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

在塞纳圣丹尼与参与社会事务的艺术家和艺术组织合作创作的《探索大巴黎》作品，探讨了这个贫困郊区的城市复兴的文化政治。它主要考察了法国政府的复兴计划--“大巴黎”--一项旨在将巴黎转变为全球特大城市的大规模战略--与通过在公共场合主张社会边缘群体的发言权和可见度来促进“城市权利”的艺术实践之间的对立。大巴黎计划于2007年启动，旨在以自奥斯曼以来未曾见过的规模改造巴黎，并在2025年之前重新确立巴黎在全球城市指数中的霸主地位。该方案的核心是通过高调的基础设施项目，将郊区卫星或“郊区”与历史中心整合在一起。在这方面，塞纳圣丹尼是一个特别的挑战：郊区是2005年城市骚乱的起点；它是法国监控最严密的地区，因为它是2015年对该市发动袭击的圣战恐怖组织的所在地；尽管它是欧洲最富有的地区(法兰西岛)的一部分，但它是法国最贫穷的地区；最后，高失业率、种族主义和警察暴行巩固了郊区作为共和国统一的“威胁”空间的形象。塞纳圣丹尼位于法国大陆，是非殖民化和非工业化对城市社区影响的最具象征意义的地点，它构成了该项目的地点，因为在这里，可见性、视觉文化和空间正义问题确实交织在一起。首先，这个郊区的修复对“大巴黎”项目的成功至关重要。其次，最近的城市政策，试图对抗巴黎作为“博物馆之城”的声誉，将这片“荒原”的种族多样性和亚文化之都确定为重塑全球化巴黎品牌的核心。考虑到新自由主义和一体化的相互关联的驱动因素，文化处于国家主导的复兴的最前沿，但关于谁的文化、谁的利益、艺术和创意运作的重大问题，对“创造力”的促进提出了重大问题。社会参与的公共艺术在表达这些对立方面发挥了关键作用，这些对立一方面是国家战略的表达，努力重塑城市形象，另一方面是本地化的斗争，以促进平等主义和解放形式的城市归属感。在对城市更新的分析通常侧重于知名品牌重塑企业的情况下，该项目对当前的学术研究进行了两个主要方面的创新：首先，在城市政策、视觉文化和社区行动之间的关系的理论化方面，它将塞纳圣丹尼定位为一个有争议的象征性空间，其中创造性的实践重新塑造了社区空间的意义，并产生了新的社会、政治和文化认同纽带。其次，该项目的关键推动力在于，重新设计了“图像能说什么”这个问题，问的是“图像能做什么？”在大规模复兴的背景下，艺术实践如何参与构成和竞争城市民主、认可和包容性？它制定了一个新的研究议程，其价值在于它的“自下而上”的方法来理解巴黎目前正在进行的不朽的复兴，探索艺术产生新的“地方感”的可能性(Agnew 1987)。该项目与十个艺术组织的艺术家和利益相关者合作，使用以实践为基础的方法来创作共同创作的可视化作品《情感领域》，而该项目的专著《发明大巴黎》探索了社会参与的艺术实践如何重塑郊区的意义和物质，以建议城市关系的模式，赋予全球城市中被边缘化的社区权力。

'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.