization based organizations, NGOs, political parties, governments, national, and global institutions. As a result, contestation occurs between unequally positioned envi- of environmental ronmentalism(s), creating an arena or sphere that is intertwined with a more politics and the complicated milieu of actors engaged in ongoing social and political struggles. The institutionalization of environmental politics and the development of a contested environmental arena are particularly vivid in cities. Once associated development of a primarily with neighborhood movements, green politics are now on the policy contested agenda of urban elites around the world, often under the rubric of sustainability initiatives centered on urban redevelopment and revitalization. In some cases, environmental processes of “green gentrification” have emerged as a means for profit accumulation by dispossession that displaces the urban poor (Checker, this volume; arena are Dooling, 2009); these developments suggest that such initiatives are being incorporated into a “global urban strategy” (Smith 2002) of capital accumulaparticularly vivid tion. These processes indicate that the institutionalization of environmental politics has gone beyond “green-washing” or the co-option of particular movein cities ments. Instead, sustainable urban planning and green design2 are becoming core components of numerous redevelopment projects and the strategic plans for many urban regions, making it increasingly central to capitalist urbanization. The Jardins d’Éole case study offers an example of the environmental arena’s significance for studying struggles at the core of urban strategies of capital 193

City & Society accumulation. By conceiving of urban environmental politics as an arena, this approach can account for the contradictory nature of the Jardins d’Éole mobilization. On one hand, the AJE demonstrates that activists meet some success integrating environmentalist demands for green space with pre-existing struggles over class-based, gendered, and ethno-racial inequalities. The AJE’s activism was rooted in political discourses that blurred the boundaries between the city’s natural and built environments (Harvey 1996); the demand for a park amounted to self-conscious, politicized “production of nature” (Smith 1996) through urban space. At the level of the everyday lives of residents, it resulted in a transformation of Paris’ urban political ecology (Paulson and Gezon 2005; Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006). The resulting change in Paris’ physical landscape was at once a political and environmental shift as it mitigated pollution, added green space and bolstered the political power of residents vis-à-vis Paris’ urban policy establishment. It also created a vibrant urban space that is especially popular with low-income West African and Maghrebi residents whose presence in the capital has been threatened by gentrification, redevelopment, and displacement. At the same time, the building of a sustainable green space required (and reinforced) the environmental expertise and dominance of architects and municipal agencies in a process, that was initially led by residents. The political process that enabled the park’s construction also reinforced the dominance of middle-class led associations (such as the AJE) in Paris’ politics. Moreover, at a regional level, the new park was integrated into long-term strategies geared towards global interurban competition and capital accumulation. These Grand Paris and Paris Nord Est projects will likely intensify the displacement of economically vulnerable residents of West African and Maghrebi origin from Paris (media and policy makers have described the redevelopment as a reconquête urbaine or “urban reconquest”). As such, sustainable redevelopment reproduces, if not exacerbates, the spatial segregation and marginalization experienced by France’s post-colonial minority populations in the Paris region (Silverstein 2004; Dikeç 2007; Wacquant 2008). Thus, if the environmental arena allows for new openings for some activists to intervene and reshape urban political ecologies, “sustainable” urban redevelopment initiatives reproduce spatial, social, and political inequality for those who are victims of impoverishment and processes of “immigrant racialization” (Silverstein 2005).

Contesting northeast Paris’ urban political ecology

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he AJE is a relatively small organization, counting roughly 300 members. The core leadership is made up of middle-income, primarily public sector workers such as teachers and city employees of French (non-immigrant) and Maghrebi origin, though the wider membership includes residents from a more recent wave of West African immigration. Women play a visible role in the group’s leadership, and in particular, parents with children have been an important presence in the group’s public events and protests. The broader membership varies in class composition from neighborhood merchants and professionals to unemployed residents wholly dependent on public support for their income. In spite of the social differences within the group, members were united by a common urban predicament with deep historical roots in Paris’ spatial structuring of land-use and environmental inequality. The group was founded in the late 1990s in an area of Paris that has long functioned as an intermediary zone between the capital’s resplendent city center and its working class suburbs (the banlieues), popularly associated with France’s post-colonial ethnic minorities and in particular, populations of West 194

Contested Ecologies African and Maghrebi origin. Lying outside of the capital’s core (and the city limits itself until 1860) but too close for heavy industry, the district evolved into a “backstage” for the spectacle of modernity and consumption for which the capital was renown (Harvey 2003). In the 19th century, northeast Paris was a principal location of the city’s slaughterhouses, a major municipal funeral home, and the terrestrial port of entry for goods and passengers arriving in the capital from the English Channel and points east (Gare du Nord, the larger of the area’s two rail terminals, remains the third busiest train station in the world). In this context, residential development occurred in pockets of land not covered by infrastructure, leaving isolated neighborhoods cut off from the city by railroad tracks and an industrial canal, save for a few main roads. As a result, air and noise pollution has been a continual problem for the area (APUR 2010:56). Not surprisingly, the housing stock was often of poor quality: as late as 1950, one in five of the area’s residences lacked running water and/or lavatories (Pinol 1996:57). Many apartment buildings became long term hotels, often serving as housing of a last (or only) resort for waves of migrant laborers, arriving first from rural France, later from Italy, Iberia and Eastern Europe, and finally by the mid-20th century, from former colonies in the Maghreb and West Africa. Today, the area continues to be a largely working class, post-industrial neighborhood, populated by residents of diverse immigrant origins. Northeast Paris has the city’s densest concentration of inhabitants born outside of France; first-generation immigrants compose more than 30 percent of the area’s population, as compared to 20 percent in Paris as a whole (APUR 2010:57,66). The area is home to three generations of Maghrebi residents, two generations of West Africans as well as more recent arrivals from Sri Lanka and China. These patterns of immigration account for an especially high proportion of children in the neighborhood: 27 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are under 20, compared to 19.5 percent of Paris as a whole (APUR 2010:57, 66). A large portion of the housing is HLM (habitation à loyer modéré—low rent social housing) built since the 1960s, the proportions of the neighborhoods’ residential stock that is social housing vary between 35 percent to 58 percent, while the Paris average is 16 percent (APUR 2010:58, 67). It is also the only area of Paris where more than 40 percent of the workforce is still classified as workers and laborers (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2004:61) though it is plagued by near 20 percent unemployment, and a quarter of its households are in the lowest income bracket (APUR 2010:27). The area has undergone a radical process of deindustrialization: between 1954–1974 roughly 25 percent of all the industrial space demolished in Paris was razed in northeast Paris alone (Pinol 1996:62). Yet, because of the area’s location in Paris itself, its residents’ benefit from access to facilities and public goods to a greater extent than their counterparts in the adjacent working-class banlieues. The catalyst for the AJE mobilization was the discovery by residents in the late 1990s that the Cour du Maroc, an abandoned freight train station owned by the national railway (the SNCF, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer), would be leased for a new industrial use. A beverage distributor planned to expand warehouse space onto the site and was negotiating with the SNCF to lease the vacant lot. This proposal had the public support of the Communist Party and the local arrondissement mayor, Daniel Vaillant of the Socialist Party. In line for access to the Cour du Maroc behind the beverage distributor was a publicprivate entity charged with municipal sanitation and garbage collection, which had the explicit support of Paris’ then-mayor Jean Tiberi, of the dominant center-right party, RPR (Rassemblement pour la Républic—Rally for the Republic). Both of these options were considered an environmental hazard by the AJE. 195

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The AJE’s proposal for a public park was part of a strategy to reshape the neighborhoods’ urban political ecology

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AJE activists demanded the park as an environmentally beneficial alternative to the distributor, which would increase the number of diesel trucks in the neighborhood and the AJE opposed the garbage storage facility for fear of its ecological and stigmatizing impact on the neighborhood. Anti-pollution politics played an important role in justifying one of the AJE’s core demands: that residents should decide the future of the Cour du Maroc instead of the railway and its potential tenants. The argument stemmed from a 1998 incident in which residents learned that an SNCF tenant was illegally storing 2.5 metric tons of highly toxic sodium cyanide in the Cour du Maroc, though the barrels containing it had fortunately suffered no leakage (Hurin 2000). This drew the Green Party into the debate, whose support increased pressure on a now embarrassed (and politically vulnerable) SNCF. Even though the railroad was legally absolved from responsibility for the waste (two of its tenants were later fined), pollution politics introduced a narrative of victimization in which the SNCF could be seen as actively harming the neighborhood. Riding a wave of publicity, AJE activists were able to hold interviews with the press, and before long, a national weekly published a feature titled “A Poisoned Neighborhood” (“un quartier empoisionné”; Didier 1999). The article drew connections with great effect between the toxic waste, the diesel fumes expelled by the SNCF’s engines and the distributor’s delivery trucks, and the high number of children living in the area, depicting the railroad and company as public menaces. The AJE’s success in publicly cowing the SNCF over the toxic waste and diesel emissions emboldened the activists. The Alliance’s objectives shifted towards planning what they believed should be built in the space instead of protesting what the SNCF and its tenants planned to construct there. The strategy was to focus on the idea of a green space in the Cour du Maroc (which one activist described to me as the “last free space” in Paris). The idea for a green space as well as the name “Jardins d’Éole” was taken from an electoral speech that Vaillant had made in 1993, in which he proposed the Cour du Maroc be made a park, taking the name from a commuter rail line being constructed along northeast Paris’ railway tracks (the RER ÉOLE: Est-Ouest Liason Express). Using the name “Éole” for the mobilization was therefore meant as a “reminder” to Vaillant, who had lost the 1993 election but later resurfaced as both mayor of the 18th arrondissement and a steadfast supporter of the SNCF’s plan to reindustrialize the Cour du Maroc. Rather than an end in itself, the AJE’s proposal for a public park was part of a strategy to reshape the neighborhoods’ urban political ecology. For example, a former leader of the AJE (a civil servant of French origin in his 50s) analyzed the area’s difficulties through an assessment linking “buildings left abandoned” to “worries of demolition” with the “inertia and silence of those in power.” “I knew of other neighborhoods where associative action and residents’ mobilizations got things going,” he stated, pointing out that “with a group of residents, we decided to collectively take our future into our own hands, and persuaded ourselves that this four hectare field could be an issue, a way to leverage a better life for the neighborhood.” The demand for a park was a strategy to intervene in the patterns of urbanization shaping the neighborhood. Unlike central Paris where Second Empire-era boulevards have largely been preserved intact, 75 percent of northeast Paris’s built environment has been demolished and rebuilt since 1945 due largely to deindustrialization and housing demolition (APUR 2001a, 2001b). These processes were linked by the AJE to specific political figures and institutions (Vaillant and the SNCF) and their refusal to include residents in the initial negotiations over the site’s future. The movement shifted from protesting one proposed land-use policy to demanding their own as a means to increase the

Contested Ecologies power of the residents over the broader urbanization process and improve environmental conditions. The demand for a park was also a highly specific response to the gendered, class-based, and ethno-racial forms of inequality experienced by northeast Paris residents. As previously mentioned, northeast Paris has among the highest proportions of youth in any of Paris’ neighborhoods. These high numbers of children are a legacy of immigration patterns leading to a generation of youth (jeunes issus de l’immigration) born throughout the Maghreb and West Africa but raised in France since the 1970s (Simon 2003). At the same time, this large population of children is highly concentrated at more than three times the Paris average in a post-industrial area bereft of green space and playgrounds, a privation that is felt by children, parents, and mothers in particular (City of Paris 2003a:14). This lack of space for child rearing was compounded by a longstanding housing crisis facing immigrant origin families who are frequently unable to access public housing and instead forced into a “shadow” housing market consisting of crowded apartments in exceptionally poor condition (de Rudder 1992). Some immigrant origin informants in their twenties spoke of “growing up on the sidewalk” (a woman of Senegalese origin) and of a youth spent “re-appropriating” the “industrial wastelands” with his friends (a man of Malian origin). In this regard, AJE developed at the same time as—but not in direct coordination with—larger movements for housing rights, DAL (Droit au Logement, Right to Housing) and the Mal-logés (the “Mis-housed”) who also emerged during the 1990s and 2000s. The AJE’s demand was directly related to northeast Paris’ housing situation. One flyer for a protest read: “Everyone knows that a family of seven can’t live in a two room apartment and that the problems of the overburdened classes are corrupting the youth of this country.” In this way, the AJE demand for green space intertwined issues of housing, class, and concerns of youth morality. Parents—and women with small children in particular—became publicly visible members of the mobilization by “occupying” the Cour du Maroc while it was still owned by the SNCF with a makeshift playground. Such practices constituted a gendered response to an acute housing crisis faced by many immigrant origin families who endure horrendous housing conditions in the buildings surrounding the park. For many parents the demand for green space or play space was not about “recreation” as a form of leisure, but as a necessity for raising children, surviving as a family; in short, ensuring the social and biological reproduction of a community. Indeed, AJE members frequently described the proposed park at the Cour du Maroc as a “space of life” (espace de vie). In a related vein, residents called for a community garden to be built in the park. This demand developed through the AJE’s networks with community gardening mobilizations in Europe and North America, but most of all, it grew from mobilizations in northeast Paris’ large public housing complexes, where activists created gardens to function as social centers for residents, and especially youths and children. The AJE’s discourses on the metaphorical value of gardening, nature, and horticulture built on this youth-oriented momentum. Members described their visions for a “garden that could transmit life across the generations, a park of human values” and “real green space where one can see nature at work and show young Parisians of the neighborhood the cycle of the seasons, and how plants grow—other than the weeds that come up through the sidewalks.” This genre of demands for the park, again closely related to child rearing and social reproduction, drew heavily on the theme of nature as having a healing impact (physically and morally) on children in particular and the neighborhood in general. Thus, another protest flyer declared “there is an emergency need to 197

City & Society respond to the inhabitants’ suffering” and AJE activists often invoked metaphors stressing “suffocation” and “resuscitation”, describing the park as a needed “living space,” “space of life,” or alternatively, a “space to breathe,” “let in light” or as “lungs for the neighborhood.” Metaphors were mixed and combined among the physical health of residents, the ecological conditions favoring gardening, and the material and economic conditions of the surrounding neighborhood. In many respects, the movement did not simply demand the park for the neighborhood, but used the language of ecology and horticulture as a way to frame broader sets of grievances related to pollution and housing (with children and child rearing being an especially important theme), as has been seen in the American Environmental Justice movement (Bullard 1993, 2000; Checker 2005). Gardening and cultivation functioned as metaphors for transforming northeast Paris’ urban political ecology. Thus the AJE’s espace de vie discourse was marked by a triadic conflation of life between the human, the horticultural, and the urban. When the AJE activists used the term espace de vie, they not only referenced the horticultural and urban sphere, but self-conscious practices of cultural production as well. But the question: “whose culture?” was a circumspect issue. AJE protests (termed manif-festives or “protest parties”) at the Cour du Maroc were colorful affairs featuring musical performances and circus performers alongside activities for children. The performances were well attended by residents from across northeast Paris’ ethnic and class spectrum but the role of cultural identity was inconsistent within CMC discourse. On one hand, the AJE embraced pluralism and diversity at an abstract level (activists commonly described the park as a welcome space of “cultural encounters” between residents) but the group also kept within France’s republican taboos on identity politics (Jennings 2000; Hargreaves 2007). A Tunisian-born member of the AJE stated that his requests for a park evocative of the green spaces in his home country were not incorporated into the design. Similarly, an anonymous resident’s written request sent on behalf of the AJE to the architectural team called for “a park with the identity of the residents” including “a forest made all of the trees of the residents of neighborhoods’ home countries such as baobab, pine, oak, olive and palm” was ignored (a rejected architectural proposal for the park’s design was based on the same theme). After the park was constructed, the AJE actively encouraged northeast Paris’ cultural associations to appropriate the park for events such as a combined Eid and Christmas gathering, but during the campaign to build the park nearly all references to particular cultural identities were eschewed in favor of the normalizing term “neighborhood.” “Our underprivileged neighborhood” (quartier défavorisé) was a common refrain used by AJE activists that could ambiguously evoke any number of class-based or ethnic inflections—or in keeping France’s republican taboo on identity politics, no explicit avowal of difference at all—as a basis for mobilization. In other words, the usage of the spatial category of “neighborhood” allowed the group to claim unfair, differential treatment without appealing to any specific cultural (or class) identity. The use of spatialized rhetoric appealed across class and ethnic lines, and at the same time, it pre-empted criticism from media and political figures who associated northeast Paris with anti-republican identity politics and ethno-racial ghettoïzation (see Catherine 2007). The AJE campaign reached its zenith of publicity during the build-up to Paris’ mayoral race of 2001, in which an energized Socialist Party and Green Party coalition saw an opportunity to seize the mayor’s office from the right wing. By polling day, Jean Tiberi, the right wing incumbent, had been weakened by several scandals and his own party split its ranks, running a second mayoral candidate in the election. Bertrand Delanoë, of the Socialist Party, a former city 198

Contested Ecologies councilor who happened to be from the same arrondissement as many AJE members (though he was originally elected from the wealthy Montmartre neighborhood), won the election handily against the split opposition. Delanoë’s campaign drew heavily from support by Paris’ emergent, left-leaning urban middle class, which has been active with environmental and associative politics as well as the gentrification of many of the city’s formerly working class neighborhoods (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2004). The Delanoë campaign broke with the incumbent mayor by publicly supporting the bid for the park (his officials were frequent attendees of the AJE’s manif-festives). His new administration was quick to tout a park at the Cour du Maroc as one of its first new projects, using it to promote a new approach to urbanism away from “monuments”, and towards “neighborhoods” (Le Nouvel Observateur 2002). Such statements were not merely public relations: as an AJE activist described it, after the election of Delanoë, the terms of the debate surrounding the park swiftly “went from ‘yes or no’ to ‘what size’?” The SNCF and its tenants, already weakened by the pollution and toxic waste scandal, were forced to renegotiate their claim to the Cour du Maroc in ever decreasing sections until being pressured to sell the entire property to the City of Paris. Thus, thanks to a combination of political timing and shrewd coalition building, the AJE and its allies successfully had the space set aside as a 4.2 hectare park (at an estimated cost of $26 million) in the face of powerful opposition, in a roughly six year time period (1998–2004). The victory was all the more remarkable because it occurred in an area whose residents have been historically marginalized—politically, socially and economically. The building of the park was viewed by many in the AJE as a coup for local grassroots democracy. It would not only address ecological concerns, but improve the “urban environment” in the broadest sense, linking issues of childcare, housing, and health. The unanswered question that remained was what kind of park—if any—could address such a variety of concerns?

From Cour du Maroc to Jardins d’Éole

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The building of the park would address not only ecological concerns, but improve the “urban environment” in the broadest sense, linking issues of

he landscape and identity of the new park was an added element in northeast Paris’ arena of environmental contestation involving careful negotia- childcare, housing, tions between activists and the design team. AJE activists demanded—and and health received—an innovative “organic” and resource-efficient park design that required no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, the first of its kind in Paris. In a city infamous for the “museumification” of its urban spaces, the AJE demanded “a garden for living” with open, unrestricted access to lawns and playgrounds. The activists resolutely spoke out against a “garden to be looked at.” The architectural team3 responded to these demands with a level of technical and aesthetic acumen that brought their design international recognition.4 However, by foregrounding the importance of sustainable practices (durabilité) and green design features in the new park, architects reinforced their dominant position as experts in a different type of environmentalism than that espoused by the AJE. As a design principle, sustainability articulated with a globalized environmental discourse stressing themes such as energy conservation and the use of renewable resources. This was in contrast to the environmentalism of the AJE, which despite connections to a transnational network of activists, was largely the result of a specific urban, social, and ethno-racial predicament combining anti-pollution politics with concerns related to housing, childcare, and to a contested extant, a cultural space in the city. Thus, while sustainability was not an important concept to the AJE, it became a fundamental theme for the design 199

City & Society team combining both aesthetic and technical details. A number of symbolic elements such as a miniature wind turbine (a token with a minimal power yield), the use of “natural” materials (meaning wood, millstone, terracotta, and slate), and an overall aesthetic of sparse, resource efficient minimalism helped to conjure an aura of sustainability through the park’s visual composition. Resource efficiency was a theme of particular emphasis: stones from the abandoned railway station were re-appropriated in the construction of the park, and according to the architects’ design proposal, only “materials with provenances compatible with the rules of sustainable development” were used (City of Paris 2003b:7). In many respects, the park combines recycling and resource efficiency with ambiance to make the space an example of—and an allegory for—environmental sustainability. Indeed, the park was meant as a medium through which ideals of sustainability could be communicated to northeast Paris residents; a veritable green polemic or allegory inscribed upon the northeast Paris landscape. Nowhere was this more clear than with the use of water, which was viewed as an important visual and sensorial element in the park and a symbol laden with connotations relating to resource management. Emphasis was placed on the recycling of rain water, and to this end, an ingenious “gravel garden” (les jardins de gravier) was created, allowing collected water to trickle down through subterranean channels and be recycled in an adjacent canal, itself host to an aquatic garden. An impressive technical feat, the connection between the gravel garden and the plant filled canal was meant to call to mind a symbolic interrelationship. “The gravel garden evokes vital links between earth, water, and plants, evoking the fragility and scarcity of resources” wrote the architectural team in their design proposal, adding “in this sense, the garden is a didactic digression of our project” (City of Paris 2003b:5). In essence, the water irrigation system allowed the canal and gravel garden to operate in perfect harmony, as a self-sustaining, human-made analogy of a naturally balanced ecosystem, a statement of the imperative for resource conservation. Indeed, the design proposal and related documents are filled with language dwelling on the “didactic” and “pedagogic” aspects of the space. And finally, water was a means of spatial control, with the canal serving as a stand-in for fencing along a section of the park’s perimeter, restricting movement and access while still being “inviting” and allowing for more visibility into the space from the adjacent streets. It was a core component ensuring that the park would be a place providing residents with the expected benefits of green space (sociality, physical activity, security), as well as instilling the importance of resource conservation and natural harmony on park users. The question of who would manage the park’s operation was central to the AJE. In this respect, the architects played an empowering role for the AJE by designing collective action into the operation of the space. The design team demonstrated a remarkable level of engagement with the espace de vie concept so central to the AJE mobilization itself—a direct result of collaboration with the sociologist Isaac Joseph and his successors.5 Measures were taken to create a residents’ presence in the park at multiple levels. The community garden played a central role in this process, as did a refreshment stand operated by residents. A residents’ committee consisting of the AJE, cultural associations from the Maghrebi and West African communities, and youth associations was formed to work alongside the DEVE (Direction des Espaces Verts et de l’Environnement, Paris’ Parks and Environment Department) in managing the park. Above all, according to one design team member, the aim was to avoid a “dead space.” A particularly novel step towards this end—and a controversial provocation for some policy makers and officials from the DEVE—was a decision to leave a 200

Contested Ecologies plaza-like section of the park open and accessible to residents 24 hours a day, contradicting a strongly ingrained tradition in Paris’ parks emphasizing both spatial and temporal control of green spaces (at sundown each day, uniformed guards with whistles expel visitors from parks, and nearly all of the parks are gated and locked after dark). The idea of allowing nocturnal usage was viewed as part of the espace de vie concept by allowing residents to use “their park” anytime they wanted. The measure provoked protest by the local arrondissement mayor Daniel Vaillant and some in the DEVE who pointed out that the very location which was open at night was at the street corner most associated the illegal drug economy in northeast Paris. Ungating the park thus risked turning it into a “druggie park,” in the words of one resident. The AJE, architects, and sociologists countered, and eventually won the debate with a Jane Jacobs-inspired “eyes on the street” (1961) argument. By inviting residents into the park at night, hypothetical undesirable uses of the park (in particular, the selling and consumption of illegal drugs) would be displaced. The design was meant to provoke what the leader of an immigrant youth association described as a “re-vindication” of the neighborhoods’ public spaces by residents themselves, as opposed to the use of gating and police. At the same time, the final design—and name—for the park eliminated any potential for it to be formally associated with northeast Paris’ multi-ethnic identity. Jardins d’Éole was adopted as the park’s name primarily because this was the name first used by 18th arrondissement mayor Daniel Vaillant in 1994. The AJE had adopted the name to “remind” the politician about the park. Though it is translated as Garden of Aeolus (the Greek god of wind) the name Éole is known locally as an acronym (ÉOLE: Est-Ouest Liason Express) for a commuter rail line using the neighborhood railroad tracks (this was the intent of Vaillant’s usage). Jardins d’Éole is thus a reference uniting sustainable energy, and the neighborhood’s long history as a rail thoroughfare, while evoking Greek mythology (a change that resonates with Bunzl’s (2005) observation of the increasingly civilization-oriented focus of discourses of belonging in Europe). No official reason was ever given by officials for abandoning the name Parc de la Cour du Maroc (the “working title” of the project). A plausible explanation is that the usage of Maroc (Morocco) in the title of the park was avoided because of its foreign, even immigrant, connotations. If true, this would be a meaningful decision given that the locale is already strongly associated with immigrants from North Africa, and in the context of France’s current crisis of national identity, there is particular anxiety over immigrant assertions of cultural identity among North Africans and other populations associated with Islam. Residents have provided a rejoinder to the Jardins d’Éole’s design through park usage. DEVE officials point out that one of the most significant problems with the Jardins d’Éole is actually over-usage and the stretching of its capacity because of its great popularity (more playground equipment has hurriedly been added, for example, to deal with the even greater than expected number of parents with children who use the park). It is popular across the lines of class, ethnicity, and gender, with children being among the most prolific users of the space (Jolé et al. 2009). It is especially popular with women of Maghrebi origin who gather in large groups to socialize in the early evenings while their children play in the space. Teenagers of West African and Maghrebi descent are also prominent users of the space. They frequently stay on the park’s open esplanade until well after midnight during the summer. The park has also become an important outdoor concert venue for youths in particular, with hip-hop performances having attracted crowds in the thousands during Paris’ annual Fête de la Music and the Paris Hip-Hop festival. Usage does not necessarily take form 201

City & Society according the spatial (and ideological) guidelines laid down by architects. Puzzlement and indifference were the most common reactions to the gravel garden, which despite its pedagogical intent, was frequently dismissed by residents in terms of being an “architects’ thingy” (truc de les architectes). Perhaps the most amusing critique of the design can be read from the playful, sensorial spatial practices of the many children who enjoy the gravel garden. Much to the chagrin of park officials, they enjoy tossing the gravel in the canal, a pastime that continually threatens to malfunction the irrigation system’s carefully planned simulacra of ecological equilibrium. The formal design process by which the vacant Cour du Maroc was transformed into the Jardins d’Éole was a continuation of an environmental struggle that began with the AJE mobilization. This contested design process led to a material reshaping of northeast Paris accompanied by a dramatic transformation in the way residents lived and experienced the city. In one respect, architects entered this environmental arena as experts in sustainable urban design, and planned the park around a globalized vision of environmentalism. At the same time, activists (with some help from a team of sociologists) were able to negotiate numerous design features of the new park that addressed some of AJE’s core demands. Additionally, the new park design gave neighborhood associations more control over urban space vis-à-vis municipal agencies by incorporating collective action into the management and operation of the park itself. However, the republican cultural politics of the park reproduced the dominant political position of middle class, non-immigrant origin French residents vis-àvis their less affluent immigrant-origin counterparts. Not surprisingly, this classbased and ethno-racial contradiction comes to the forefront in an analysis of the Jardins d’Éole’s wider impact on the reproduction of social inequality in immigrant Paris.

The environmental arena and the “reconquest” of immigrant Paris

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he full socio-spatial impact of the Jardins de’Éole—and the environmental arena of urban politics—only comes into focus when it is viewed as part of the wider urban, social, and economic context of the Paris region. Indeed, when the city itself is viewed as a “project” (and not merely the park) the environmental arena’s broader impact on processes of capitalist urbanization is rendered discernable. Although the Jardins d’Éole was arguably an example of bottom up urban planning, it is situated in an axis of ongoing redevelopment and social conflict. The building of the Jardins d’Éole has accompanied the demolition of two full residential city blocks adjacent to the park to “remedy” northeast Paris of “insalubrious” conditions (City of Paris 2003a:27). These dramatic changes in the built environment are two of over twenty other urban renewal projects in northeast Paris that are part of the 200 hectare Paris Nord Est urban renewal initiative, undertaken with the goal of building “a piece of the sustainable city” (City of Paris 2011a). The project focuses on Paris’ boundaries in an effort to add 27 hectares of green space (City of Paris 2011b) to the intermediary zone that lies between the capital and the city’s banlieues, which Silverstein has previously compared to the cordon sanitaire of Lyautey’s colonial plan for Rabat, Morocco (2004:89). These initiatives have been spearheaded by the Delanoë adminstration, illustrating the Janus-faced meaning of the Socialist administration’s pledge to shift the emphasis of Paris’ urbanism away from monumentality and towards neighborhoods. 202

Contested Ecologies As ambitious as the Paris Nord Est project may appear, it is only one aspect of regional and globally-focused strategies for the Paris region, including the inner-ring banlieues that saw extensive and violent unrest in 2005 (an event that was only the most dramatic instance in a string of banlieue uprisings that have frequently occurred since the early 1980s). These projects include a two decade old regional plan to redevelop the banlieues of Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers (Lecroart 1997), centered on the national soccer stadium, the 80,000 seat, $400 million Stade de France located less than four kilometers from the Jardins d’Éole. At the same time, and allegedly in conflict with Paris’ urban planning establishment (according to one informant at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme) President Sarkozy’s office has proposed his widely publicized and controversial plan to remake Paris’ outskirts, the Grand Paris. This ambitious proposal explicitly invokes Haussmann’s 19th century restructuring of Paris (see Harvey 2003) as a precedent for this 21st century project, which is touted as “a response to a vital challenge facing our country: how to sustainably engage France in international economic competition” (Grand Paris 2011). While still a vision awaiting precise planning, this multi-municipality project, which includes Paris and many of the cities along its outskirts, takes aim specifically at London and New York as urban competitors in creating an internationally dominant, “post-Kyoto city” (Grand Paris 2011). The grand scale and ambitions of these visions may seem distant from the 4.2 hectare Jardins d’Éole, but the significance of each green space and redevelopment project in a globalizing urban region should not be discounted. Indeed, a high-ranking official in the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme described the “Jardins d’Éole . . . as a strategic anchor in the reconquest of all of this territory” (La Rocca 2008). The question that remains is who is this territory being reconquered from? As is often the case with gentrification and redevelopment, the physical renovation of Paris’ urban landscape is inseparable from the class-based and ethno-racial remaking of the capital. The geographic scope of the redevelopment, much of which is publicly financed and planned (as opposed to gentrification driven by the renovations of private home buyers) is coterminous with Paris’ immigrant neighborhoods (APUR 2003c, 2010). In this regard, the relationship between redevelopment and the housing situations facing immigrantorigin Parisians is of crucial importance. Land values in Northeast Paris, despite being the lowest in the city, have been among its most rapidly rising, climbing over 40 percent between 2004 and 2010, a rate that defied the Paris average until the global real estate crash of 2008 (CNP 2011). Prior to the downturn, northeast Paris rents rose at a rate double the Parisian average (CLAMEUR 2008) and continue to rise steadily, despite being among the most deflated in the city (OLAP 2010, 2009). These shifts have occurred in tandem with mass evictions accompanying the demolition of housing in the area; more than 350 apartment buildings have been demolished since 2001 (APUR 2010:58). Residents have responded to these processes through protests and housing movements such as DAL and the Mal-logés, whose emergence occurred in conjunction with the remaking of Paris’ working class and immigrant neighborhoods. The framing of northeast Paris’ “sustainable” redevelopment in the media and by policy makers has taken the character of a class-based, ethno-racial, and civilization-based project. As early as 1991, an article in Le Monde lamented the “foreign” character of working class neighborhoods in northeast Paris. Pointing to development of “black neighborhoods” as well as shops with signs written in Arabic, the article deployed the language of reconquest (reconquête) in describing efforts by elites solve the problems of France’s emergent “ghettos” (Andre 1991). The historical and civilization-focused implications of “reconquest,” with

The physical renovation of Paris’ urban landscape is inseparable from the class-based and ethno- racial remaking of the capital

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City & Society its reference to the Reconquest of Spain and the shift in power in the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims of North African origins to Christians may appear extreme, but “reconquest” discourse has become normalized (and thus de-historicized) in Parisian urban politics. The usage of the term is commonplace when describing the cultural, economic, and social remaking of northeast Paris (see e.g. Ambroise-Rendu 1993, 1995; Sauvage 1996; Garin 2005; Boccara 2006). In this sense the socio-spatial remaking of the city parallels an established body of Islamophobic discourse rendering European civilization as in a state of struggle with an internal Islamic other (Bunzl 2005). Paris’ ethno-racial and spatial patterns of redevelopment, gentrification and displacement now reflect France’s exclusionary politics of national belonging towards post-colonial minorities. Planners and urban policy makers are not alone in situating the Jardins d’Éole as a landmark in the contested remaking of the French capital. The park’s inauguration ceremony in May 2007 demonstrated the extant that the environmental arena has become a flashpoint of contestation along class-based and ethno-racial lines. During the inauguration, northeast Paris residents, members of the AJE, Mayor Delanoë, Daniel Vaillant, and the design team saw the proceedings upstaged by a raucous protest. A visibly frustrated Delanoë attempted a triumphant speech, in which he described the Jardins d’Éole as the “fruit of an environmentalist ambition present in each of our public policies, utilizing techniques that are most respectful to the air, water, and soil” and calling it an example of “sustainable development, urban aesthetics, and a space of conviviality open to all generations.” However, he was nearly shouted down by several dozen members of the Mal-logés housing rights mobilization, who had gathered at the park to demand the construction of affordable housing and protest home demolitions in northeast Paris. Riot police were dispatched to form a barricade between the Mal-logés and the other residents attending the event, including the AJE activists. The police detained and arrested the majority of the protestors, many of whom were Maghrebi and West African women (some carried infants swaddled over their shoulders). The vivid class, gender, and ethnic divisions on display at the inauguration—with West African and Maghrebi protestors being repressed by the police while the largely (but not exclusively) middle class and nonimmigrant origin AJE leaders were seated near the elected officials—present a vivid rendering of the class based and ethnic inequalities marking the new “sustainable” Paris. The protests highlight the degree to which the environmental arena is relevant not only to the construction of the park but is embedded in struggles over the reproduction of the political, economic, and ethno-racial order that defines Paris as a global city.

Conclusion: What is sustained, and for whom?

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he trajectory of the AJE mobilization and the creation of the Jardins d’Éole demonstrates that environmentalism plays a more complex and significant role in reshaping urban inequality than simply being the arrival of green politics in an urban setting. The conflict over the creation and design of the Jardins d’Éole reveals how class-based, gendered, and ethno-racial inequalities are contested by environmentalism(s) that blur the boundaries between the city’s natural and built environments. However, by concluding with the question “what is sustained, and for whom?”, I center my analysis on the contradictions of the urban environmental arena, which holds the potential to transform unjust urban political ecologies while simultaneously reproducing spaces of social and ethno-racial inequality in the city. 204

Contested Ecologies I foreground the above question to acknowledge that the AJE marshaled an environmentalism that re-worked preexisting urban struggles into a literally grassroots intervention in the urbanization process. The first portion of the Despite the park’s question also acknowledges that the Jardins d’Éole’s design team successfully realized a concept of urban sustainability in the built environment. It is a space link to large scale that is popular, socially inclusive, and an innovative low-impact environmental design. For the residents of northeast Paris, the building of the Jardins d’Éole plans to redevelop prevented increased diesel truck traffic and avoided the construction of a proposed waste-processing unit. It led to a dramatic change in the daily life of northeast Paris, residents by creating a needed open green space for parents (and women in particular) to care for children (this is evidenced by the park’s “over-usage” in this diversity of the words of a DEVE employee). The space offers a reprieve from the overcrowded and substandard housing conditions that have long plagued northeast usage makes it a Paris. Though remaining within republican strictures governing the politicization of culture and ethnicity, the AJE and cultural associations created a space bulwark against of diversity and pluralism that did not previously exist, and it has been heavily wholesale used since it was built. Despite the park’s link to large scale plans to redevelop northeast Paris, this diversity of usage (and the tenacity with which residents demanded the park) makes it a bulwark against wholesale gentrification and gentrification and ethno-racial reconquest. Thus, the promises of urban environmental mobilizaethno-racial tions are neither absent from the AJE nor the Jardins d’Éole itself. Nevertheless, the “for whom” question weighs heavily on the urban envireconquest ronmental arena’s role in reproducing urban and spatial inequalities. The environmental sphere, composed in this case of activists, political parties, elected officials, municipal agencies, and urban designers is a shifting political field. The AJE’s success in this arena created a space of political inclusion for a middle class-led mobilization, and the mobilization contributed to greater, albeit circumscribed political space for the cultural associations who represent the West African and Maghrebi communities. However, the limits of this arena were evident in the ethno-cultural, gendered and class based divide at the Jardins d’Éole’s inauguration protest. At a broader level, the environmental arena that enabled the creation of the Jardins d’Éole also undergirds a social configuration based on the class-based and ethno-racial order that reproduces Paris as a global city and France as an “imperial nation-state” (Wilder 2005). This reproduction of economic, urban, and ethno-racial inequality occurs It is the very despite the improvement of the social, political, and environmental conditions of residents who mobilized with, and were directly affected by, the AJE. Othinstability and erwise stated, when one looks beyond the self-consciously defined “neighborhood” scale of the AJE and the Jardins d’Éole, the park is a component of continual rebirth larger urban, national and globally focused projects (such as Paris Nord Est and Grand Paris) that ultimately exacerbate social inequalities in Paris as a whole. of environmental The often gendered “mis-housing” and displacement of low-income West African and Maghrebi origin residents is the most vivid manifestation of these mobilizations that broader urban inequalities. As a result, the Jardins d’Éole appears sustainable in a holistic sense (i.e. will most likely socially, politically, and environmentally) only when abstracted from the spatial practices of domination that define Paris as a global city and France a ensure their contested nation in the current moment. The contradictions marking the urban environmental arena should not however, be taken as a cue to disregard success in enacting environmental politics in the city or mobilizations such as the AJE. Indeed, as anthropological approaches continue to show (e.g. Paulson and Gezon 2005) both ecological and it is the very instability and continual rebirth of environmental mobilizations social change that will most likely ensure their success in enacting both ecological and social change. 205

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Notes Acknowledgments. I would like to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (award #0827283) and the Council of Sciences of the City of Paris who made this project possible. I am deeply indebted to Michéle Jolé, and Stéphane Tonnelat of the CNRS Laboratoire Vie Urbaine, whose generosity with their time (and patience) made navigating Paris’ parks and planning agencies both possible and fruitful. I am also grateful for the help and comments of the anonymous reviewers, and from my fellow members of the Sustainability as Myth and Practice in the Global City panel delivered at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Philadelphia in 2009: Melissa Checker, Cynthia Isenhour, Gary McDonogh, Alf Hornborg, Robert Rotenburg, Kathleen Bubinas, Deborah Gewertz, Frederick Errington, Jennifer Hubert, Elliot Tretter, and Giovanni Orlando. 1

The case study is based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in northeast Paris between 2007 and 2009, much of which consisted of creating an ethnographic case study on the history and origins of the AJE mobilization. The majority of the evidence for this article is based on oral history interviews with activists and research in the group’s archives. In addition to research with the AJE, which included participant observation in meetings and public events, I conducted interviews with activists from other northeast Paris community organizations, officials from municipal agencies, architects, and urban planners. 2 E.g. Beatley (1999), Wheeler and Beatley (2004), and Farr (2007). 3 The design team was led by the architects Michel Corajoud, Claire Corajoud, and Georges Descombes of ADR Architects. 4 The design was featured in a Museum of Modern Art exhibition on contemporary urban public landscapes titled Groundswell in 2005. See http://www.moma.org/interactives/ exhibitions/2005/groundswell/gs.html. 5 The role played by social scientists in designing an environmentally and socially sustainable urban park merits further discussion, though space limitations do not permit it in this short piece. Sadly, Isaac Joseph passed way soon after the design contracts were awarded, and was replaced by Stéphane Tonnelat and Yann Renaud. For a reflection on the process by the sociologists, see Tonnelat and Renaud (2008).

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