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

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