Locating Belleville

Locating Paris-Belleville World City Systems and Spatial Agency in the Translocal Neighborhood

Darian Razdar

A thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

BACHELOR OF ARTS WITH HONORS

Department of Social Theory & Practice Residential College University of Michigan April 27, 2018

Primary Reader: Dr. Kimberley Kinder, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Secondary Reader: Dr. Virginia Murphy, Lecturer in Program in the Environment and the Residential College

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Acknowledgements The undergraduate honors thesis process has been a long, though fruitful, one. I deeply thank both Kim Kinder and Virginia Murphy, my concentration advisors, thesis readers, and mentors. Kim, through her steady guidance in all things critical geography, has facilitated my academic growth to the place where I am able to conduct research and build analyses such as this project. Virginia has not only sharpened me as a writer, but been a mentor throughout undergrad—providing me with advice, support, challenges, and camaraderie over the years. The ways both Kim and Virginia have shaped me into a budding scholar-activist will remain close to me. I would also like to thank my former professor, Solange Muùoz, for piquing my interest in human geography during my first semester at the University of Michigan. Without her passion and belief in me, I may not be the aspiring geographer and activist I am today. I would be remiss to not thank the Residential College and Honors Program at the University of Michigan, too. With their support, I was able to live in Paris and visit again for a week-long study period. Lastly, I am grateful to all those who I interviewed throughout the process of this study—those who let me into their homes, places of work, and get a glimpse of their lives.

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Table of Contents Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING THEORY & TERRAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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What’s at stake? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Discussing key terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Review of key foundational literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Questioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Opening the terrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Experimenting with Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 CHAPTER II IMAGINATIONS OF LOCAL AND GLOBAL IN PARIS-BELLEVILLE . . . . . 29 Identifying Dichotomy, Confronting Hegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 (How) Is Paris a World City? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 The Neighborhood: Global, Local, or Translocal? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 CHAPTER III THE MANY WAYS OF LOCATING PARIS-BELLEVILLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Imagining the Neighborhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Quartier-village . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Quartier-ouvrier et populaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Quartier-monde et mixte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Quartier-militant et solidaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

3 Quartier-artiste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quartier-ghetto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Quartier gentrifié . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Performing the Neighborhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Commerce in Belleville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 (Quasi-) Public Café Inhabitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 (Re)Constructing the Neighborhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Spatial Differentiation & Homogenization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 23 Rue Ramponeau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 CHAPTER IV CONCLUSIONS & NEXT STEPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 (Trans)Locating & Cultivating Spatial Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Shifting Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 (Re)Shaping the World City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Diluting Dichotomies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Next Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

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Abstract Since John Friedmann published “The World Cities Hypothesis” in 1986, a groundswell of literature on the topic of world cities has arisen. This literature includes authors in a variety of disciplines, and their theories permeate urban policy and planning.

However, mainstream discourses in this field routinely ignore the real-world implications of their work—namely the reproduction of hegemony of the Global over the Local, and the City over the Neighborhood. The current work seeks to unsettle such dichotomies through studying world city systems from the perspective of a Parisian neighborhood, Belleville. By putting geographical theories in conversation with Situationist practice and innovative fieldwork, we find that simple hierarchies and distinctions become, in fact, precarious in world cities. The work neighborhood actors engage in to locate their space draws on translocal world city systems, and cultivates the spatial agency to both reclaim space and shape world cities.

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Preface When you think of a “world city” what do you imagine? Is it the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, replete with brokers moving financial investments around the virtual world, or is it the Borough of Queens with its myriad of ‘ethnic’ eateries and community centers? Do you envision London, as the former seat of empire, or as the contemporary home of diasporic communities? Are you drawn to Detroit’s global influence in music and manufacturing, or southwest Detroit’s Mexican neighborhood a single river away from Ontario, Canada? Do you see Marrakesh bazaars selling imported spices alongside Disney products, or Venetian canals overflowing with tourists?

The ways that we understand here and elsewhere are central to how we approach “world cities” as an emerging field of analysis, especially as urbanization becomes indistinguishable from globalization in the 21st century. Increasingly we are finding elsewhere within our reach, and seeking out our heres in faraway lands. Families like mine—living in the Persian diaspora—travel between the northern United States to Toronto, where Iranian culture occupies space more widely than other cities in the region.

We look to Toronto as our Iran in America, just as we turn our gaze to Tehran and its array of cultural exports for a sense of history and belonging. The world city then, is simultaneously tied to the ideas of homeland and global exchange. Today it so happens that it is more difficult to define these ideas given the movement of people and capital between here, there, and elsewhere.

This thesis will emphasize the ways in which the world city articulates itself in diverse, even ambiguous, ways. The “world city” is an urban center characterized by a strong simultaneity of many intersecting flows (i.e. economic, financial, cultural, political, social, religious exchanges). A world city, thus, acquires its character and prominence on the world stage through its preference for the global over the national, and maintains mutual relationships with other world cities. This definition arises from a literature and political history that confers great attention toward financial and State actors; this is the structuralist definition constructed at the dawn of the discipline. I present this literature in the chapters that follow, with the ultimate goal of locating a novel understanding of the ‘world city’—one that surpasses the dominance of financial political economy that has characterized thinking in this field.

By drawing our attention to Paris and one of its most singular neighborhoods, Belleville, I tease out the ways that the world city manifests itself in the urban fabric of both entities—how here and elsewhere are implicated in these arenas, perhaps by different means and for different ends in each one. Nonetheless, the world city as defined above is a concept produced through the academic disciplines of Geography and Urban Planning; it is not a holistic representation of reality. The analysis of the Parisian terrain opens a discussion around the ways in which the operational definition is negotiated,

6 negated, and amended by everyday people. Accordingly, shifting the methodological framework from large actors to common terrain changes how world cities are understood.

The idea to study world city dynamics as they are manifest in Paris-Belleville1 originated when I resided in Belleville, on Rue de Savies, during the first six months of 2017. Over this period, I was consistently intrigued by the complexity, and awed by the rich history and diversity, of Belleville. It was the base of my new social life in Paris, and where I chose to spend time with friends and family. I was proud to live in Belleville, to be a Bellevillois, even temporarily. The unabashed pride in the neighborhood’s populaire2 and immigrant status projects itself from its cafés, abundant Chinese and Maghreb commerce, social justice associations, and especially in conversations with its residents.

It was this affective environment that drew me in to study Belleville more closely.

Additionally, it is Belleville’s distinction as the ‘melting pot’ of Paris that leads me to consider the ways that the locality and globality of Paris-Belleville can be interpreted through the filter of world city theory, which has been traditionally used to understand the city as a whole or its most powerful sectors.

It would be foolish to study a terrain so closely for purely personal reasons, however. This work reveals and uplifts the perspectives of social actors in Belleville—the individuals and groups who are seldom studied when building theories about globalization or world city systems. Through this paper, I also argue that the ways in which power geometries of globality and locality are constructed in contemporary human civilization often come at the expense of the spatial agency of residents in neighborhoods such as Belleville. These power geometries accord the global elite excess wealth, while limiting resources for those who do not or cannot contribute to the elite vision for global society. Nevertheless, spatial agency is cultivated in quotidian ways by people acting together in spaces they know well.

This brings us to a broader consideration of the value of this study. In her ethnographic exploration of the matsutake mushroom trade, The Mushroom at the End of the World3, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the economic determinist analysis that capitalism is a totally hegemonic, ubiquitous monolith that governs all interactions. She proposes an alternative approach, one that acknowledges spaces just outside of the logic and control of the capitalist system. She calls these ‘pericapitalist’ spaces. I adopt this approach by affirming that not everyone is equally integrated into world city systems, if at all—though most of us are. In a world of world cities, it is crucial to understand that most of us are implicated in the reordering of the global power geometries according to 1 In this essay, I will often refer to the terrain of study as “Paris-Belleville” as to communicate the inseparability of either from the other. Paris-Belleville is the field of study, not because Belleville simply is constituent to Paris, but because Belleville and Paris can be most justly understood with the deep recognition of the flows between the two, and between either and locations outside of Paris altogether.

2 “Populaire” in French is the equivalent to both “working-class” and “people’s” in English. I choose not to translate this word in my writing in order to preserve its double meaning.

3 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

7 world city systems. Many thinkers in this field attest that capitalism is the driving force behind world city system formation. But if Tsing shows us anything, it is that there are many trajectories—including and beyond capitalism—contemporarily at play, and we must attend to this diversity in order to build a just and socially significant analysis4.

I approached this field study with a flexible methodological framework that incorporated a diversity of tactics—including interviews, short-term ethnographies, print material collection, photography, video, and audio recording. This repertoire was built and modified as challenges studying the field arose. The process of experimenting with methodology allowed for a better understanding of the terrain. The field research was primarily conducted over two periods: April-June 2017, and for a week in October of the same year. Such a large gap in the two periods allowed for the digestion of findings from the initial study term. In turn, during the second period I was focused on conducting interviews and observations, and collecting media, that would elaborate upon that which was previously uncovered. I hesitate to write “complete that which was previously uncovered” because in no way is this study complete. Rather, I provide a snapshot into the diverse trajectories and interactions at play in the human and built environments of Paris-Belleville as they relate to the idea of the world city.

I apply the above methodological framework to three central research questions: 1. How, where, and why do actors in Belleville locate their neighborhood in the context of world city flows?

2. How does translocality play out on the neighborhood scale?

3. What alternatives exist to the hierarchal relationship between the neighborhood and the city, and why are such alternatives important?

From my study of the terrain and pertinent theory, I have drawn several conclusions. These conclusions, similar to the methodology, are not complete, but rather point us in the direction of a more comprehensive and equitable understanding of a diversely urbanizing and globalizing planet. A broad conclusion that I have been able to draw is that spatial agency—the ability and self-determined power one has to form relationships to space and with others in space—is tied to one’s ability to make sense of the geography in which they act. This means not only comprehending—but imagining, performing and reconstructing one’s space of everyday life—is central to one’s ability to live a socially, politically, and culturally fulfilling life.

Given this in-depth study of Paris-Belleville, I gather that world city dynamics shape the ways that people are able to cultivate spatial agency. Belleville residents locate their neighborhood despite and in spite of the world city systems in which they are inscribed. The act of locating occurs in spaces significant in a resident’s everyday life, and patterns of place-based behavior and (re)appropriation guide such acts. In many cases, these acts are performed without self-conscious attention to the influence of or the implications on the world city system. However, the thesis here, as it relates to world city 4 Jennifer Robinson (see: “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map,” 2002) carves a path to such an understanding of world cities as “ordinary cities” and vice-versa by valorizing the multiple ways in which a city can be(come) worldly.

8 theory, is that the ways people in neighborhoods such as Belleville behave in and with their environment destabilize conventional scales and boundaries of the global and local, and of the city and neighborhood. A diversity of actors in Belleville develop translocal ties, as it is a neighborhood that historically attracts extra-Parisian inhabitants. When these actors reside, work, or associate in Belleville, they reclaim a spatial agency that is under threat from the authority of the Mairie de Paris5 and capitalist hegemony in the economic world city system. As I will elaborate upon, the development of translocal ties and the reclamation of spatial agency confounds the prevailing logic that assumes the power of the global over the local, and the City over the Neighborhood.

The interactions of those I studied in Belleville lead me to a reinterpretation of what a world city means—what world cities are, how they relate to each other, and how they are imagined and theorized. With a look to neighborhoods that lie outside of powerful economic and cultural centers, it becomes clear that non-dominant actors build the world city alongside their more powerful counterparts. Artists, artisans, immigrants, merchants, and the translocal working class synthesize ties between cities that are too often overlooked, but which are important for understanding the complex world in which we live.

Such a reading of the world city and its network of systems, from the perspective of Belleville, constructs an awareness of the world city as the prime example of translocalism. This translocalism runs counter to the idea that ‘global’ forces restructure human civilization from the top-down. As will be expanded upon in the chapters that follow, this idea opens up the possibility for a politics of spatial agency and justice at the neighborhood, translocal level. The world city as a translocal space also opens up the possibility for a rethinking of the scales of ‘city’ and ‘neighborhood’, and of ‘local’ and ‘global’.

Northern Belleville at dawn. On the rue Arthur Rozier, above rue de Crimée—looking northwest, toward Seine Saint-Denis.

5 I preserve the language “Mairie de Paris,” instead of its translation “City of Paris,” in order to remain appropriate to the culture at hand.

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CHAPTER I Introduction: Approaching Theory & Terrain Where is the world city? Where exists this coveted entity that Paris and so many other municipalities the world over seek to become? Common sense tells us that it is where the world manifests in cities. This commons sense, I argue, provides a simple and quality framework to treat world city questions. Where is the world city? and What does it stand for?6 are two questions that humanity is forced to ask as we undergo joint urban and global restructuring in the 21st century. Those of us who find ourselves migrating in global flows and tied to urban life already interrogate the meaning behind novel conditions and pressing dynamics brought about by these coeval processes. Third-world and trans feminists, for instance, are reworking identities and reforming social scripts as to realize visions of everyday equity,7 just as social movements descend on cities to express a collective voice against violent articulations of global capitalism. While the intersection of current forms of urbanization and globalization engenders a widening gap between jet-setting mega-rich and urbanized subalterns,8 communities construct organized, and sometimes mediatized, alternative models of globalization—from the Battle of Seattle and Hamburg’s Welcome to Hell anti-G20 protests, to the occupations of Zuccotti Park and Madrid’s Plaza del Sol.9 It is important to note that reckonings with this system do not arise infrequently and in separate corners of the globe. Rather, people’s entire lives are affected by the novel dynamics of the contemporary world: we come to cities, move away from our homelands, travel between spaces of belonging and alienation, and find ourselves in complex knots of exploitation and liberation. Indeed, it is the ‘ordinary’ interactions between people, communities, and institutions that provide the richest ground for a systemic analysis.

Secondly, we must not think of populaire or alter-globalist actions in the contemporary world city systems as mere reactions to the capitalist dynamics of such systems. As I propose in this chapter and those to follow, these counter-hegemonic trajectories are central to the world city systems as we know it. Indeed, there is no world city today without immigration and emigration, populaire community organizations, or 6 Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 10. In the introduction to her book, Massey asks, “What does this place stand for?”, as to question the multidirectional flows that become materialized in a place.

7 Chandra Mohanty’s Under the Western Eyes (1984) and Alok Vaid-Manon’s social media and performance-based activism provide reflections on injustice experienced by women and femmes from third-world and poc backgrounds, and offer embodied visions for a decolonized and feminist future.

8 John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff, “World city formation: an agenda for research and action.” International Journal for Urban and Regional Research 6, no. 3 (1982): 309-44.

9 Altermondialisme, or alter-globalization, is a social movement that calls out the exploitation of neoliberal globalization and promotes grassroots, democratic globalization as a more equitable alternative. Geoffrey Pleyer’s 2011 book “Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in a Global Age” analyzes the underlying patterns and values that characterize the movement in the past three decades.

10 ‘suitcase trade’. For too long world city theory has been confused with neoliberal globalization. It is one of my goals to show how world cities are as diverse as the many ways we (re)work our many worldly ties.

Rue de Belleville, near the intersection with Rue Denooyez.

In this thesis, I explore world city systems as they are manifest in Paris-Belleville.

Entering with the perspective that theoretical and field-based analyses employed simultaneously yield the most just conclusions, I combine abstract reflections on globality and locality with experiences in the terrain. I lived in Belleville for several months, where I built a social life from scratch and formed strong ties to place through acts of being and doing alongside other residents, travelers, and the built environment. In Belleville, a contrast between the neighborhood and the city—specifically, imaginaries of the two—rapidly came to my attention. Where Paris is museums, cafés, monuments, and quays on the Seine, Belleville is street markets, Chinese novelty stores, Tunisian bakeries, and layers of graffiti. Where Paris is French and luxurious, Belleville is immigrant and working-class. Where Paris is tourist, Belleville is resident. The contrasts become more complex as both the city and the neighborhood reveal themselves. Thus, this paper is simultaneously an analysis of world city dynamics and a gradual reveal of such dynamics in the Parisian context.

How could Paris be local but Bellville global? This confounds the expectation that a neighborhood should be tied more to its specific geography of place—its “locality”—

11 than the city. On the other hand, Paris as a whole includes various cultural and economic centers fully integrated into global capitalism, while Belleville’s integration therein is less conspicuous. These tensions that came from knowing Belleville and Paris simultaneously led to a reflection of their relationships to world city systems. I found myself curious about the ways that Belleville and Paris are inscribed in global flows of capital and people, how people make sense of these flows in the space of their everyday lives, and how world city processes transform space itself. Belleville in particular is a terrain ripe for such an investigation given its historical immigrant and populaire character.

What’s at stake?

Residents of Belleville, and even outside observers, often recognize its rather communal nature. Belleville is a place where one feels at home, where residents build and sustain community in ways not experienced on such a level elsewhere in Paris. In this imaginary, Belleville represents the ideal multiethnic urban community. Belleville’s imaginary refracts and creates an affective landscape—an environment evocative of a variety of sentiments, from belonging to alienation, and ease to hardship. Such a landscape may explain why the neighborhood is often referred to as a village in the middle of Paris.10 Upon starting field research, however, many challenging dynamics in the neighborhood, and between the neighborhood and the city, came to light. There is the quality of life of neighborhood residents; cleanliness, safety, appropriate cultural services, housing, and education pose significant challenges in Belleville relative to the more wealthy and homogenous areas of the city. Such ‘challenges’ are rooted in the diverse uses of public space invested in the neighborhood by differing cultures—since the cultural groups have varying norms of occupying and using urban space. These challenges are also produced through the systemic political economic marginalization of Belleville in the context of the Paris and the region, Ile-de-France.

While challenges to quality of life are not unique to Belleville, a more existential threat of social stratification, even atomization, specifies itself in the terrain. Successive waves of migration and gentrification in the neighborhood have engendered conflicts between Chinese, Maghreb, and European communities, between populaire and aisé,11 and between ‘upper’ and ‘lower.’12 These are not simple issues of separation, but of 10 Agnès Deboulet and Roselyne de Villanova, “Belleville, laboratoire social ?” in Belleville, Quartier Populaire ?, ed. Roselyne de Villanova and Angès Deboulet (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 5-12.

Belleville and its actors are noted to express an enthusiasm for its character as a “quartier-village,” or “neighborhood-village.” Several interview participants and authors writing about Belleville also cited this village aspect.

11 “Aisé” meaning both “well-off” and “comfortable”, which simultaneously speaks to one’s material and symbolic socioeconomic status.

12 The articulation of “haut Belleville” and “bas Belleville” inscribes itself in the class and ethnic divisions in the neighborhood.

12 power articulated in space. Access to opportune commercial spaces on Belleville’s main axes, insertion into the neighborhood and city’s social cultures, and the ability to afford quality housing are all worked out in the context of such cultural and class conflicts.

Importantly, these conflicts are not just theoretical considerations, but take shape in space. Moreover, they take shape in shape through the translocal ties afforded by world city systems. Thus, a critical regard for the form of urban space and human interactions therein is crucial for building an analysis that treats these challenges. This regard also allows for an analysis of world city systems on the neighborhood level.

The very image of Belleville as a popular and immigrant neighborhood comes in question as global capitalism takes hold of cities and turns them into command and control centers for capitalist exploitation. And this dynamic is not reserved for financial centers; Doreen Massey argues that neighborhood gentrification is the local manifestation of global capitalism.13 Parisians from more wealthy strata began to invest in Belleville in the 1980s, and thus increased rent for residents and business owners. It has come with a degree of transformation in the urban fabric of the quarter, with hipster and bobo14 cafés, bars, and restaurants succeeding just as well as their Chinese and Maghreb neighbors. As more well-off people take up space in this neighborhood, what will become of its rich tradition as a staging ground for immigrants in Paris, and as an affordable respite for the region’s urbanized poor? Here lie challenges to the very core of what Belleville was, is, and will be. My research focuses heavily on how Bellevillois.es15 imagine and act for certain visions of their neighborhood, and how these visions constantly exist in relation to the city where it is found.

Approximate locations of Belleville. Left: Paris with arrondissements Right: “Grand Paris” or Greater Paris.

13 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 121-22.

14 “Bourgeois-bohemien,” or more colloquially “bobo,” generally connotes a middle-aged population aisée of European origin. In France, the term “boboïsation” is generally used alongside “gentrification” or “embourgeoisement.”

15 I use the form “Bellevillois.es” in this work to denote those living in the neighborhood, Belleville. This is a French construction, which combines the grammatically masculine and plural (Bellevillois) and the grammatically feminine and plural (Bellevilloises) into one word.

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Discussing Key Terms In order to approach this terrain with acuity, it is crucial to have an understanding of certain concepts. These concepts are explored more in-depth in the following literature review, and will be reused and negotiated in my analysis. The reader would be correct to sense ambiguity or tension in these explanations—such realities allow for novel notions of these ideas to be constructed in relation to the methodological approach and field research, and hopefully invite the audience to engage with the topic at hand. Finally, these are not definitions; rather they are brief, introductory discussions of key concepts in the context of this study. o World City — The “world city” first and foremost is a concept meant to represent experienced and observed realities. This concept reconciles the tension that is experienced in the contemporary world, where ‘local’ and ‘global’ are increasingly indistinguishable. World city literature has fluctuated between financial, economic, and cultural definitions. The concept his used by many for anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques of global urbanism and urban globalism since John Friedmann first hypothesized the term in 1986 in “The World Cities Hypothesis.”16 The world city is constituent to systems of world cities. Indeed, there is no “world city” without “world city systems” that connect localities across Earth. The current study adopts a broad usage of “world city”— affirming the cultural, economic, political, and social realities it encompasses. o Flows — A “flow” can be compared to a thread that links and relates places across space. Flows are fluid; they are multidirectional, changing, and pass through numerous nodes. They carry certain information, capital, and people along the way. Massey writes about flows as spacio-temporal currents through which changing power geometries are articulated.17 Massey also developed the theory that flows generate an increasing “time-space compression”18 in relation to the prevailing global power geometries. Rather than simple bidirectional exchanges between actors, flows represent movement through space-time that is inherently charged with politics, heavy with culture, tied to economies, and directed by all three. We all live in and create flows. In turn, space is produced. o Globalization and Global Capitalism — Globalization is a word burdened with presumption and controversy. Thus, it is important to define what it means for the current study. I affirm analyses that argue that globalization is the contemporary manifestation of capitalism on a global scale. Markets are extended across the globe, tying places together in the process of extraction, trade, fabrication, selling, buying, and consumption. Multinational corporations and international institutions reclaim power vacated by national institutions under this mutating 16 John Friedmann, “The World Cities Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69-83.

17 Doreen Massey, “Power Geometries and a Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 59-69. A power geometry describes the manner in which “different social groups and different individuals are placed in vert distinct ways in relation to these flows. and interconnections” (p 61). Thus, the power to direct or determine the nature of flows can reproduce, negotiate, or negate political authority; a power geometry describes such a dynamic.

18 See note above. “Time-space compression” refers to phenomenological shrinking of space and time in what we often refer to as ‘globalization’.

14 system. Thus, contemporary globalization differs from previous global exchanges in its tie to denationalized capital and markets. The consequence, then, is the uprooting of nationalized economies, politics, and cultural identities. This is the reality that we are confronted with today. We come apart as we come together. o Transnationalism — This term has been built by cultural studies to represent a theory of global connectedness that is less about global capitalism, and more so transgressing state borders. Transnationalism does not take itself as a new condition, but a lens through which we can analyze novel phenomena. For the purposes of this paper, transnationalism will be used exclusively as the politicocultural counter-point to globalization. If globalization as global capitalism speaks to capital exchanges and movement of labor, then transnationalism speaks to the flows across statist borders. o Globality & Locality — These are two conditions that this essay returns to regularly as it works through the spaces of Paris-Belleville. Globality refers to a condition that arose with capitalism starting in the era of modern colonial conquest of the 18th century. Such is a condition that speaks to the connectedness of a person, group, or place to foreign elsewheres. Long-distance movement of bodies, materials, and symbols lend to the condition of globality. Locality, on the other hand, speaks to conditions situated in place; it is experienced through strong ties to the area around oneself. In locality, the human body is connected to the immediate environment. I approach the dual concepts with an understanding that they are distinct. I will argue, however, that meditations on world cities and my findings from the Parisian terrain destabilize both notions. This lends to my questioning of what it means to be ‘global’ or ‘local’ in world cities. o Translocalism — Translocalism is a framework that rises out of a mistrust of the nation-state as a unit of analysis to study global flows. Specifically, translocalism takes on the grassroots exchanges between ‘local’ places around the world with the seriousness that Friedmann and other structuralist applied to the world economic landscape. The translocal project connects local social movements, economies, and cultures to innumerable localities elsewhere. This essay will take up translocalism in order to trace the experiences of people in the context of globalization and transnationalism. The translocal project is the synthesis between the two, and the world city is its prime example.

Review of pertinent foundational literature A review of key literature on world cities is in order before we delve deeper into an analysis of the terrain. Brenner and Keil provide three categories of thought foundational to the world cities discipline: 1) neomarxism, 2) transnationalism, and 3) critical geography.19 These approaches have each produced novel ideas about global capitalism and its hegemony over urbanism. Some even reveal how contestations to this system are materialized in world cities. Authors from each camp are in constant conversation with one another; they build off each other’s analyses through critique and synthesis to make a more comprehensive field of world city studies. Many authors even 19 Neil Brenner and Roger Kiel, “From Global Cities to Globalized Urbanization,” Globalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 3, (2014): 1-17.

15 espouse a certain theoretically promiscuity—they have their hands in more than one of Brenner and Keil’s taxonomies.

Early neomarxists—notably Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Guy Debord— created a base on which later analyses of world cities flourish. These thinkers did not necessarily speak to the explicit idea of the world city, but to the transformative forms of capitalism in the late 20th century. What jumps out of the neomarxist reading of such complex systems is the coupling of dialectical materialism with a reading of experiences in urban space. Lefebvre, for instance, was at the forefront of the spatial turn in the social sciences by proposing that “(social) space is a (social) product.”.20 By concurrently affirming Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectics—that dialectical analysis should be an analysis of material processes of constant social production—and proposing a novel perspective rooted in the theory of space, Lefebvre gave subsequent world city theorists a new “spatial triad” to apply to the production of space: representational space, representations of space, and spatial practice. 21 Lefebvre opened up the field to the analysis of social mutations in spatially specific settings, and led thinkers of the social to analyze multidirectional flows and unstable simultaneities.

Debord, a contemporary of Lefebvre and leading member of the Situationist International, brings Marx into the 20st century postwar European city. Debord and the Situationists built theory and practice against what they called “the society of the spectacle.”22 The Situationists used a method of “detournement” to expose to the masses the ways in which commodity culture directs their daily lives and uses of urban space.

Debord simultaneously called for a liberated urbanism and the end of capitalist exploitation of the city. The Situationists read “the spectacle” as an articulation of the Marxian dialectic23 in modern cities: The spectacle, like modern society itself, is at once united and divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the spectacle, is itself contradicted a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided.24 Harvey took up Debord’s neomarxist, anticaptialist critique of cities and the project of building a unitary urbanism. In his groundbreaking work on the French capital, Paris, Capital of Modernity, Harvey paints a longer trajectory of the rise of capitalism in Paris, wherein capitalism exploited urban space in favor of State power and commodity spectacle. Harvey identifies this trajectory as modernization. His reading of 20th century Paris put historical dialecticism into action. Later, in Limits of Capital, Harvey argued that Marx’s visionary contribution was “the capacity to see capitalism as an integrated whole.”.25 Important for subsequent world city theorists, Limits of Capital argues that Marx’s analysis of modes of production was predicated on the production of a 20 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 26.

21 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38-39.

22 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983).

23 The Marxian dialectic can be described simply as the continual process that follows: affirmation— negation—negation-of-the-negation.

24 Debord, G. (1970). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. 25 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1982).

16 “differentiated and integrated” space-economies. In fact, historical materialism contends that spatial production occurs differently under different modes of production. Harvey added the idea that the unique space-economy of capitalism was constantly in search of a “spatial fix”: an material anchor to which capitalism’s progression of crises takes hold. It makes perfect sense then, that world city theorists in Harvey’s wake not only create the concept of the world cities system as a particular articulation of contemporary capitalism, but also identify the world city as the spatial manifestation for such a system. This thesis develops a negotiated understanding of this manifestation through an analysis of ParisBelleville.

Brenner and Keil’s second category of world city approaches is the transnational.

The concept of world cities, in fact, first formed in transnationalist literature. Most notably, John Friedmann published “The World Cities Hypothesis” in 1986, which took up the previously discussed neomarxist literature as its point of departure: “Some fifteen years ago, Manuel Castells (1972) and David Harvey (1973) revolutionized the study of urbanization and initiated a period of exciting and fruitful scholarship,”26 wrote Friedmann. His world city is intended as a framework for research rather than an unmovable truth. Nevertheless, his approach is structuralist; he sets out criteria on which cities ought to be evaluated. Friedmann sees in contemporary globalization a novel “spatial organization of the new international division of labor” that functions on the global, regional, and metropolitan levels.27 While Friedmann’s work is foundational for the study of world cities, his analysis is a mechanistic one that creates hierarchies of world citydom between, what he calls, the capitalist core countries and those of the “peasant periphery.” Such a hierarchy is based on constructed ideas of integration into a financial world economy and visions of class conflict that pit elite and subaltern in almost unwavering positions. The below map demonstrates how Friedmann re-envisions Earthly cartography through those urban centers that ‘make the cut.’

26 John Friedmann, “The World Cities Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69-83.

27 John Friedmann, “The World Cities Hypothesis,” 69.

17 Friedmann’s hypothetical map of a hierarchal world city system, 1986.28

Similarly, Saskia Sassen asserts that the economic restructuring of the world economy changes the function of cities on national, regional, and global stages. Though she forgoes the mechanistic and hierarchical superstructure of world cities touted by Friedmann, Sassen uses world city as a frame for an analysis of emerging urban class conflict and transnational politics. Sassen’s work, “Whose City is it? Globalization and the formation of new claims,”29 established a transnational analysis that birthed a more comprehensive world city literature, and explains how changing economic orders reshape territorial claims. These claims, she explains, occur in and among cities, as well as between regions and cities: as transnationality takes on the form of a world city network, cities’ allegiances shift from the national or regional to the global—often alienating their home nation.

Paris and its surrounding region of Ile-de-France have longtime been alienated from the outlying area of the country, diminutively called “La Province”. Because such a distinction is not new, we can trace the history of world city formation back centuries.

The preference for the global over the national did not occur instantaneously or by accident, but through histories of imperialism, colonialism, and modernization that directed the attention of capital cities toward foreign elsewheres. It is not a coincidence, then, that Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, and many other imperial capital cities are among the most widely noted world cities.

Sassen also approaches the cultural changes taking shape in and among the world cities. She discusses the uneven distribution of power and capital (i.e. inequality), as well as the heterogeneous cultures brought to world cities, which create novel cultural environments ripe for study. By integrating cultural elements into the world cities field, Sassen makes a claim that “cultures from all over the world are de- and reterritorialized, [putting] them right there at the center along with the internationalization of capital . . .”.30 She also hints that cities increasingly take on the role that the nation-state or region, by structure or by mandate, cannot fill. In this perspective, urban space becomes the main site of “new notions of community, of membership, and of entitlement,”31 where we see conflicts escalating and new claims arising. Sassen’s contributions are a clear elaboration on those of Friedmann’s. I will use hers to link the localities and globailites invoked in my research of Paris-Belleville to the theory about their roots in global economic restructuring and manifestations of conflict therein.

While the previous thinkers of the transnational espouse a certain structuralism and prescriptivism in how they view world city systems, subsequent authors emphasize heterogeneity, multiplicity, and simultaneity. These are the “critical geographers” aforementioned by Brenner and Kiel. Perhaps the most important geographer in the context of this study is Doreen Massey, who notably took up the discourse of “flows’” and “simultaneities” that Lefebvre begun. Massey, furthermore, integrated this spatial analysis with the transnational, mostly economic world cities hypotheses of Friedmann, 28 Friedmann, “World City Formation,” 74.

29 Sasskia Sassen, “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims”. Public Culture 8, no. 1 (1996): 205-222.

30 Sassen, “Whose City Is It?,” 214.

31 Sassen, 219.

18 Sassen, and others. In doing so, Massey located an intellectual middle ground between the social representation of the city provided by Lefebvre,32 and the superstructural economic worldview of Friedmann.33 Massey’s book, World City34, was her direct engagement with the concept of the world city, through which she confronts and reinvigorates the concept with a critical geographic, and even anthropological, analysis that had been missing from many of the previous author’s works.

In this book, Massey interrogates the idea of the ‘world’ or ‘global’ city via a thorough analysis of a terrain she knew well: London. London is not only the former capital of history’s largest colonial empire, and the seat of national power in contemporary Great Britain, but it is unquestionably a world city in every sense of the term. Massey portrays the city with all of its complicated, messy web of connections to former colonies, diasporic communities, financial markets, and political entities the world over. Importantly, this means that her London case study holds valuable implications for ‘globalizing’ places elsewhere—such as Paris.

Massey’s project in World City is to destabilize the hierarchical dichotomy between local and global—noting that elsewhere exists here, and vice-versa. She approaches the task of deconstruction by interrogating the identity of the “world city”— asking, “What does this place stand for?”35—and by building an understanding of political responsibilities with which world cities should reckon. Actors in the world city system have the ability to practice politics with and against the forces that govern them, exposes Massey, in order to remain accountable for their historical and spatial legacies.

This ethics of political responsibility that is profoundly in-tune with place is unheard of in the foundational world cities literature of the 1980s and 1990s, which only went as far as defining a concept and related dialectical tensions. Evidently, London has many responsibilities in the contemporary world for its storied history of violent colonialism and imperialism—as do its colonial counterparts, such as Paris.

Distancing herself particularly from Friedmann’s mechanistic perspective, Massey critiques the classification of world cities as internally homogenous, and as solely “command and control” sites for global capitalism. In doing so, she advocates for an alternative definition of what a ‘world city’ is—what this concept represents in academia, as well as in governmental, corporate, and quotidian arenas. The perspective she proposes is not a definition but rather a framework for action that she names “local internationalism.”36 This framework directs the “vibrant, ordinary cosmopolitanism” of world cities toward an opposition of modern day imperialism.37 This includes reformulating practices of ‘local action’ and ‘foreign politics’ to be trans-scalar, with a recognition that the most local of politics are not rooted firmly in a single sector, nor are foreign relations totally alienated from place-based dynamics. Examples of this new “local internationalist” politics include a possible mutualization of the UK and Ghanaian 32 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 26.

33 Friedmann, “The World Cities Hypothesis,” 72. On the note of economic superstructure, Friedmann writes: “Key cities throughout the world are used by global capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets.”

34 Massey, World City.

35 Massey, World City, 10.

36 Massey, 184.

37 Massey, 183.

19 health systems, and plans to build a network of material and educational exchange between London and Caracas. How could similarly responsible politics be construed within the city of Paris? Paris as a political entity has a history of colonialism that can be addressed within the space of the city itself—particularly in a neighborhood like Belleville.

In this paper, I use an approach similar to that of Massey. I am equally as critical of conceptions of ‘world cities’ based on the financial district, a single part of that city’s identity and form. Massey describes how the use of synecdoche has been manipulated by world city thinkers and policymakers so that a part of the city represents the whole, and so that a city, or a part of the city, represents all others in its network. This practice is hegemonic as much as it is homogenizing. It is the not the most just depiction of our reality. In contrast, Massey’s “local internationalist” program asserts that alternative world city theory and practice is necessary and reachable. Additionally, Massey’s question, What does this place stand for? informed much of my approach to field work and theoretical reflection.

Even though Massey critiques world city assumptions, World City affirms financial and economic flows as dominant by withholding due respect to the host of other exchanges that ought to be integrated into an updated world cities theory and practice.

For the purposes of this project, it is crucial to valorize the ‘neighborhood’ outside of the dominating ‘core’ as a space that is built through the intersection of diverse translocal trajectories. In this respect, I look to Jennifer Robinson for insight, a geographer who challenges the divide between “western” and “third-world” cities and argues for a decolonized approach to current cosmopolitan readings of urban space.

Robinson’s “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map”38 seeks to decolonize urban studies by deconstructing the dichotomy between “urban theory” rooted in the analysis of western cities and “developmentalism” focused on a supposedly nonurbanized Third-World. Robinson aims to build an alternative urban studies that reflects the experiences of a geographically diverse array of urban actors. To execute this project, she builds a framework from cities “off the map” of the world cities network provided by Friedmann. Instead of “consigning substantial areas of the globe to structural irrelevance,” the author advocates for an approach to world cities as “ordinary cities” and for the creation of a new vocabulary with which to analyze the diverse array of cities.39 Important for this study, Robinson exposes urban studies, and indeed the world cities discipline, for their over-valorization of financial citadels and underrepresentation of massive swaths of cities, such as populaire immigrant neighborhoods.

What Robinson points to is that “all cities are world cities”40 when we recognize that urbanization and global imperialism are coeval processes. Robinson offers three practices for structuring a more inclusive study of cities: 1) look beyond the immediate necessities of the research topic, 2) avoid (re)producing hierarchies between spaces, and 3) value the diversity of dynamics within and between cities.41 Robinson’s advice urges me to avoid hierarchy between Belleville and Paris and to investigate flows in varied 38 Jennifer Robinson, “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 3 (2002): 531-554.

39 Robinson, “Global and World Cities,” 536.

40 Robinson, 538.

41 Robinson, 544.

20 world cities networks. This practice will become evident in subsequent discussions on methodology.

Robinson leaves space for an important, and final, conversation on the emerging literature of translocalism. In a rejection of transnationalism, this framework chooses to make visible that which is lost in the statist regard toward global exchanges. Peter Mandaville42 contests that internationalism and transnationalism invisibilize that which “[does] not depend on the limits of territory to define the limits of [its] politics” or “[does] more than operate across or between the borders of nations.”.43 Mandaville briefly explains how diasporic communities, borderzone identities, and spiritualist movements work as examples of political identities generated and networked on local levels44. In effect, the author proposes a new understanding of transnationality that is more local than statist, and more equitable in its prioritization of the everyday global implications of local affairs.

Translocalism was not recognized by Brenner and Keil in their categorization of foundational world cities literature, perhaps because this concept has seldom been put into conversation with world city analyses. Nevertheless, I argue that translocalism is an applicable framework for studying connections between urban centers such as world cities, especially since the concept centers the processes involved in the lives of immigrants and emigrants who travel between here and elsewhere.

While there is purchase in the structuralism of Friedmann and Sassen’s approach to world cities—as there are indeed systemic patterns that underpin how such cities function and their interactions with each other—there is a need to diversify and democratize their structuralism. The translocal geographic analysis allows for a more fluid investigation rooted and routed in the terrain of everyday life—more so than the terrain of theory. World cities, thus, are dense areas of intersecting translocal flows.

Perhaps a grassroots structuralism, instead of superstructuralism, is needed to better understand the world cities we inhabit.

The following analysis of Paris-Belleville, and pertinent world city dynamics, falls heavily upon the theorizing of the above foundational authors. The essay goes further, incorporating insights of additional urbanists writing in Anglophone and Francophone contexts, as well as my own collection of field observations and interviews.

Theory & practice are weaved together to represent and construct novel visions of the Paris-Belleville, which apply to the idea of the world city overall.

Questioning After preliminary observations in Belleville, I began to consider how the above multifaceted dynamics are related to affairs in the whole of the city, and indeed the rest of the world. From simply walking around Belleville, and seeing the many non-French, nonEuropean signs and bodies in its space, it became clear that global dynamics have firmly taken root. And there is no doubt that the geography of Paris influences the changes the neighborhood has experienced since its founding. Thus, the research that went into 42 Peter G. Mandaville, “Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no. 3 (1999): 653-673.

43 Mandaville, “Territory and Translocality,” 654.

44 Mandaville, 663-67.

21 making this paper studied the worlding dynamics, as they are manifest in Belleville and Paris as a whole.

How, where, and why do actors in Belleville locate their neighborhood in the context of world city flows? As previously described, Belleville benefits from a strong community imaginary and character, though it suffers from social and cultural fractures and conflicts. World city scholars before me have argued that many of these local phenomena can be explained with a framework that folds together ideas of local and global. I take up this perspective by asking how residents “locate” their space of everyday life. Locating is a crucial process of situated reflection and action that speaks to one’s sense of belonging to place and understanding of space. As Kevin Lynch discerned in his foundational research on urban form, this process allows residents to exist and move in space in ways that reflect their belonging and understanding.45 Lynch also describes that locating occurs more intensely in certain “nodes.” These are key sites that give meaning to place, thereby ‘locating’ in an existential and epistemological manner. As always, it is important that we ask why people locate. Evidently there is much at stake for Belleville residents, from very immediate concerns of safety and services to more profound issues of what it means to live in the neighborhood or in migratory trajectories. My approach puts the processes by which residents locate Belleville in conversation with the idea that the global becomes local, and vice versa, through world city dynamics.

Instead of limiting my research to the scale of an entire city, I reach into the fabric of Paris to discern just in what ways the world city is expressed in the space of everyday life. How does translocality play out on the neighborhood scale? thus reveals itself as another central question for this analysis. I am interested in the global exchanges that take hold in Belleville and shape the ways it is imagined, performed and (re)constructed. Such a question becomes crucial in the context of world cities literature that approaches the city as an undifferentiated unity, often leaving behind the neighborhoods in favor of more glamorous emblems of global prestige. At the same time, we see neighborhoods outside of world city centers being forgotten and losing key services; that is, unless they are appropriated by forces with economic power who invest in these marginalized communities at the expense of poorer residents. This is occurring in Seine-Saint Denis, which is being transformed to host the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. For an analysis of the world city dynamics in Belleville and Paris, it is thus crucial to foster curiosity toward the diversity of ways globality and translocality articulate themselves locally.

While the terms ‘local’ and ‘global’ prove to be invariably useful when studying world cities, this field distinguishes itself by its inherent ability to confound the duality separating the two. However, in the foundational texts of the discipline, the City is still oriented outward while the Neighborhood looks inward. The City—or rather its command and control centers—is mistakenly seen only as global, and the Neighborhood as local. This leads me to a final research question that speaks to the ways that resident and academics alike discuss urban space: What alternatives exist to the hierarchal relationship between the neighborhood and the city, and why are such alternatives important? This question speaks to the need for a new geographical framework to orient contemporary discourses about world cities. The hope is that an updated framework will better account for complicated existences that can neither be aptly termed ‘local’ or 45 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960).

22 ‘global,’ or ‘of the city’ or ‘of the neighborhood.’ The study of translocal trajectories is, thus, important in finding a path toward destabilizing this dichotomy.

Opening the Terrain We are dealing with Paris, and with a specific Parisian neighborhood, Belleville.

But we are also dealing with the many translocal ties that develop exchanges between this city and localities elsewhere. Paris is a city of 2.2 million in a space a quarter the size of Detroit, Michigan, which holds just less than 700,000. Paris intra-muros is a dense space where trajectories originating in the city, in the other French towns, and across the planet mingle. Paris is a place often defined by its relationship to its past—through monarchy, revolution, empire, colonialism, and modernism. Within such histories, the city consistently played an important role on the national and global levels. The city was at the heart of French nation-building, and was connected to a variety of monarchal, revolutionary, imperial, colonial, and modernist movements in the world. Since medieval times, Paris has allied itself to flows of people and goods that, even in the 13th century, connected China to Parisian markets. For centuries, the city has (re)created and maintained translocal networks on a global scale—often to the benefit of the capital city and the French state it directs. Given such histories, I affirm that Paris has been a key node in French, European, and global power geometries46.

Paris, nor any place for that matter, cannot be understood as a discrete entity.

Thus, when I refer to “Paris,” I refer to the complex character of a city only comprehended with the recognition of its local, national, and global trajectories. Parisian urbanism can only be read appropriately with this in mind. The division of the city between rive droite and rive gauche47, for example, ties back to political tension between civil and religious powers of the pre-Revolutionary era. Current wealth and resource disparities observed or imagined between the two banks trace back to this medieval spatial order. This distinction appears too simple to explain contemporary complexities in urban systems—to which I respond affirmatively. That such a differentiation is at least salient in the Parisian imaginary, however, attests to the power of the Parisian palimpsest.

There is another simple geographic division in Paris, one that I argue is more important today than the left-right duality: an east-west divide approximately marked by the Boulevard de Sebastopol on the right bank and the Boulevard St. Michel on the left.

This divide separates many of the wealthy arrondissements from the poorer ones, as well as the ethnically homogenous quarters (read: White European) from the more diverse and welcoming to immigrants48. The following chart exhibits along what axes the unequal distribution of wealth is organized in the city, and supports the case that the east-west divide is more significant than the former left-right duality.

46 Doreen Massey, “Power Geometries and a Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 59-69.

47 “Right bank” and “left bank” refer to the Parisian north and south banks of the Seine, respectively.

48 Seven out of the ten arrondissements in western Paris are among the richest ten in the city. Moreover, the richest seven arrondissements contain the half of the wealth of Paris’ 20 total arrondissements, with only one of these 7 residing in the eastern half of the city. Clearly, there is an unequal distribution of wealth tied to private property and geographic location.

23 Figure 1 – Wealth of Paris arrondissements by mean estate tax (ISF)49 Arrondissement East or West Left or Right Bank Mean estate tax (Euros/year) 7 West Left 22,547 16 West Right 16,582 8 West Right 15,933 6 West Left 14,637 1 West Right 12,272 4 East Right 11,478 17 West Right 9,125 3 East Right 7,906 5 East Left 7,665 9 West Right 7,169 18 West Right 6,699 14 East & West Right 6,612 2 West Right 6,388 15 West Left 5,993 12 East Right 5,469 11 East Right 5,225 13 East Left 4,926 10 East & West Right 4,858 19 East Right 4,817 20 East Right 4,051 Average mean estate tax: 9,017.60 In this geography, Belleville is located in what is the most populaire quadrant of Paris: the northeast. Specifically, Belleville reaches into the 10th, 11th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements. The above chart shows that all four are among the five least wealthy Parisian districts. The neighborhood’s working-class character is tied to a long history of marginalization, especially in relation to the bourgeois central city.

Belleville’s history starts with an agrarian, vineyard community on the outskirts of medieval Paris. This former village covered a large area that included the north half of the 20th arrondissement and the south half of the 19th. As Paris grew, the hilltop village followed suit. Traders—transporting their goods to the capital for sale—frequented Belleville’s inns, bars, and depots. The monarchy imposed an entry tax on goods imported into Paris in 178550 that not only encouraged traders to sell outside of the city, but for customers, workers and artisans to leave and even settle outside Paris’s walls.

Bellville, and other extra-muros villages such as Pigalle, became hubs for the Parisian 49 Data retrieved from “ISF: le classement des arrondissements de Paris” (Journal du Net) http://www.journaldunet.com/economie/magazine/riche-paris/classement.shtml. The ISF, or Impôt solidaire sur la fortune, is an estate tax on wealthy individuals. Data from 2011. Blue highlight denotes arrondissements with mean estate tax above the Parisian average, and red highlight denotes those below the average.

50 De Villanova and Deboulet, Belleville, quartier populaire ?, 19.

24 working-class and the socially promiscuous—replete with worker’s clubs, bars, and cabarets in a frequency unseen within the city’s walls. By the time Belleville was annexed by the city of Paris in 1860, Belleville was the twelfth most populated municipality in France. When Haussmann’s development program tore down the wall and expanded the city, economic and physical barriers to entry were lifted, yet the former villages’ populaire character remained intact. Traces of this past reveal themselves to the informed eye: the former wall of Paris is traced by Boulevard de la Villette and Boulevard Belleville, which serve as the sector’s main arteries, and the neighborhood’s urban fabric retains a village-like pattern51. Even today, many Bellevilleois.es refer to their neighborhood as a “quartier-village”.

Belleville has served as a hub for working-class immigrants since its annexation.

Residents displaced from populaire districts demolished during Haussmannian renovations fled to Belleville, where affordable housing and services were still abundant.

At the same time, the quartier-village served as the staging ground for French countrypeople migrating to the city for jobs provided by the Haussmannian renovations and modernizing economy. As European geopolitics changed, and the borders of its states became progressively more porous, populations fleeing economic precarity and political persecution moved into Belleville. By this time—in the earlier half of the 20th century— Belleville had a cultivated tradition of sociocultural mixing and tolerance of diverse ways of life. Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish immigrants all settled here in great numbers, creating ethnic micro-communities in the dense Parisian tissue.

After World War II, and the subsequent wave of decolonization, the direction of global relations shifted; unidirectional global relations mutated into the multidirectional system of flows with which we are so familiar today—and with which this study occupies itself. The former capital of the French empire faced an influx of migrants from former colonies and under-resourced nations. Yet again Belleville was the perfect staging ground for incoming populations with less wealth and enfranchisement. Tunisian, particularly Tunisian Jews, flocked to Belleville for its affordability as well as the budding Tunisian community. Turks, Algerians, Lebanese, Chinese, Indochinese, and Sub-Saharan Africans likewise settled Belleville later in the 20th century. Today, three main ethnic groups stand out in Bellville among the rest: White Europeans, Maghreb, and Chinese.

The varied trajectories weaving their ways through Parisian time and space make this terrain ripe for the study of globality, locality, and world city systems. With background knowledge of the spaces at hand, we can begin to dig into the manifold dynamics at work in Paris-Belleville. These dynamics are characterized by varying connections between here and elsewhere, and oscillating affects of belonging and alienation. It is my task to bring these contradictory and overlapping experiences to light, and to evaluate the terrain in the context of world city theories.

Experimenting with Methodology Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.52

51 Belleville was not touched by Haussmann’s sweeping redevelopment of the city. For this reason, we do not see the grands boulevards and uniform, ornate haussmannian structures that characterize much of the central city.

25 Guy Debord provides a wise and cautionary axiom for those of us who try to deeply grasp realities at hand. The methodology that I built in the course of the research process is one that tends to this challenge by uncovering what lies beneath spectacular landscapes, where that which is deemed ‘true’ by dominant culture is often the opposite.

In this sense, it is up to us to deeply re-think how our society and our cities function and present themselves. It is up to me as a researcher to provide a pathway for such an analysis in Belleville-Paris, and to uplift the processes of rethinking space that occurs constantly in the neighborhood. The goals of this section are to share the methodological approach from which my arguments are generated, and to argue the appropriateness of the repertoire of methods used to the specific terrain studied and to the questions being asked of this terrain.

As I built my methodological approach with an eye for world city systems, I rapidly realized that any appropriate approach would require a diverse array of socially responsible research methods—ones accessible to a short-term Belleville resident and foreigner coming to terms with a new cultural context. Therefore, methods ranged from interviews with Belleville residents, to placed-based ethnographic observation, walking ethnography, photography, video and audio recording, collection of print media, and online investigation of key actors. A healthy combination of these methods allowed me to meet people and places where they were at—that is, with the language and perspective used by regular residents and users of the spaces under study.

I particularly relied on interviews with Belleville residents to focus my field of study and to open gateways to spaces and individuals to which I would otherwise not have had access. Asking my interlocutors where they saw the most evidence of globality in the entire city of Paris pointed me to certain key sites of interest. Those that were most frequently evoked include the Eiffel Tower, Gare du Nord, the Louvre, and La Défense. I would then delve into place-based studies of these sites; observing the dynamics between people, institutions, and urban form as they manifest on the ground. Later in this essay I put findings from such observations in conversation with those gained from interviews, online research, and other literature.

I spent most time during the two research periods, however, in Belleville. Here, I also used interview subjects to point me to certain sites that best characterize the neighborhood. I then conducted several rounds of observation at these sites—carrefour de Belleville,53 Parc de Belleville, and on the rue de Belleville. I took thorough notes on interactions between people and between people and the built environment, spoke casually to some, and used walking as a mobile ethnographic method to better understand the ins and outs of how people interact in and with these spaces.

To study these settings, I rely heavily on photographic, video, and audio records taken during the periods of study. Again, drawing on the insight of Debord and his fellow Situationists, I focused on recording that which is often overlooked in the built environment due to the society of the spectacle. At the Eiffel Tower, I was struck by the immense array of security personnel and barriers that juxtaposed the immense 52 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 3. Translation: “In a world reversed upon itself, the truth is a

moment of the false.”

53 I use “carrefour de Belleville”, or “Belleville intersection”, to denote the intersection of Boulevard de Belleville, Rue de Belleville, Rue du Faubourg du Temple, and Boulevard de la Villette. This is an important intersection in the neighborhood, and is the location of the metro stop “Belleville.”

26 monumentality of the structure, and I recorded people’s varied interactions with this spatial configuration. In Belleville, I had an eye toward the everyday interactions we have with others our built environment, which often go overlooked. I studied and recorded spaces that pull in passers-by with a seemingly gravitational pull: metro exits and entrances, corner cafés, commerce, oases of greenery. I also paid attention to spaces ignored, walked through, and taken for granted. It is my belief that such moments of interaction in and with space show us how, where, and why people locate. These moments also speak to world city dynamics at the heart of this study. Such recordings will supplement the arguments made throughout this paper, and draw the reader into the life worlds of Paris-Belleville. Likewise, the recordings will be central to a gallery exhibition of my research in May 2018 at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, in collaboration with performing art technician, Clement Turner.

The methodological framework used in the study of Paris-Belleville selfconsciously distances itself from the structuralism of earlier world city analyses. Instead, these methods and their analysis are based partially upon the phenomenological approaches of the Situationists, which sought to reinterpret the city by actively working against normative behavior in urban form. The tactic of ‘détournement’, or ‘rerouting’, employed by the Situationists was a way to turn the society of the spectacle—modern capitalist media culture and urban form, specifically—against itself. The Situationists’ ingenuity in building an analysis of the city simultaneously rooted in everyday practice and anti-capitalist, anti-hegemonic politics is one that outlived the group. Field work for this study was approached with a similar intention as the Situationists in Paris decades before me; I interpreted that which was presented in urban space through a skeptical lens.

The application of resident testimony to my field practice, however, integrated an anthropological element into that of the phenomenological Situationist practice. I was at once uncovering that which was hidden by advanced capitalist spectacle and peeling back the layers of a neighborhood and a city shrouded to the outsider’s eye.

27

At the base of the Eiffel Tour – October 2017.

*

*

*

Through the course of this study, I deal primarily with two different terrains: the terrain of Paris-Belleville, and the terrain of world city studies. Both terrains are spaces of tension and mutual understanding. While the former is foremost a material environment, the latter is an ideological landscape floating between authors and universities. Is there not more nuance to the difference between the two terrains at hand, though? World city theories have clear material consequences. Friedmann and others’ structuralism in the 1980s set the tone for contemporary world city politics. Their writing, in the hands of the State and capitalists, was and is used to justify the competition between such cities to attract international capital. The race between Los Angeles and Paris to host the 2024 Olympic Games in the first half of 2017 is a current, specific example of mechanistic world city theory at play in a global arena of cities working as powerful actors.

Because we are living in a world city moment, rerouting our discourse therein takes on a grand importance. The purpose of my work is to synthesize methods that have not been developed in such analyses. The Situationist brand of urban phenomenology, the spatial dialectics of Lefebvre, the environmental psychology of Lynch, the democratizing re-theorization by Robinson and Massey, and my own field research collude in the context of the current study. Such is a constructive collusion—stirring up a novel sense of the world city. This new sense is one that specifically seeks to understand the complexity

28 in the world city—from its monuments and sites of power, to its historically marginalized neighborhoods and translocal actors.

By applying a hybrid methodology based on the everyday spatial practice and representations of space,54 the act of locating as an active mode of spatial agency became evident. I was able to see different groups and individuals invest their time and energy in Belleville. Whether this was by taking up space with friends or family in a park, painting on walls, maintaining commercial establishments, co-organizing public events, or refracting reality through cultural production—Bellevillois.es are constantly in the middle of making their neighborhood familiar to them. Through interviews and observations, I found that many residents are actively engaged in (re)constructing a landscape of belonging in Belleville. Bourdieu calls this “symbolic mastery”—the ability to shape the field and the social scripts found therein.55 The practice of locating the neighborhood is both in response to pressures within the world city system and the (re)creation of the system itself.

The following chapters unveil how theory and practice meet to generate this novel pathway toward a more democratic understanding of the world city, Paris-Belleville, and the local and global more broadly. These sections expand upon the field research which allowed me to build the argument begun in this first chapter. Likewise, they will delve deeper into the theory evaluated in the above literature review, while incorporating supplementary ideas from writers inside and outside the world city subfield. By the end, we will be left with an understanding of the world city as not just a force in global capitalism, but as a driver of the translocal exchanges that are destabilizing the ways we envision our urban spaces and ties to locality and globality. As you will see, my hope is for this analysis to contribute to the reworking of politics against the hegemony of financial capital in the terrain of Paris-Belleville, other world cities, and the academic discipline itself.

54 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38-39.

55 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990).

29

CHAPTER II Imaginations of Local & Global in Paris-Belleville “I was born just about everywhere.” – Michele le Dœuff56 In a world increasingly characterized by movement, we are also confronted with deep­seated identities of place. Capital and people migrate across seas, hop cities and continents. Some of these very same actors express a pride of place specific to a single locality. The artist ‘based in’ Paris is just that: principally tied to this city, though usually on the move—around the region, continent, or globe—given the connections formed at their ‘home base’. The Parisian artist travels without losing a sense of place in their home city. Indeed, activity conducted abroad may expand their social networks and spatial agency at home. Clearly, the conditions of locality and globality are central to the ways in which we conceive of our environment. When we seek to study world cities, we must pay due diligence to the supposed duality of local and global—and the many implications for cities therein.

In this chapter, I evoke research from my field studies of Paris­Belleville to reckon with this dichotomy. I lean on observations of particularly ‘globalized’ areas, interviews, and street­level ethnographies—all of which allow me to synthesize my findings with pertinent theoretical considerations from the ground up. I apply Mohanty’s method of “reading up”57 in order to examine the juncture between local and global, as well as to deconstruct the common logic that creates a hierarchical relationship between City and Neighborhood. Ethnographic observations of ‘globalized’ places in Paris will uncover the diverse realities inherent to the field of study—a diversity neither exclusively local or global, nor belonging solely to the city, its neighborhood, or the world. The evidence I gathered points to a hegemony of the local­global dichotomy on our thinking of spatial agency.

I go on to pose the question: How is Paris a world city? In Chapter I, I hinted that world city dynamics can be interpreted through the framework of translocalism. By applying this perspective more concretely to the study of Paris­Belleville, Chapter II proposes that the world citydom of Paris as a whole is best interpreted with translocal exchanges in mind—in which Paris acts as a switchboard where activity between localities the world over are mediated. Robinson’s analysis of all cities as world cities, and of the plurality of world city systems, serves as a critical reflex as I continue to investigate the character of world city dynamics at play in Paris.

56 Michèle le Dœuff. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 172.

57 Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Postcolonial Discourse,” boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 333-358.

30 This chapter coalesces with an evaluation of the roles of locality, globality, and translocality in the context of Belleville. In this section, I delve into the life­worlds of the neighborhood evoked during periods of field work. By offering resident testimony to the character—or the imaginaries therein—of their neighborhood, along with ethnography of this space, I hope to exhibit the tangle of ties to here and elsewhere that cohabitate this neighborhood. I leave it until later in this work to beginning untangling the mess of such flows; let this chapter guide you through the mess of what it means to live in a global city: always—but never fully—local, global, and translocal. Belleville, to return to Michèle le Dœuff, is a place born just about everywhere.

Identifying Dichotomy, Confronting Hegemony When Friedmann coined the academic discourse around world cities with the publication of “The World City Hypothesis” in 1986, he reflected the common logic of the time regarding the opposition between local and global. Friedmann’s essay also detonated a vein of urbanism within both politics and academia that set global trajectories in opposition to the specificity of localities. In this vision of globalization, there is an emphasis on the increasing prominence of globality, and the diminishing uniqueness and importance of localities. Sassen redeployed the clear distinction between global and local that Friedmann founded. In Sassen’s work, she argues that world city exchanges are forming at an unprecedented pace, and that such global exchanges are forcibly manifest in world cities. Such cities, like Paris, act has localizing nodes for and of global capital.

In “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims”, Sassen writes, “Major cities in the highly developed world are the terrain where a multiplicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms”58. Yet, Massey shows that such a vision adopts the colonizer’s perspective of globalization, forgetting that traces of elsewhere have indeed been salient in colonized territory since the beginning of human conquest.

I am writing in the vein of world city urbanism that Friedmann began over three decades ago. However, it is crucial that I pinpoint the dichotomies inherent to many world city analyses. The dichotomy between the local and the global is central and problematic to much of this literature and policy. Central, as the idea that some cities are worldly while others are not, and as is the notion that certain cities are excluded from the global exchanges that increasingly contemporary humanity. Problematic, as this distinction reproduces the hierarchies between the imperial core—cities like London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo—and their exploited hinterlands or colonies. Such hierarchies are not only unjust, they are out of touch with geographic realities that are more complex than the core versus periphery model.

What is striking about world cities literature is that it has succeeded in linking the dichotomy between local and global with the distinction between City and Neighborhood.

In a world of worlding cities, the central city—the City writ large, and characterized by its powerful political, economic, and cultural centers—seems to exist in opposition to 58 Saskia Sassen, “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims,” Public Culture 8, no. 1 (1996): 205-222.

31 neighborhoods, whose actors have less recognized authority. Though Sassen recognizes the global condition of many marginalized communities in the world city, her analysis underlines the association between the non­central urban neighborhood and the local­as­ victim: The disparities, as seen and as lived, between the urban glamour zone and the urban war zone have become enormous. The extreme visibility of the difference is likely to contribute to further brutalization of the conflict: the indifference and greed of the new elites versus the hopelessness and rage of the poor . . . The center now concentrates immense economic and political power, power that rests on the capability for global control and the capability to produce superprofits.

And actors with little economic and traditional political power have become an increasingly strong presence through the new politics of culture and identity . . .59 Paris’s museums, monuments, and shopping districts centered around the Seine— including Rue de Rivoli, le Champs Elysée, Ile de la Cité, and much of the 6th and 7th arrondissements—hold a place in the global consciousness of the city, according to my interviews. It is in this central sector where most interlocutors identified Paris’s ties to the rest of the world: le Louvre, l’Elysée, la Sorbonne, and the Eiffel Tour are all in walking distance to the Seine’s quays. These locations, nonetheless, represent the vision of Parisian globality as seen through the bourgeois and tourist gaze. It is this privileged view of what globality means that tourists share with Friedmann and his ilk, and which permeates even among the populaire residents of Belleville. Municipal politicians and corporate leaders then buy into the idea that their cities must globally dominate—and that the only way to do so is by developing and extending the central city’s features throughout the metropolitan area. They seek to attract international events, make havens for multinational corporations, and facilitate more travel in and out of the city with expensive renovations to transit hubs.

The collusion among a variety of elite professionals to set the ‘global’ apart from the ‘local’ is evidence that such a dichotomy is constructed, not an essential fact of life. It is also a way that large cities, and specifically the prestigious centers such as central Paris, have taken on a ‘global’ character. Under such a construct, then, neighborhoods like Belleville are relegated to the ‘local’—incapable of attaining the worldly prowess as defined by the elite or mobile bourgeoisie. This is the discourse with which we are faced, and which I critique using field­based findings and a novel theoretical framework, which applies Situationist phenomenology, and environmental psychological methods, to the study of world cities on the ground.

Indeed, in Friedmann’s later writing on the subject—which applies a more social justice­oriented view of world city formation—the assumptions of hierarchy between global and local in the space of the city are still present. In “Place and Placemaking in Cities: A Global Perspective”60, Friedmann calls for planners to contest the “entropic . . .

59 Saskia Sassen, “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims,” 221.

60 John Friedmann, “Place and Placemaking in Cities: A Global Perspective, Planning Theory & Practice,” Urban Planning Theory & Practice, no.11 (2010): 149-165.

32 forces of contemporary life that steadily eat away at our sense of being anywhere at all, erasing our sense of place.”61 For him, these “contemporary forces” are obviously intrinsic to world city formation, or what Massey would call the restructuring of global power geometries. Friedmann goes on to share an imperative for fellow urbanists to “recover” places, re­humanizing “the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods.”.62 Whereas Friedmann offers an analysis on the importance of urban places for the promotion of egalitarian cities, he does not voyage beyond the opposition between local and global that underpinned his original world city hypothesis: the global works to squash the agency of the local, obliterates “space for social reproduction and transformation”, and generates a sense of placelessness which must be counteracted.

But is this not the case? Do we not see in any city with cosmopolitan leanings or aspirations quarters that look like they could be in any other? Many Belleville residents who I interviewed pointed to La Défense—a financial center and the largest purpose­built business district in Europe just east of Paris’s city limits, in the Hauts­de­Seine department—as a district supposedly void of any sign of local character. La Défense was frequently noted by subjects for its capacity to tie Paris to a global human civilization.

This is the hub of big finance for Ile­de­France, where economic exchanges are brokered and transmitted far away in its many glassy towers. Here, it seems that the modernist impulse to iron away internal differences in space has succeeded. On the other hand, the postmodern concept of simulacra—or, an abstracted representation of reality—appears to manifest itself here, just as in the financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo. La Défense, then, appears to simultaneously be othered from its Francillien63 or Parisian spatial context and allied more closely with other global financial districts around the world. Through this lens, La Défense is read as homogenous, placeless, and non­local.

While affirming the observations of those with whom I spoke, I propose that many of us fall into the same logical hole as Friedmann when thinking about elite urban spaces—notably financial districts—on the scale of a single metropole. In these areas, we see an urban aesthetics originating form an abstract elsewhere. We do not see ourselves represented or representing this type of space; it is not local to us, but abstractly ‘global.’

This logic adheres to the most powerful articulations of globality outlined above, even when more obvious ones lie just under our noses: in populaire and immigrant neighborhoods like Belleville. Such places exercise a different sort of power over translocal exchanges across the globe, not necessarily a lesser power.

Now that it is clear that a dichotomy exists between global and local, and that it has been twined with the dichotomy between (central) City and Neighborhood, we may come to terms with the hegemonic relationship of the global over the local and the city over its neighborhoods. In the process of confronting this hegemonic relationship, I hope to also deconstruct the dichotomies therein.

City governments, for one, have an increasingly large stake in aligning themselves with signs of globality—specifically the elite structuralist globality previously 61 Friedmann, “Place and Placemaking in Cities,” 150.

62 Friedmann, 152.

63 “Francilien.ne” is an adjective referring that which is from, or characterized by, the region of Ile-deFrance—including Paris.

33 described. Transnational and international institutions like the UN and its subsidiaries, cultural exhibitions, conferences, competitions, and corporations must be materialized in specific places even though they serve a ‘global’ clientele. Large metropolises like Paris, then, vie to host such institutions for the capital they attract to the region, as well as for the symbolic prestige accorded to the city in a globalizing cultural economy. Municipal and State funds are directed toward fixing such capital. Created in 1958, L’Établissement public pour l’aménegement de La Défense (EPAD), for example, sought to redevelop zones in Courbevoie, Nanterre, and Puteaux into an entirely new business district. The existing farms, factories, and shanties in the area were demolished in order to build new glassy skyscrapers, malls, and plazas for the planned district. La Défense now is home to only 25,000 residents, while 180,000 workers commute to and from its offices daily, and 8,000,000 tourists visit its Grande Arche and long esplanade each year. La Défense bears witness to an important though troubling trend: people’s space of everyday life is encroached upon by developments by and for a globalizing elite. Former residents have no choice but to find home elsewhere when the State intervenes in the attempt to fix what Harvey calls “footloose capital” for the ‘best interest’ of the city.

La Défense. Photo taken from the central esplanade, looking northeast in the direction of the commune of Courbevoie.

In an era of global, neoliberal economic and social restructuring, localities that do not contribute to the building of the elite world city are marginalized—even extinguished.

Another case in point: Paris’s bids to host the 2012 and 2024 Summer Olympics. In the years leading up to the 2012 Olympics, Paris entered a heated diplomatic struggle with a historical rival—London—for the rights to host the famed international athletic

34 competition. The two cities vied for the temporary global spotlight that the Games provide, and for the similarly ephemeral economic profits to be had during the event itself. London ended up succeeding in its bid, and Paris returned to the International Olympic Committee in 2015 with a bid to host the 2024 Games. Despite the history of net economic loss associated with hosting the Olympics,64 the City of Paris willfully re­ entered the bidding competition, which narrowly ended in summer 2017 when Paris was selected over Los Angeles for the 2024 Games.

The city quickly mobilized planning for the new infrastructure needed to host such a grandiose event. This was branded as an opportunity by the Mairie de Paris, headed by mayor Anne Hidalgo, to modernize Paris and raise its inhabitants’ quality of life: renovating the metro rail system making handicap accessible, cleaning the Seine for aquatic Olympic events, creating more pedestrian and bike­friendly routes, and minimizing motor vehicle traffic. The city, however, would need to find land to build a new aquatics center and the Olympic Village traditionally constructed for athletes during the 2­week long competition. Where does a city as dense as Paris construct such massive developments? Not in Paris it turns out. The committee in charge of Paris’s bid identified the three communes in the department of Seine­Saint­Denis, to the north of Paris, to accommodate major renovations leading up to 2024: Saint­Denis, Saint­Ouen, and L’Île­ Saint­Denis. The commune of Saint­Denis is already home to Stade de France, where many of Olympic events will be held. Saint­Denis is also one of the infamous Parisian banlieues—a word that simply means ‘suburb,’ but which has gained a threatening connotation given their populaire and militant histories. Thus, in succeeding to finally win a bid for the prestigious Summer Olympic Games, Paris is deciding once again to employ its political hegemony to direct the lives of those who do not (yet)65 serve the purposes of world city formation.

These banlieues are targeted because their populations threaten the hegemonic order of world cities. In 2005, massive riots and rebellions rocked Saint­Denis and other Parisian banlieues. These were largely in response to the structural disenfranchisement and discrimination that the population of non­White origins have historically received in Paris extra­muros. Therefore, when le Mairie de Paris proclaim that redeveloping Saint­ Denis will train a new youth workforce to contribute to the region’s economy, they are responding to the fears of black or gray market activity, organized non­State violence, and “communautarisme” in Seine­Saint­Denis. They are also responding to the calls from capitalists to open up the housing market in Seine­Saint­Denis to more speculation, which began even before Paris won its 2024 bid. These fears, I learned, originate in Parisian bourgeois classes. As this paper continues, we will return to these fears in the context of Belleville—a neighborhood not too dissimilar with Saint­Denis even though it lies within the municipality—and the implications that similar responses have for the spatial agency of residents over the space of their everyday lives.

64 14 of the last 25 Olympics Games have resulted in a net economic loss for the host city and country, with the CDN$990,000,000 loss accrued for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal being the most severe.

65 I say “yet” parenthetically because one of the goals of the Olympic redevelopment of Seine-SaintDenis is to give residents, particularly the youth population, occupational training and work experience so they can be more “useful” in the political economy of Ile-de-France.

35 The relationship between city governments and large private enterprise is clearly hegemonic in the case of Seine­Saint­Denis. There was no choice for the residents in the zones where new structures are to be built during the planning process, and now there is no choice but to be relocated. This spatialized power geometry is rooted in the dichotomies between global and local, and (central) City and Neighborhood—wherein the latter are consistently subservient to the former. In reality, this means that quality services are directed away from longtime residents and establishments to serve the interest of those which more keenly match an elite global vision. It also means that the populations of the service­deprived areas are politically and socially disenfranchised.

They are distanced from a fully realized, culturally appropriate spatial agency in municipal politics and Parisian society. Without such agency, their neighborhoods are prone to redevelopment, while the fabric of more elite areas are preserved for generations.

This dichotomy is incredibly consequential for all of us living in cities— especially those whose spatial agency is called into question. The dichotomy is a flawed construct that we are better off without. This construct, I argue, has permeated world cities literature and into the political arena in a way that normalizes the idea that the global and local are mutually exclusive, and that the global and local must exist in an adversarial relationship in world cities.

La Défense, for instance, is not the exclusive domain of globalizing flows and jet setting elites. Though EPAD has greatly changed the landscape and re­territorialized the area as one of the world’s foremost financial hubs, La Défense is far from a one­sided story of globalization. During my observations here in October 2017, socioeconomic diversity was evident; among the businesspeople in professional wear were service­sector workers. Restaurant employees, custodial staff, retail merchants, and sales associates are perhaps those most visible to the average pedestrian in La Défense. This class of individual make up a great deal of this district’s economic ecosystem. Additionally, there is the occasional residential building that presides along the latitudinal esplanade that runs through the district. Upon closer investigation, I found that these residences were State­run social housing residences. These observations points to one of three analyses: either the presence of many non­elite individuals in La Défense expresses its local character, these non­elite workers are similarly inscribed in the global exchanges of the world market given their location at La Défense, or their ambiguous position bridges the bifurcation of local and global. My methodologies suggest the third analysis.

36

Two instances of government housing along the esplanade of La Défense, set in a backdrop of glassy skyscrapers.

Field studies of other prestigious locations in Paris also uncovered the ambivalence of what were mentioned most frequently as ‘global’ by interview subjects.

The Eiffel Tower, along with the adjacent Champs de Mars and Place de Trocadero, are characterized as much by their surrounding neighborhoods as their constant influx of foreign tourists. The Eiffel Tower is located at the edge of the 7th arrondissement, just across the Seine from the 16th. Figure 1 notes that these are the wealthiest arrondissements in Paris, respectively. The class dynamics in these arrondissements contribute to the spatial interactions around the Tower. I witnessed many literal and figurative signs advising visitors to audit their comportment in order to preserve the State’s orderly vision for the built environment. Literal signs directed visitors how to use the public space at Champs de Mars, how to enter the Tower’s premises, and how to navigate the surrounding neighborhood. More strikingly, the State erected a variety of barriers—from metal fences, to the characteristic Parisian green and gray traffic barriers,

37 to 15­foot­tall solid metal fences—to prevent access into the grounds of the Eiffel Tower or the green lawn of the Champs de Mars. This security apparatus self­consciously inscribes itself into the globalized discourse around (anti)­terrorism; it is also tied to the class interests of those in the surrounding neighborhoods: the most powerful people in world city. If we peel back the layers of spectacle—as the Situationists advise—we recognize that the performance of security all around the Eiffel Tower reflects a particular class dynamic of the adjacent, local variety. This all goes unbeknownst to the tourist, entranced by the pull of the great monument and surrounding spectacular landscape. However, the message of these figurative signs is clear: spatial agency here belongs to the State.

Around the Eiffel Tower, we see the colluding hegemony of the State and global capital in action. Tourists—mostly from outside of France—are indeed a part of this mix.

However, my study in the terrain suggests that this hegemony is not rooted in a true dichotomy of the local and global as much as it constructs such a dichotomy. The historical aristocratic and bourgeois class dynamics in the space surrounding the Eiffel Tower cannot be separated from its prominence as a global tourist attraction. Nor can its worldwide status be detached from the influence it has on its environs, which profits from the relatively wealthy visitors it attracts. If this place stands for the global and local simultaneously, then does it truly stand for either?

In Belleville, a neighborhood on the opposite side of the class spectrum as the 7th th and 16 arrondissements, this dichotomy is also confounded—in this case, by the material and symbolic ties that many of its residents maintain with a foreign homeland.

Material exchanges in Belleville are most visibly mediated via commerce. These exchanges often occur in complex chains that originate in a businessperson’s nation of origin and that end with the direct exchange between the merchant and a customer in a shop, restaurant, or outdoor market. Behind such commodity chains are the links that maintain ties between Belleville and elsewhere. Telecommunication stores, which occur in high frequency in the neighborhood, offer affordable devices for people to stay in touch with those outside of immediate contact. Not only do they coordinate transnational material exchanges and transactions over the phone, these merchants use telecommunications to maintain the relationships that predicate trade in the first place.

Additionally, wire services such as Western Union and MoneyGram facilitate material and social ties between Belleville and its immigrant residents’ homelands. In a world where normative economic transactions take the form of currency exchanges, wire services represent the physical anchors for a virtual, global, and non­elite economy. As in other immigrant quarters, Belleville houses many shops espousing such services. These affordable modern technologies maintain community connections between potentially faraway localities.

38

MoneyGram location on Rue de Ménilmotant.

On a different level, Belleville confounds the dichotomy at hand through the symbolic referents, exchanges, and institutions in its urban environment that are at once, and thus neither, global or local. Take the Rue de Belleville, between Boulevard de Belleville and Rue des Pyrénées, for instance. Walking on the sidewalk up the hill from the Belleville metro, one encounters a surprising number of commercial signs in Chinese, or the French equivalent of Chinese words. These signs advertise the restaurants and shops that claim space for the Chinese in Belleville, in order to communicate along their cultural norms and in their languages. The signs—marking cultural juxtaposition and hybridity—also territorialize the space; they indicate the claims that East Asian communities have set down in Belleville over recent decades. These signs are juxtaposed against those in other languages. In further sections, we will come back to this dynamic and the idea of linguistic landscapes in relation to world cities, locating and spatial agency.

On an institutional level, Belleville’s two regular open­air markets also deconstruct the global­local dichotomy through the complexity of cultural and economic relationships underpinning and manifesting the markets. These two markets occur on twice a week on Rue des Pyrénées—between Hôtel de l’Emritage and Rue de Ménilmotant—and on Boulevard de Belleville—between the metro stops Belleville and Ménilmotant. These ephemeral though regular spaces are crucial spaces where Belleville residents meet neighbors, build existing relationships, and solidify ties to their neighborhood. The public markets act as more than open­air shops, but as institutions that broker and mutate ties to people and places. The neighborhood ethos of Belleville is thus constructed through the exchange of goods grown and manufactured around the world. In Chapter III the centrality of these markets to the locating of Belleville among world city dynamics becomes more evident.

Whether we are in Belleville or one of Paris’s world­renowned tourist sites, it is crucial to understand the discourse around globality and locality at play within our cities.

This discourse is hegemonic; possible conditions within it are predicated on a duality between the global and local. This is a dichotomy that we are constantly confronted with when talking about our cities. Paris is no different. This city allies itself with an elite formulation of the “world city” for the purposes of attracting capital and advancing in a competition between world cities in an arena completely constructed out of this

39 problematic differentiation between local and global. In this way, Paris maintains a degree of hegemony over actors in the city who are not able to surpass “local” limits in the economist sense. However, such actors and their neighborhoods align themselves with elsewheres in ways that move beyond this hegemony. By studying the space outside of the hegemonic globalist discourse, we set down the path of confronting the inequitable distribution of spatial agency in the world city.

(How) Is Paris a World City?

One of the key assumptions that is made in this analysis is that Paris is a world city. Such a crucial assumption depends on two components: the purchase of the concept of the world city in the context of the study, and that Paris itself can be understood comprehensively through the world cities framework.

World cities are an important theoretical and practical resource for understanding the linked restructuring of contemporary urban and world systems. In Chapter I, I describe the intellectual history of world city theory. A variety of authors grapple with the (trans)formation of cities into global entities—allied with elsewhere equally or more than here. From Friedmann to Massey and Robinson, the idea of what constitutes a world city is formed, elaborated, and contested.

Through my field research I found consistent evidence of world city dynamics in Paris, as discussed by both the traditional world city urbanists as well as its more critical currents. In places like La Défense and along the Champs Elyssée, the restructuring of global capitalism takes shape on the ground of the elite and touristic Parisian world. More importantly, especially for the structuralist like Friedmann and Sassen, Paris’s international institutions and multinational corporations hold enough pull on the global economy to be considered a “control center” of its neoliberal restructuring.66 Indeed, Friedmann’s map of world cities shown in Chapter 1 does locate Paris as a “Core: primary city” among a world of world(ing) cities. Paris’ position as a world city in the neomarxist, transnational analysis can be traced back to the city’s central role in directing imperial and colonial flows beginning in the 16th century.

Contemporary Paris is marked by its colonial and imperial heritage: populations from former colonies now flock to the city that coordinated their ancestor’s domination and attempted to shape subjugated cultures after its own. This city was able to accumulate capital over the last five centuries due to its place in the power geometry of colonialism, and now formerly colonized populations are appropriating the space of the (former) seat of empire by settling in its districts. The critical, postcolonial analyses offered by Robinson and Massey give light to the types of everyday urban practices that construct world cities out of tangled space­time trajectories.

An understanding of the diversity of trajectories, and the spaces they manifest, attests to Massey’s perspective that our understanding of world cities need not rely 66 Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” 70. Friedmann references the position of a city as a command and control center in the formation of the new world economy as requisite to its standing as a world city. Paris’s considerable pull in the domains of luxury goods, fashion, fine art, and finance—a result of the concentration of wealth and of capital—attests to its dominance in the global power geometry.

40 exclusively on the central city. Rather, the world city is made out of spaces ranging on the spectrum between dominant and marginal, colonizer and colonized, and imperial and subject. The site of the Louvre is as important a node in the world city network as La Défense. The museum holds a coveted spot in global arts and culture circuit: lending works to institutions abroad, training generations of curators and artists, and captivating visitors from all over the planet. In a different way, non­central neighborhoods like Belleville or Saint Denis are important nodes in the fabric of the translocal world. A comparison between dominant and non­dominant spaces represent the breadth of world city form.

If Massey exposes the problematic of the synecdoche that confuses the central city as the whole city, Robinson questions just what types of flows and whose perspective the world city perspective values. Robinson adds an important postcolonial perspective to world city discourse by building her analysis from the vantage point of the colony—she, herself, a white South African living in London. Adopting this perspective, the reading of the Louvre as constituent to the elite brand of world city system is negotiated by the presence of poor and migrant others. In the courtyard that serves as the entrance to the museum, individual Sub­Saharan African men attempt to sell souvenirs to the tourists admiring the former palace’s exterior and the more recent I. M. Pei glass pyramids.

During my observations in this court, I found that these men were in fact organized as a group—joining together when police scare them from the square or during pauses from their work. Groups of self­organized Black men selling souvenirs were also at the Eiffel Tower and its environs. This parallel suggests a city­wide network of an ethnic subgroup who exist in a world city system outside and within the flow of global financial capital.67 They constitute another world city system based, perhaps, on transnational migration of working­class and socioeconomically precarious groups. Despite the hegemony of global capitalism in the sites of central Paris under study, vectors in pericapitalist world city systems—such as these souvenir salesmen—transgress boundaries of the elite world city.

Robinson’s postcolonial perspective attests to the Paris’s world city status, and calls for the recognition of the diversity that such a status entails.

67 Chandra Mohanty, “ “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2003): 499-535. Mohanty’s self-critical writing about living “under” and “inside” the “Western eye” informs my analysis of this group of African men’s relation to the global capitalist system. They simultaneously live as subalterns outside of the dominant world city systems, and within them since their economic behavior relies on geographies oriented by certain world city systems.

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Security gate at le Louvre, October 2017. The four languages of sign denote the global attraction of the museum and establishes boundaries of normative behavior in the space.

World city theory gives us a framework to analyze the dynamics we see on the ground. Reading the dynamics that I observed in Paris in this light lends to an understanding of the connections between the city and many elsewheres that engender the unique and ever­changing character of the city. Actors that are normally considered to be local (e.g. the urban working class)–and thus impuissant in the hegemonic dichotomy discussed above—are key actors in the landscape of elite globality in Paris. Where interview subjects noted as the most ‘global’ spaces of Paris—La Défense, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Gare du Nord—there is never the exclusive presence of the elite capitalist class. Spaces that symbolize the city of Paris on a global scale are always cohabited by a plurality of actors coming from different class and ethnic backgrounds.

From the elite business people at La Défense, to tourists admiring monuments, to service workers, or souvenir salesmen—the world city of Paris hosts a wide variety of actors whose actions and conditions straddle the global and local. As the world city is the collection of these constituent dynamics—simultaneously rooted in Paris and tied to innumerable other places—Paris testifies to the dissolution of the dichotomy between local and global.

The structural reconfiguration of global power geometries—as developed by Friedmann and Sassen, and elaborated by Massey in World Cities68—explains much about power geometries in cities themselves. This is because world city theory compresses the global and local and deconstructs the dichotomy therein. The current study adds to this discourse by reading the world city from the Neighborhood, and via a comparison between the Neighborhood and the (central) City. In this way, I find that a 68 Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

42 wide variety of actors across Paris appropriate even the most guarded elite spaces in ways that allow them to locate themselves amongst globalizing flows. Shifting the perspective to the terrain reveals the how the world cities structure is constructed and negotiated through an ongoing dialectic. This dialectic constitutes the active state of worlding cities, and is best read through relations within the world city (though it is understood that such relations are tied to a plethora of elsewheres). Now, we turn to the space of Belleville in order to better understand the world city from the neighborhood up.

The Neighborhood: Global, Local, or Translocal?

Shifting our perspective from the whole city of Paris to the neighborhood of Belleville, we are again confronted with the troublesome though commonplace distinction between the local and global. The neighborhood as an urban trope is habitually attributed to the position of the local. As previously explained, this status within the hegemonic structure of global capitalism cements neighborhoods as immobile bodies at the margin of the urban core. In popular and academic discourse, neighborhoods like Belleville are all too often seen to be powerless within the context of the city, let alone on the global scale. While actors and institutions in these places have a deep knowledge of their neighborhood space and their neighbors, they are assumed to not have the capability to advocate for themselves before la Mairie, or in national or international institutions. Neighborhood actors, under this framework, have spatial agency in the context of their local space but have no power to locate outside of their neighborhood.

Belleville residents express different modes of power than those that are expressed in central cities. The power to represent oneself at the Mairie de Paris, to bring grant money from large institutions or corporations, or to express globality via activity mediated by international non­governmental institutions (e.g. the United Nations, large museums, universities, and institutes)69 is only one particular type of power. Indeed, under the normative framework of city governance, neighborhood actors hold marginal power. Neighborhoods are disenfranchised from key decision­making practices; they are relegated to making decision that are intended to impact their locality uniquely.

Spatial agency—the power to make changes to one’s environment that are meaningful to them—is a counterpoint to the elite vision and exercise of power, which is based on enfranchisement within large institutions. In order to access the resources and the agency that such institutions possess, one must hold a mastery of the dominant language and culture. Belleville residents, many of whom may not have a nuanced mastery of French or understanding of French bureaucratic cultures, are excluded from access to resources that they could employ in the space of their everyday lives. Spatial agency, on the other hand, has a lower barrier of access; one need only be able to read their surroundings, act in it, and influence trajectories that overlap around them.

Borrowing from the treatises of the Situationists of the 20th century, I attribute value to 69 UNESCO, L’Institut du Monde Arabe, Le Louvre, Le Centre Pompidou, L’Université de Paris are among the most powerful institutions that mediate international collaboration between the city and elsewhere.

43 the capacity for individuals, groups, and communities to understand and act in the city in such ways.

Valorizing spatial agency exposes the variety of ways that neighborhood actors daily exercise power in their neighborhood, city, and elsewhere. Occupying urban space for communal use, for example, is an expression of spatial agency that occurs frequently on the neighborhood level. Walking through Belleville, we find such spatial appropriation commonplace: youth practicing Chinese martial arts in the Place Marcel Achard, hipsters spilling out to the café­bar La Folie, Muslim men conversing in the Esplanade Roger Linet, and families relaxing to small concerts in the Parc de Belleville on sunny days. Though this use of urban space is commonplace and diverse in Belleville, they should not be underestimated. I argue that such happenings can only occur through the power of individual and collective actors to understand these spaces, socially organizing in groups, and territorialize urban space among the polyphony of the neighborhood.

It is through the exercise of spatial agency by non­dominant actors in Belleville that the nuances of world city living came to life in my research. Unlike in the spaces of surveillance and oriented by global capital that I observed in Parisian ‘global’ centers like the Eiffel Tower, le Louvre, or La Défense, Belleville espouses world citydom in ways that showcase the symbolic power70 of urban residents—who, in this case, are often from immigrant and popular backgrounds—over their neighborhood space. The landscape is marked by a concentration of non­French linguistic and cultural symbols, despite its position within the capital of the Republic. Such symbols facilitate the sociocultural relations between actors of similar and differing backgrounds. Moreover, these signs are important in the process of locating Belleville among the dizzying world city dynamics swirling through Paris. In this way, locating is an act that simultaneously builds from face­to­face encounters, neighborhood spatial dynamics, citywide trends, and national and translocal flows.

The exercise of spatial agency, thus, does not occur in discrete scales of neighborhood, city, region, nation, continent, or globe. The popular café, La Vielleuse, at the southeastern corner of the carrefour de Belleville, may seem like any other neighborhood café to the outsider. Indeed, many busy intersections with adjoining metro stops in the city are consistently crowded and important sites of encounter. However, La Vielleuse does not happen exclusively at the scale of this neighborhood. The café is owned by a Franco­Tunisian businessman, and has been over recent decades. In Belleville, quartier populaire ?, the authors describe how this café has acted as an important node and social anchor for the Tunisian, and specifically Judeo­Tunisian, population in Paris that is concentrated in Belleville.71 On this, Conord writes that Tunisian inhabitation of La Vielleuse denotes “une volonté d’affirmer une identité culturelle marquée par la nostalgie de la view sociale qu’elles avaient en Tunisie et par un

70 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990).

71 Sylvaine Conord, “Sociabilité des femmes juives tunisiennes: Approche photo-ethnographique,” in Belleville, quartier populaire ? (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 172-83.

44 attachement aux traditions et croyances populaires judéo­tunisiennes”72. One of my interlocutors during the field research process, S. Amiri, affirmed that La Vielleuse is the most crucial public social node for the Tunisian community in Paris. She also described how this café is known even in Tunisia, where the urbanized Jewish minority talks about Paris in relation to their lived or imagined experiences of this café at the heart of Belleville. For Tunisians whose ties extend to Paris, La Vielleuse is an important center of community activity in diaspora, just as it is for other neighborhood residents and those traveling through the city. It is where subjects who are simultaneously defined by global flows and local dynamics build relations and group identity in diaspora.

Thus, Bellevillois.es exercise their spatial agency and locate themselves within the world city by compressing traditional geographic scales. The world city as articulated in the neighborhood, rather than the city center, is no longer about the connection between homogenous city space with others across the planet73. Rather, the reading of the world city and world city systems from the neighborhood perspective makes clear our inability to disassociate the on­goings of the neighborhood with that of its city, region, or global systems. As Sassen puts it, world city formation continues a process of “reterritorialization” that begets “the formation of new claims on that [transnational] space”74. The mixing of immigrant populations, multinational corporations, and a growing precariat in world cities marks the urban landscape in novel ways. Although Sassen employs the distinction between local and global that I argue against, and invokes transnationality, I offer that the “new claims” she sees arising in urban space lends more toward translocality when analyzed through neighborhoods like Belleville. That is, new claims in and between world cities occur with regard local conditions, not national borders.

Business that advertise and offer services to facilitate travel between France and the Maghreb are plentiful, and exhibit the degree of connectedness between Paris­Belleville and elsewheres.

72 Conord, 181. Translation: “A desire to afform a cultural identity marked by nostalgia of a social perspective that they used to have in Tunisia, and by an attachment to populaire Tunisian traditions and beliefs.”

73 Robinson, “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map,” 547. Robinson warns urbanists that: “Categorizing a group of cities as ‘global’ on the basis of these small concentrated areas of transnational management and coordination activity within them is metonymic in that it has associated entire cities with the success and power of a small area within them (Amin and Graham, 1997, and as Sassen 2001, acknowledges).”

74 Sassen, “Whose City Is It?,” 220.

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The new claims arising in Belleville are tied to translocal flows. The claims that East Asians have made to the Rue de Belleville, Maghreb to the Boulevard de Belleville, and Europeans to haut, or ‘upper,’ Belleville are tied to the differing temporalities and geographies of migration intersecting in the neighborhood. As Mandaville described in his article “Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity,” translocality is a framework that recognizes that the connections that people, communities, and institutions make over space occurs in the space of everyday life.75 Belleville, because of its unique history and geography in Paris, is a place where successive generations of migrants find room to articulate new claims to space: internal migrants within the city moving between quarters, European families moving to Paris looking for economic opportunity, people coming from different continents, and French provincials moving in and out of the capital. In the translocal frame, few of us are stable, the vast majority of humans are migrants, and the world city is a space of accelerated (re)territorialization. Through the process of locating oneself among translocal flows in the world city, the relevance of the social conditions of globality and locality is called into question. As the following chapter will elucidate, Belleville is an example of the formation of a new kind of being in the world (city). I call this contemporary formation that I observed in Belleville “translocalism” given my reckoning with the global­local dichotomy and the valorization of everyday practices. However, “translocal” may not be the perfect term, and I recognize that new vocabulary is needed to better characterize the new ways people are living beyond the global and local in worlding cities and neighborhoods. Nevertheless, I see the world city best characterized through my fieldwork as a translocal entity and translocal process that manifests itself in the streets and associations of urban centers, as well as in prestigious centers of command and control. * * * The ways in which geographers, urbanists, and society at large attributes globality and locality to certain spaces, processes, groups, and bodies is reflective of the power geometries of global capitalism and imperialism; it is a construct. In this chapter, I describe how the imaginary opposition of the global and the local translates into a harmful dichotomy on the scale of a world city, and how it pairs itself with the equally fictitious polemic between City and Neighborhood. In this power geometry, the City is global—integrated into cosmopolitan flows of people and capital—whereas the Neighborhood is local—bound to its specific geography and defined by its position within its ‘parent’ municipality. While neighborhoods like Belleville espouse a number of global characteristics, their plural conditions are often overshadowed by the structuralist world city system à la Friedmann’s World City Hypothesis. Geographers, like Sassen, Massey, and Robinson, expose the metonymy wherein the central city stands in for the 75 Peter G. Mandaville, “Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no. 3 (1999): 653-673. There is a fruitful conversation to be had between translocality, as described by Mandaville, and the ‘space of everyday life’ that comes up in Michèle de Certeau’s literature.

46 City as a whole. There is an evident pairing of the hegemony of the global over the local, and the (central) City over the Neighborhood.

I argue that this hegemony is a constructed phenomenon that serves global elites profiting from the neoliberal restructuring of the global power geometry. Indeed, the conditions in central Paris and in La Défense—areas that represent the ‘global’ power of Paris according to my interlocutors—are more complicated than just the exchange between Paris and other cities around the world. Long histories of place are manifest in the palimpsest of Parisian urban geography, and even these specific geographies are tied to histories of colonial extraction, modernization, and translocal migration. The same can be said for a more ‘marginal’ space like Belleville.

This neighborhood challenges us to reconsider how we read the world city and the systems that tie world cities together. I affirm that the world city is a useful concept for understanding translocalism as an important articulation of novel experiences, while asserting that world cities are best understood among the diversity of everyday practices in urban space. Belleville’s diverse actors locate themselves and their communities in relation to their neighborhood—a space, among many, of their everyday lives. The following chapter will delve deeper into the many ways that Bellevilleois.es lean into active processes of locating as a way to cultivate spatial agency and build urban environments to suit their needs and visions. We will see how translocal flows and marginalized urban spaces are appropriated by actors and institutions of diverse backgrounds and aspirations to carve out a place for themselves amidst the complexities of world city life.

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CHAPTER III The Many Ways of Locating Paris­Belleville Locating is an active process through which people understand space, thereby opening up the possibility for spatial agency to be exercised. Locating is not a local phenomenon, however; it is translocal. By studying the space of Paris­Belleville, I found that actors locate spaces by drawing on a variety of flows that link their immediate space to innumerable others the world over. World city flows are central to the formation of such translocalism, especially when dealing with a case like Paris­Belleville. A range of actors—from the street merchant, to the art gallery owner—cultivate spatial agency by locating themselves and their environment among diverse world city systems.

Translocalism, thus, builds the world city by creating opportunities for people to shape their corners of the world city.

In this chapter, I explore the social worlds of Paris­Belleville by arranging three subprocesses key to the activity of locating: imagining, performing, and (re)constructing.

The triad is meant to build onto itself; imagination onto to performance, and the previous two onto (re)construction. As I will show, imagining draws upon a host of schema to orient performances in urban space, and such performances create new possibilities for the makeup of this space. In this section, I will draw upon a host of geographic literature, and rely heavily on my field research. Particularly, I will apply Lefebvre’s dialectic of the spatial triad76 to inform my own, previously described triad. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes: . . . spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces contribute in different ways to the production of space according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period.77 Thus, an analysis informed by the Lefebvre’s spatial triad recognizes that the ways in which space is produced is directly influenced by social, cultural, and historical context. I specifically lean on Lefebvre’s ideas of representational space and spatial practice to interrogate that which I observed on the ground, and integrate these concepts with my theorizing on translocality and world cities.

Through this chapter, I hope to give my reader a glimpse at the social worlds inscribed in Belleville—how these worlds are formed, and how they are implicated in world city formation. These worlds are complex, and I by no means imply my expertise on all the complexities going on in this context. I, however, hold that an innovative geographical approach to the terrain elucidates the complexities and contradictions that 76 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 33.

77 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 46.

48 abound among the plurality of translocal flows. Residents, merchants, and visitors to the neighborhood are all crucial to my approach, but so is the environment they inhabit, and the structures in which they act. By looking carefully into how Paris­Belleville is imagined, performed, and (re)constructed, this chapter makes the claim that actors in urban neighborhoods like Belleville—that is, populaire and ethnically nondominant and nonhomogenous—are central in the formation of world city systems. This stance responds to the over­valorization of global capitalist visions of world cities, and attends to the hard work of locating and cultivating spatial agency that popular actors do every day.

“BELLEVILLE EN VRAI” (“REAL BELLEVILLE”), banner for the annual neighborhood culture and sports festival of the same name, Parc de Belleville amphitheater, May 2017.

During the field research process, I asked interview subjects to draw the boundaries of their neighborhood, Belleville, on a map of the city of Paris—in addition to sites of globality and sites that represent Belleville. These questions were asked among many others, and were intended as a heuristic exercise in order to find out how Bellevillois.es understand their neighborhood and city­space. This exercise affirms the analysis that, “Subtilement, les contours et frontiers variant selon la subjectivité et le sentiment d’appartenance des habitants,”78 and that such differences are important for how city­dwellers exercise their spatial agency. The scanned copies of the individual 78 Roselyne de Villanova, “Belleville, créativités et démocratie locale ?,” in Belleville, quartier populaire (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 185. Translation: “Subtly, the contours and borders vary according to subjectivity and residents’ feeling of belonging.”

49 annotated maps can be found at the end of this thesis. Below, however, is a composite digital representation of responses to the question, “Can you mark the boundaries that define Belleville?”. As I work through the three parts of this final chapter, it will be useful to return to this map as one of several ways of understanding how the neighborhood fits into the world city of Paris. As a heuristic exercise, I understand that such representations do not get into the complexities of daily life; that is why I pair this exercise with deeper conversation, observation, and literature review.

In the above map, the red dotted line indicates where there exists the highest amount of agreement between respondents regarding the area of Belleville; and the larger red dot symbolizes the most frequently identified nodes of Belleville, while the smaller red dot represents other less crucial nodes, nonetheless important for locating the neighborhood. Important axes such as the Boulevard de Belleville and the Rue de Belleville are not indicated in this map, though they function as orienting paths of everyday life in Belleville.

Imagining the Neighborhood “Il y a encore, dans ce quartier, non seulement un ‘melting pot’, mais vous avez aussi des differentes classes sociales. Ça devient à peu près introuvable partout sur la planète. . .

50 Vous trouvez ici dans le quartier une mixité que vous ne trouverez quasiment nulle part dans la planète.” – J. Wolff79 In his appraisal of Belleville’s incredible diversity, gallerist J. Wolff, with whom I spoke, makes a simple though resounding statement: the neighborhood’s class and ethnic diversity distinguishes Belleville from anywhere else on Earth. This evaluation, I argue is an imaginary: one of many valid ways people understand space. Cities—and I add, world city neighborhoods—are dense simultaneities of certain kinds of imaginaries.

Neighborhoods are fundamentally collective imaginations of spatial differentiation. The imaginary that Wolff speaks to is one that not only locates Belleville among Parisian districts, but also among a global, translocal geography.

Images are central to the imagination of the city: they orient spatial practice and territorialize the urban fabric. As Kevin Lynch notes in his foundational book, The Image of the City: At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences . . . Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings.80 More than images and symbols, though, I argue that imagination puts one’s city­images in conversation with idiosyncratic moral landscapes—places imbued with senses of good and bad—media, and perceptions. This mixture generates schema to which a person and place adhere depending on “their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period.”81 For instance, the Parc de Belleville is home to a plurality of imaginations that come to be through one’s position in society. Children imagine it as a play­space unencumbered by automobile traffic and vitalized by its abundant flora; performing artists may subscribe to it as a space for cultural exhibition; and the employed worker as a space for leisure and relaxation outside the confines of the domestic environment.

Imaginations of Belleville manifest in the form of different schemas that reflect the place’s history, current conditions, and ideas for what Belleville ought to be. Through my research I have identified seven overlapping and conflicting schema that shape the imaginations one has of and in this urban environment: quartier­village, quartier ouvrier & populaire, quartier­monde & mixte, quartier­ghetto, quartier solidaire & militant, quartier artistique, quartier gentrification. These schemas serve as orienting frameworks through which people understand the social worlds of Belleville, and the possibility to act with others to claim and shape the space of their neighborhood. I find that the schema(s) 79 Translated excerpt from interview with gallerist J. Wolff: “There is still, in this neighborhood, not only a ‘melting pot,’ but also different social classes. This is becoming almost impossible to find anywhere on the planet. . . Here, in this neighborhood, you have a diversity that you cannot find practically anywhere in the world.”

80 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960), 1.

81 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 46.

51 one embraces or finesses are determined through a relational process involving the person as a social body, place, and imaginary82. Schemas tie the individual to certain scripts, behavioral norms, and claims in the built environment. The above schemas, or imaginations, help actors understand how they fit into a certain place; they answer: “Where should I be?”, “Who can I work with?”, and “How should I/we act?”. Hence, schemas facilitate active locating. Importantly, as well, these orienting frameworks are generated through the intersecting translocal trajectories in Belleville—and influence these trajectories in return. Through the following discussion and case studies of each schema, I uncover the various imaginations that call Belleville home.

Quartier­village Winding streets, public plazas, street food and flea markets, and a surprising amount of greenery characterize Belleville’s landscape. In popular discourse and academic literature alike, this neighborhood is often characterized as quartier­village, or neighborhood­village, given its architecture, urban fabric, and social life distinct from that of the typical Parisian imaginary. Almost all of my interlocutors acknowledged this imaginary—though many questioned its accuracy—during interviews and conversations about the neighborhood. In Belleville, quartier populaire ?, the writer Amina Sellai83 alludes to Belleville’s history as an autonomous village outside of Paris intra­muros as a reason for the district’s long lasting town­like quality. Plazas, modern streets, and residences with their interior courts were built on the foundation of privately owned, small­scale vineyards that dated back to the Middle Ages. As Regan Koch and Alan Latham remind us in the metaphor of home­making, foundations in the built environment are “an enabling set of features that underpin the building of a home.”.84 The fact that Belleville was not majorly touched by Haussmannian renovations between 1853 and 1870 means that the veritable village foundations were left intact for future generations.85 Belleville as imagined as the quartier­village places emphasis on the neighborhood’s history at the outskirts of Paris proper. Indeed, since the annexation of the village in 1860, Belleville has not experienced urban redevelopment of the same magnitude as central Paris. There are no grand boulevards that pierce the neighborhood— only the contiguous Boulevard de Belleville and de la Villette that mark the former span

82 Imaginary, as described above, is a combination of symbolic images, moral landscapes, media, and perceptions—all of which are particular to the person and the groups to which they belong.

83 Amina Sellali, “L’épopée de l’ouvrier propriétaire” in Belleville, quartier populaire ? (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 18-31.

84 Regan Koch and Alan Latham, “On the Hard Work of Domesticating a Public Space,” Urban Studies 50, 6 (2012): 15.

85 However, Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris did involve the destruction of the city’s Wall of the Farmers-General (1784-1860) and the annexation of adjacent communes such as Belleville (at the time named “la Courtille”) and Ménilmotant. The renovations also displaced a large amount of working-class residents from central Paris, some of whom would settle in the affordable residences of the newly-named Belleville.

52 of Paris’ wall86. Additionally, when asking interlocutors to expand on the village­like aspect of their neighborhood, one responded: “C’est un quartier où on se voit dans les rues, où on se connaît . . . où on passe pas mal de temps entre copains ou bien entre familles.”87 This imaginary, thus, encompasses both the physical and social environments. I often found that Belleville’s village­like imaginary is used to appeal to the human social need for recognition and community. Belleville is able to satisfy these needs given its history that is maintained through its built aspect, while more central areas in Paris may not. Or, more justly, it is imagined as such. When people speak of Belleville in this light, there is an implicit counter­positioning to the social alienation and atomization that is thought to occur in more central parts of the city. In those areas, the ability to locate oneself and one’s communities is necessarily different, or even reduced, since their former quartier­villages have been bulldozed and expropriated by the State or corporate interests.

86 Surprisingly, however, the Boulevard de Belleville is wider than the Boulevard de Haussmann—the most well-known of the Grands Boulevards constructed by the Baron in the mid 19th century. This is because of the pedestrian zone along the middle of the boulevards—dividing automobile traffic and providing space for community markets.

87 Translated interview excerpt: “It’s a neighborhood where we see each other in the streets, where we know each other . . . where we pass a lot of time between families and even between friends.”

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From top left to bottom right: stairs between Rue de l’Émritage and Rue des Cascades, vine covered wall in Cité Janelle, Rue des Solitaires, La Petite Ceinture (abandoned railway) from Rue de Ménilmotant, Villa Bleu at Rue Olivier Métra, alleyway in Cité Janelle.

The imaginary of the quartier­village manifests itself on the streets and (semi­) public spaces of the neighborhood, where new encounters occur and social relationships are maintained in familiar settings. Given that Belleville’s rural foundations were maintained even after decades of redevelopment, the interior spaces of residential buildings serve as important semi­public spaces for Bellevillois.es.88 Courtyards in Belleville neighborhoods facilitate relations among residents that implicate neighbors in mutual practices of domestication. Older residents often take care of these courts, and introduce new residents and families to the social geography of the building and block. I often observed people sharing responsibilities to care for plants and pets, and to look after children in Belleville’s courtyards. In Belleville, un quartier populaire ?, Philippe Bonnin writes that place­based sense of belonging is made in such contexts given not only the sharing of an address, but the typical parcel structure in northeast Paris, in which a single entrance often gives way to several buildings and their courts.89 Though Bonnin initially quips, “ . . . la même address, le même sort,”90 in reality this built environment shapes how people think of the neighborhood. Furthermore, it creates norms for how people use and occupy space. Thus, Belleville’s residences and courts both affirm and stage the reproduction of the quartier­village imaginary.

While I consider residential buildings as sites where the quartier­village schema encourages convivial behavior, the neighborhood’s open­air markets give rise to this schema in a different way. Residents interact with vendors from northeast Paris and throughout Île­de­France at the biweekly market on the Rue de Belleville, the weekly market on the Rue des Pyrénées, and in less regular street flea markets along Belleville’s 88 Agnès Deboulet and Roselyne de Villanova, “Belleville, laboratoire social” in Belleville, quartier populaire ? (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 8. In this chapter, the authors touch on the importance of this aspect of the built environment for the socialability of Bellevillois.es: “Derrières les portes cochères, des allées et passages traversant, bordés de petits bâtiments, d’ateliers et de verdure, immeubles à cou se succédant, deux, trois, quatre, enfin des petities maisons en bande avec jardinets, dédoublent la ville.”

Translation: “Alleys and passages traverse behind closed doors, bordered by small buildings, studios, and greenery. Apartments close together come after one another—two, three, four, and finally there are those small row houses with small gardens. They double the size of the city.”

89 Philippe Bonnin, “Belleville : un habitat populaire” in Belleville, quartier populaire ? (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 34.

90 Bonnon, 34. Translation: “The same address, the same fate.”

54 main axes. Often, these interactions are fleeting and are limited to economic exchanges.

But when certain charismatic or longtime vendors set up their ephemeral shops, social ties become more meaningful, and the imaginary of the quartier­village is imparted on vendor and shopper alike. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that these markets are a chance for residents of all ages to see each other, and to be seen. Residents not only frequent such institutions for affordable food and products, but to better understand their neighborhood and neighbors. Every interlocutor referenced Belleville’s public markets during interviews—which denotes their powerful place in the imagination of the neighborhood. Though none noted the markets among the most crucial sites to the neighborhood—perhaps due to their ephemerality—many spoke to the commonplace utility of having such reliable, affordable, and diverse markets in easy access.

Belleville’s markets contribute the neighborhood’s village­like socialization wherein many residents know each other, or are only separated by a few relations.

However, it would be shortsighted to confine such a phenomenon to the local, thereby reproducing the dichotomy identified in Chapter II. The situation is indeed more complex, as Belleville’s markets sell goods carried into France via a mix of global capitalist trade, and individual or group­based transportation between homelands. Many of these goods are even made in the area by people carrying on cultural production practices learned elsewhere. World cities systems that brought a sizable Sub­Saharan African population to Belleville, for example, are drawn upon in order to make, buy, transport, and sell Sub­Saharan African garments and clothing on the Rue de Belleville every Tuesday and Friday.91 The vendors and the goods they sell attest to the presence of translocal flows in the (re)production of the quartier­village schema, since the intersubjectivities and social ‘closeness’ that characterize this imaginary are reliant on vectors like the market to bring people together and orient their behavior. In this way, marketgoers act out imaginations for their neighborhood ought to be; when I saw kids playing together, older Chinese men discussing in Mandarin around benches, neighbors experiencing a chance encounter, and families and friends lining up for Lebanese sandwiches, I imagined Belleville through the lens of the quartier­village.

Quartier­ouvrier et populaire Paired closely with Belleville’s imaginary as a quartier-village is its imaginary as a ‘quartier-ouvirer et proletaire’, or a “working-class and populaire neighborhood.”

Similar to the previous schema, this one is rooted in the space’s history; Belleville has never been a bourgeois hang out compared to the rest of the city—even though some today decry its embourgeoisement. If we were to watch Belleville’s history in the form of a film, we would see different working-class generations be replace one another since the Middle Ages. After the Middle Ages, the space became a leisure sector outside of the city 91 The present and historical colonial and imperial power geometries are important when considering why ethnic groups from Sub-Saharan African find themselves in relatively high concentrations in Belleville and northern Paris. Such power geometries not only impoverished and exploited whole African populations, but also shaped and shape Paris: concentrating wealth in certain sectors, while marginalizing—in ways strikingly similar to colonial project—other swaths of the city. Africans found space in Belleville when global flows began sending migrants into world cities precisely because it was a marginalized space, and they marginalized subjects.

55 walls for Paris’s workers—who searched affordable drinks and entertainment—which then gave way to working class populations fleeing Haussmannian renovations, then immigrants displaced from southern Europe, then eastern Europeans, and (since the 1950s) a mix of working-class migrants from all inhabited continents. Even one of France’s largest labor unions, la Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), is inscribed in this imaginary, as its headquarters are located at carrefour de Belleville, along Rue de la Villette.

National headquarters of the CFDT. The contemporary imagination of Belleville as a quartier-ouvrier draws on this admittedly unique history, and orients the ways Bellevillois.es envision the space they occupy. Belleville has certainly changed over the decades, and the quality of life is inarguably higher, and less far from the Parisian norm, than it had been even three decades ago. S. Amiri, who was born and grew up in Bas Belleville, gave historical insight regarding the working-class geography of her neighborhood, and specifically Parc de Belleville: “Avant, c’était pas Parc de Belleville. Avant, c’était des bâtiments de squat.

Y aviat pas de parc. C’était des bâtiments de squat, des vieux bâtiments. Il y avait pas d’école aussi. C’était vide. C’était que des bâtiments de squat.”92. Despite the changes to the park, the working-class material reality of many parts of the neighborhood remains strong, and the imaginary sticks. According to the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme, in 2011 22% of neighborhood residents had “low” revenues in (Paris: 11%), 13% received “Revenue de solidarité active”93 (Paris: 5.6%), 14.4% were unemployed (Paris: 9.8%), and 33.5% lacked a high school diploma (Paris: 21.5%). Additionally, Belleville’s electoral precincts regularly vote in favor of socialist, communist, and farther left candidates in local and national elections94, which indicates the clout that working-class 92 Translation: “Before, it was not Parc de Belleville. Before, it was just some squatted buildings. There was no park. It was squats, old buildings. There was no school next door either. It was empty. It was only some squatted buildings.”

93 The Revenue de solidarité active, or active solidarity income, provides a minimum income for unemployed or underemployed workers—assuring that, since 1 September 2017, all workers in France receive an income of a minimum income of €545.48 per month.

94 “Présidentielle : les résultats à Paris, bureau par bureau,” Le Parisien online, April 25, 2017, http://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/carte-presidentielle-les-resultats-a-paris-bureau-par-bureau24-04-2017-6884058.php. Far-left, former Parti Communiste Française leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for example, won more than 30% of votes in almost every Belleville precinct during the first round of the 2017

56 politics still have in the sector. Given both the past and present class conditions of Belleville, this imaginary is particularly potent for framing spatial practice and routing translocal flows in Belleville.

Map of Parisian percentage electorate that voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the newly formed leftist political party, La France Insoumise.95 Belleville is encircled in black.

La Bellevilloise, a cultural venue and restaurant­bar situated on Rue Boyer near Rue de Ménilmotant, is a site where the quartier­ouvrier imaginary is reproduced and appropriated. La Bellevilloise began in 1877 as a food market and worker cooperative— providing political education, cultural programs, and direct producer­to­consumer commercial exchanges. The cooperative experienced great success due to migration to the neighborhood—as workers fled both the central city and provinces for Belleville; it quickly became the most important cooperative in Paris and all of the Republic, with over 9,000 members at its height just before the First World War. In 1936 the cooperative closed due to member disputes, though the establishment gained the signifier “la fortresse culturelle” over its five decades of activity. Subsequently, from 1950 to 2000, the structure served as office space for the pension fund, Organic. Five years after Organic left the site, three professionals in the cultural sector—Renaud Barillet, Fabrice Martinez, and Philippe Jupin—bought, renovated, and promoted the idea of a new iteration of la Bellevilloise. Few Belleville residents would have memory of the original cooperative; it was the trio’s work to imagine for themselves and others how the Bellevilloise would be reincarnated in the 21st century.

French presidential election.

95 “Présidentielle : les résultats à Paris, bureau par bureau,” Le Parisien online, April 25, 2017, http://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/carte-presidentielle-les-resultats-a-paris-bureau-par-bureau24-04-2017-6884058.php

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Interior uses of the modern La Bellevilloise, which re-created and updated the plan of the former La Bellevilloise, which closed in 1936.96

A look at the historical material that la Bellevilloise promotes on their website invokes the quartier­village schema by mythologizing the history of not only the former Bellevilloise, but also Belleville as a whole. The website imagines the former cooperative as an anchor for the neighborhood’s working­class social, economic, and political scene: “A cette époque, dans « La maison du Peuple de la Bellevilloise », tandis que Jean Jaurès tient des rassemblements politiques au 1er étage, on expérimente au rez­de­chaussée la première vision du « commerce équitable » suivant les principes de Joseph Proudhon, s’appuyant sur une devise qui allait marquer l’histoire des échanges : « du producteur au consommateur ».”97 The discourse promoted by la Bellevilloise draws a direct line of succession between the former and modern­day establishment. In reality, the trio attempted to re­ make the building as it existed a century prior by removing the office renovations made

by Organic. The valorization of the original structure draws a normative parallel between how the building was used and how it now ought to be occupied. The Forum does indeed host large public assemblies as well as a restaurant, and all other spaces offer a mix of dining and events. Political debates and discussions, jazz concerts, Afro­Caribbean 96 “VISITER LA BELLEVILLOISE,” La Bellevilloise, https://www.labellevilloise.com/visiter/.

97 “Notre Histoire,” La Bellevilloise, https://www.labellevilloise.com/la-bellevilloise/. Translation: “In this era, in the “House of the People of the Bellevilloise,” while Juan Juarès held political gatherings on the 1st floor, they experimented with the first vision of “equitable commerce” on the ground floor following the principles of Joseph Proudhon, drawing on a slogan that would mark the story of these exchanges: “from the producer to the consumer.”

58 dances, techno performances, and parties are among regular programming. Because of its work, La Bellevilloise proclaims itself as the voice of a liberatory movement, declaring itself “Le Paris de la liberté depuis 1877.” The current Bellevilloise is not a cooperative, however. It appropriates both the imaginary and built environment in order to produce cultural and political engagement through economic exchange. These engagements reflect the diversity of Belleville and northeastern Paris, with performances and discussions hosted by groups of diverse ethnic and class backgrounds. The imaginary of the quartier­ouvrier is, thus, shaped at la Bellevilloise by the world city that is reflected and produced within the neighborhood in which it is situated.

For Belleville residents and visitors alike, la Bellevilloise is an important space for locating the neighborhood amongst the dense urban fabric of Paris and the homogenizing trend of neoliberal global capitalism. A few of my interlocutors defined la Bellevilloise as one of the most representative locations in Belleville. These subjects aligned the establishment with both the neighborhood’s working­class history and culturally productive imaginary. The schema of the quartier­ouvrier, in the context of the world city, brings people of diverse geographic backgrounds together to envision Belleville as a space where translocal populaire cultures, politics, and aesthetics are preferred over the bourgeois. In this way, this schema both aligns itself with the north/northeastern geographic sector the city, and distinguishes Belleville—nourished by its diversity of translocal ties—as the ultimate Parisian working­class neighborhood.

Quartier-monde et mixte While the prevailing discourse around Belleville is that of its village-like and working-class history and character, the imaginary of Belleville as a ‘quartier-monde et mixte’—or, neighborhood-world and diverse—is also a powerful schema for orienting one’s understanding of the neighborhood’s geography, particularly in the context of the world city and translocality. Throughout the 20th century, the neighborhood was home to many working-class immigrant communities. In his book Belleville, je t’aime, Jean Rozental, lifelong resident and community organizer in Belleville, describes how successive waves of immigrants have invested in this district given its affordable housing and services98. In particular, Rozental draws a parallel between the specific urban form of Belleville and the ability for immigrants to self-organize; this logic generates an ethos of Belleville as an immigrant space in essence. Rozental gives examples of Eastern European Jews gone ‘missing’ from the neighborhood during Nazi German occupation, Muslim Algerian and Jewish Tunisian immigrants coming to the quarter following the second World War, and East Asians finding home in Belleville since the 1980s. The chronology that Rozental exposes is not at all unique; all residents in the neighborhood seem to be aware of the subsequent immigrant communities that have made Belleville into what it is today.

When I asked S. Amiri whether Belleville was easy to distinguish from the whole of Paris, I was, thus, little surprised when she equated Belleville’s singularity to its ethnically diverse make up: “Oui, parce que voilà Belleville, c’est Belleville quand même. Belleville, c’est tout d’immigré. C’est pas un quartier comme les autres—même 98 Jean Rozental, Belleville, je t’aime: hier comme aujourd’hui (publishing information unknown).

59 quand vous allez faire des courses ça se voit. C’est un quartier vraiment mélangé . . . mélangé. Voilà, vous trouverez toute culture.”.99 For Amiri, as well as everyone else I interviewed, the imagination of Belleville as a “mixed” space is among its most distinguishing qualities. Unlike other well-known immigrant quarters—like Chateau Rogue, the Chinatown in the 13th arrondissement, or the Indian district around Gare du Nord—Belleville espouses many distinct immigrant populations, and has for over a century. J Wolff described Belleville as the most ethnically mixed place in Paris, if not all of France: “Il y a le plus grand diversité dans la mixité”100. The imaginary of Belleville as a quartier-monde is indeed based on the idea that it is incomparably diverse. But, because I called this an ‘imaginary’, that is not to say that it is not as worldly as residents describe. Indeed, 31% of the neighborhood were immigrants in 2011—not including firstor second-generation descendants who continue to live in or frequent Belleville’s ethnic enclaves. Rather, recognizing the quartier-monde as an ‘imaginary’ also allows us to understand how actors’ are oriented by this schema. This schema in particular helps folks orient themselves among a neighborhood geography that—while divided to some degree by ethnicity—can be regrouped under the shared specificity of the quartier-monde.

Left: Rue de Belleville, 20th arrondissement. Right: Chinese store on Rue de Belleville, 19th arrondissement.

99 Translation: “Yes, because Belleville is Belleville after all. Belleville, it’s all immigrant. It’s not a neighborhood like the others—even when you go to do your groceries it’s obvious. It’s a really mixed neighborhood. That’s it, you’ll find every culture.”

100 Translation: “There is the biggest diversity in [Belleville’s] social mixing.”

60 Similar to the quartier-village schema, I argue that the quartier-monde imaginary is founded upon the built environment of Belleville. In this case, it is the linguistic and cultural landscape of the neighborhood that is important; people come to understand Belleville in terms of ‘the world’ incarnated as a neighborhood when they see a mix of French, English, Créole, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Turkish scripts in shops, postings, and other media. Les deux vies de Ning, an illustrated children’s book about an undocumented Chinese youth living in Paris, offers a particularly powerful imagination of Belleville’s elsewhere-aligned landscape. The following images are drawn from the book, and depict scenes from his first entry into Belleville. I would like to highlight a passage from page 23, when Ning encounters a landscape full of Chinese-marked signs as well as bodies: “Je vois des restaurants chinois partout, d’énormes idéogrammes rouges, jaunes, bleus. Une foule de Chinois, femmes, hommes, enfants. Des qui marchent, des qui attendant.”.101 This book reproduces the imagination of Belleville as a place outside the norms of normative French culture due to the visibility of the translocal ties in the urban landscape. It’s because of this imaginary—both semiotic and tangible—that Ning finds himself able to ask strangers for directions to meet his estranged mother. Ning—a Chinese boy completely new to Paris—locates himself in Paris and in the world using Belleville’s quartier-monde schema.

What does the quartier-monde imaginary have to do with the translocality of the world city and the controversies in which this paper is inscribed? The quartier-monde, like the world city, is a concept that compresses here and elsewhere into a single entity, while still emphasizing the ties that entity has to a plurality of others elsewhere. The proliferation of the quartier-monde imaginary in Belleville is one that complicates the supposedly clean-cut dichotomy between local and global, as well as the related dichotomy between city and neighborhood. For the many immigrants and their direct ancestors in Belleville, ‘local’ is not a matter of spatial immediacy, but a matter of connectedness. For instance, locality for many Chinese Bellevillois.es includes their neighborhood, other places where family and friends live in Ile-de-France, and their homelands. Hence, the neighborhood cannot be conceived as a space confined to the local when the very idea of locality is no longer stable. This imaginary, thus, contends with the structuralist framework of world cities promoted by Friedmann, Sassen, and the like—and confers with the more relational approaches of Robinson and Massey.

101 Valentine Goby and Philippe de Kemmeter, Les Deux Vies de Ning: De la Chine à Paris-Belleville (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2013).

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Top: pages 22 & 23. Bottom left: 20. Bottom right: 44.

Quartier-militant et solidaire When the dominant currents in the world city wield capital as a hegemonic and homogenizing force, the working-class and the immigrant—and particularly the workingclass immigrant—face oppression from global capitalist institutions. What Belleville makes clear, however, is that many spaces that non-dominant world city actors inhabit and frequent are full of imaginations of resistance and solidarity. In the face of capitalist and imperialist world city flows that could, and indeed do, annihilate spaces like Belleville, counter-imaginations are (re)produced through a dialectic between media in the urban environment, actors, and existing imaginaries/histories.

Belleville is a place in Paris where the ethos of militancy and solidarity for social justice causes are particularly visceral. The media that one sees while walking throughout

62 a neighborhood is an indicator of the politics important for that space. In Belleville, I observed a diversity of signifiers for leftist causes—from citizen participation in local democracy, to prison abolition, Palestinian liberation, communism, gay pride, migrant rights, and decolonization. These postings are visible in every corner of the neighborhood, and are put up by activists who are organized in a breadth of causes. These associations—such as la Parti Communiste Française, la CFDT, Greenpeace, la France Insoumise, le Cantine des Pyrénées, Autremonde, and le Collectif de Quartier Libre— span from international NGOS, to national political parties, and local activist organizations. These groups draw on the imagination of Belleville as aligned with leftist struggles, dating back to the Paris Commune, in order to cultivate the spatial agency necessary to plaster their media throughout the neighborhood. The quartier-militant imaginary very much reproduces militancy, wherein activists Belleville for their politics through mediatizing and politicizing life on the streets.

Wheatpasted flyer onto a large sculpture with a short manifesto on prison abolition. Place Marcel Achard, October 2017.

However, media cannot be a reliable marker of the neighborhood imaginary without the viewpoints of those who daily interact with them. My interlocutors disposed a breadth of political ideologies—which became apparent even through conversations that were not overtly political. Some of these Bellevillois.es espoused socialist ideologies—a mainstream leftist ideology in France—while others aligned more strongly with communism and anarchism with different levels of militancy. In different ways, Bellevillois.es embrace the imaginary of their neighborhood as a space of militancy and solidarity by cultivating their own personal leftisms that are articulated sometimes in their work, but always in how they talk to people and engage in the space of everyday life.

Perhaps the most characteristic of this imaginary on an organized-level are the neighborhood’s many community centers. These institutions bring together a relatively small amount of paid staff and regular volunteers to provide essential social services for the neighborhood population. The community centers that I have identified in my field work include: Autremonde (30 Rue de la Mare), Centre Socioculturel Belleville (17 Rue

63 Jules Romain), Maison du Bas Belleville (126 Boulevard de Belleville), Archipelia (17 Rue des Envierges), and Bibliothèque Couronnes (66 Rue des Couronnes), and Cantine des Pyrénées (331 Rue des Pyrénées). All of these institutions espouse organizational structures that conform to that of formalized community centers—with staff and volunteers, regular programming, and a guiding mission. I argue that these social centers are able to exist and draw in a large public of volunteers and service recipients because of the orienting framework Belleville as a quartier-militant. “C’est un quartier qui se bouge, où les gens luttent, ils se méfient de l’État depuis longtemps et les habitants de Belleville, ils mobilisent pour et contre tout.”,102 observed an interlocutor who preferred to go unnamed. In Belleville, this imaginary orients people toward mobilizing together, because that’s what Bellevillois.es do better than anyone else, according to this imaginary.

This imaginary plays off the oppositional positioning of Belleville against spaces and institutions of dominant power. The militant schema flourishes in Belleville because of the historic and contemporary disenfranchisement that its residents have experienced on the part of the French State and, now, the neoliberal restructuring of global capitalism.

Certain articulations of the quartier-militant imaginary indeed adopt the geographical framework of Friedmann and Sassen that holds spaces like Belleville in constant struggle against central city dominant groups. I argue that this schema takes hold in the neighborhood thanks its marginal position—leftist politics are not crowded out by hegemonic, homogenizing forces. However, by locating Belleville as a quartier-militant, these activists also inscribe Paris-Belleville in the translocal struggles.103 The world city as a site and a network for translocal activism, thus, comes to light through this imaginary.

102 Translation: “It’s a neighborhood that takes action, where people struggle, they’ve distrusted the State for a long time and the residents of Belleville, they mobilize for and against everything.”

103 The struggle for solidarity with French Guyana, for Palestinian liberation, against police violence, and for HIV-related gay rights are clearly translocal causes that take root/route in Belleville.

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Quartier-artiste The quartier-artiste is an imaginary based on recent trends that have brought many art studios and galleries to Belleville. For decades, artists have been moving to the neighborhood for its relatively affordable real estate, as more of Paris’s districts are becoming too expensive for those on artist’s incomes. Not only are residences affordable in Belleville, but there is space in the built environment to house studios; old factories and forges that were abandoned during the deindustrialization of the French economy in the late 20th century. These buildings were often squatted by artists and the housing precarious before formally repurposed into artist studios. The Villa Belleville (23 Rue Ramponeau), for instance, was originally a key factory. When the large building was abandoned, it was squatted by an autonomous arts and culture collective under the name “La Forge de Belleville”—subsequently named “La Kommune”. Today, the Kommune has closed, and in its place is a City-run artist studio named Villa Belleville. Widereaching, innovative institutions that involve the surrounding community like these are driving forces for the quartier-artiste schema.

Belleville is imagined as a quartier-artiste in commonplace ways; through the ways people style themselves, their (creative) occupations and hobbies, and the types of culture they consume. Some of this can be seen in the event programming at the previously described La Bellevilloise, and the networking between artists of les AAB (les Ateliers d’Artistes de Belleville). The social geography of Belleville changes through

65 artist social networks in the neighborhood—situated among homes, courtyards, parks, cafés, restaurants, and studio. In her chapter, “Artistes et collectifs d’artistes à Belleville (1990-2006),” Sophie Gravereau writes: “Enfin, d’un point de vue sociologique, la presence d’artistes, valorisant le quartier par l’organisation de manifestations culturelles, a contribué à transformer le tissue local. . .”.104 The artistic imaginations of Belleville are not homogenous, however. Les AAB, a network unifying fine artists living in Belleville since 1992 leans heavily on the schemas of Belleville as a quartier-village and -militant when locating Belleville as an artistic district. In an interview with L. Pommier, an organizer with les AAB, explained that the network was founded through mobilizations against major urban redevelopment slated for the neighborhood in the 1980s and -90s.

Pommier went on to note that the association regroups over 500 artists, and annually organizes a several day open-house among hundreds of art galleries and studios. Les AAB, at least on an organizational level, imagines Belleville as a space that facilitates not only creative expression, but also meaningful social interactions that carve out communities of affinity inside the world city and within the neighborhood’s salient translocal geography. They also see artistry as a craft that necessitates protection from both atomizing and homogenizing forces in the capitalist’s world city. This militant stance is a tactic to forge the association’s organization into an active network; solidarity between artists becomes part of both the militant and artistic imaginations of Belleville.

Inside Villa Belleville (23 Rue Ramponeau) during a Mairie-organized, neighborhood-wide artists’ open house in October 2017 (modeled after the Journées de Portes Ouvertes of les AAB). Villa Belleville had two exhibitions on view.

A different current in the quartier-artiste imaginary that I observed alive, and often contested, in Belleville is one that can be qualified as “hipster” or “bobo”. Tied to forces of gentrification active the neighborhood, particularly in the last decade, the 104 Sophie Gravereau, “Artistes et collectifs d’artistes à Belleville (1990-2006),” in Belleville, quartier populaire (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 95. Translation: “Finally, from a sociological point of view, the presence of artists, valorizing the neighborhood by the organization of cultural demonstrations, contributed to transform the local fabric. . .”

66 “boboïsation”105 of Belleville is tied to an artistic identity, as well as the idea that artists are mutating Belleville’s status as a quartier-ouvrier. Such a hypothesis holds water: as artists—many members of the working-class themselves—move into the neighborhood, studios form, followed by galleries that become frequented by those wealthy enough to purchase fine art. The influx of richer persons changes the social landscape, and their imaginary of Belleville as an exotic getaway from homogenous central Paris begins to take hold in certain studios, galleries, and café-restaurants. This is morally embraced by some, while attacked by others. In any case, actors in Belleville recognize the arts as a marker, if not a vector, for the class conditions of their neighborhood. Discourse around the arts and artists in Belleville is a crucial condition for locating the neighborhood in Paris.

Belleville as a quartier-artiste is also imagined a place where international artistic movements converge and are generated. La Kommune is an apt example. The founders of La Kommune claimed the history 23 Rue Ramponeau, the site of the last barricade during street skirmishes between Napoleon III’s army and the Paris Commune, as their own, but with a twist. They used a creolized version of “commune”, wherein the c is systematically transformed into a k in much of French Créole. The act of naming this place contests that Belleville is no longer French, but a space that is negotiated by a multiplicity of ethnic groups. This multiplicity is implicit to the naming of the Kommune, and the cultural work they did with neighborhood residents advanced the social mixing for which the neighborhood is celebrated. La Kommune not only reflected their imagination of a creolized Belleville—they did the work of creolizing by creating a site for artistic production, community socialization, and hybrid acculturation in the heart of the neighborhood.

Quartier-ghetto “I’ve lived here for the past ten years, in different places in the neighborhood, and it’s changed very much. Just ten—not even: five—years ago, Belleville was the ghetto. It was different. Dirtier, less secure . . .”. These are the paraphrased words from one of my interlocutors, someone I met by chance at a friend’s apartment one night in May. His words parallel something that became clear in the months that I lived in Belleville: it is not, and was not, the safest or most normatively beautiful neighborhood in Paris. Indeed, a walk through the neighborhood exposes to the pedestrian qualities that dominant Western society deems unsafe, improper, and dirty: litter, standing water, dog feces, graffiti, and sex workers. Though much of the discourse around Belleville today is celebratory, the neighborhood is not a single-sided story. S. Amiri, the lifelong resident of Belleville of Tunisian descent, even spoke of her neighborhood in this light: “C’est vrai, avant, le Rue Denoyez, il n’y avait que des delinquents. il n’y avait que des . . . vrai problems d’agression . . . je dis pas que [aujourd’hui] c’est un quartier tranquille—il y a toujours quelques soucis, mais pas comme avant . . .”106.

105 “Boboïsation” is derived from the word “bobo,” which is slang for “bourgeois-bohemian” in French.

The term’s meaning approaches that of “hipster”—which is also used in French—but often connotes a richer and older population.

106 Translation: “It’s true that, before, there were only delinquents on Rue Denoyez. There were only. . . real problems of aggression. . . I’m not saying that [today] it’s a tranquil neighborhood—there are always some worries, but not like before.”

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Rue Denoyez in bas Belleville, looking toward Rue Rompaneau. On right are a Jewish Tunisian synagogue, a Chinese restaurant, and a tapas restaurant. On left is a municipal gymnasium.

The way people conceive of Belleville is not just related to positive imaginations and nostalgia; I must also acknowledge that for many this space represents, and/or represented, a rough area in Paris. Some, like the person referenced in the beginning of the previous paragraph, speak of the ghettoization of Belleville. Belleville, in this schema, is a place that confines and marginalizes people in contemporary power geometries. They see the history and current conditions of Belleville as a working-class district as evidence of the neighborhood’s mobility trap, and thus where degeneracy and dirtiness are reproduced. Like the quartier-ouvrier and quartier-militant, this schema plays off an opposition between central city and outer neighborhood. In this case, the differing material and symbolic realities are once again recognized and reproduced.

However, unlike the aforementioned schemas, the quartier-ghetto places negative moral weight on Belleville rather than the center city. Subjects who spoke in this light indicated their fear, or fear observed in others, to walk about the neighborhood at night or to frequent certain spaces in Belleville at all.107 How they imagine the space directly impacts how they use it, or whether they even use it at all. In my observations, however, I recognized that most people who expressed strong ties to the quartier-ghetto imaginary were those who have not lived in Belleville for the majority of their life, and who are from more bourgeois backgrounds.

For those who are deeply familiar with the neighborhood, and who have grown up in populaire social worlds, the imagination of the quartier-ghetto is contested though never totally thrown away. For this group of residents, Belleville surely used to be a space that was less safe—particularly for young women—but it was also a place that was undoubtedly populaire, lacking the bourgeois element that is currently visible in parts of Belleville. The quartier-ghetto imagination is tempered by the schemas of the quartiervillage and quartier-ouvrier, for instance. Additionally, those who are very familiar with 107 In my interview with S. Amiri, for example, the librarian alluded to the idea that the residents of haut Belleville are scared to interact with people in bas Belleville, given the more populaire character of the latter.

68 Belleville across space and time referred to the phenomena that, for some others, aligned with the ‘ghetto’ as markers of Belleville’s diversity. J. Wolff, a longtime gallerist in Belleville, recognized that, while the dirtiness of the neighborhood may be tiring, the ways people think of waste and public space is culturally relevant. With people of various cultural traditions regarding public space, Belleville’s streets and plazas become littered: “Là, vous êtes dans un des quartier les plus sales de Paris. C’est pas parce que la Ville ne nettoie pas, c’est parce que vous avez des populations, d’origines immigrées, qui ont une autre relation à l’espace public et qui balacent tout dans la rue.”.108 Similar comments were made about Chinese sex workers on the streets of bas Belleville; many longtime residents express a cultural relativism that neutralizes fear associated with dirtiness, sex work, and delinquency. The power of the quartier-ghetto schema to orient behavior is strong for some, but many Bellevillois.es with whom I spoke demystified this imaginary by drawing on other schemas.

Quartier gentrifié The final schema that I drew from my observations in Belleville is that of the quartier-gentrifié—the gentrified neighborhood. This imaginary responds to the previous, the quartier-ghetto, by drawing on patterns of rapid change in Belleville’s built environment and social geography. Whereas the quartier-ghetto imagines Belleville as a space of isolation, socioeconomic immobility, and material deprevation, the quartiergentrifié imagines Belleville as having once been that way, but that no longer being the case. The quartier-gentrifié responds to a very specific set of changes in the social and material make up of Belleville—namely, more visible well-off populations and spaces for their socialization (e.g. certain cafés, restaurants, galleries, studios). The response claims that the neighborhood’s class and ethnic makeup is rapidly changing, thereby losing its village-like and counter–cultural characteristics, and introducing new relations of dominance into the neighborhood. This imaginary claims Belleville as working-class and immigrant, and sees the influx of (young) people of middle or higher income as outsiders.

Thus, this schema leans heavily on the imaginations of Belleville as a quartier-village: place where people have storied relations, and where people intimately know their environment and their neighbors.

108 Translation: “Here, you are in one of the dirtiest neighborhoods of Paris. It’s not because the City does not clean, it’s because you have some populations, of immigrant origin, that have another relation with public space and who through everything in the street.”

69 “Beautiful Belleville,” hostile and hotel, is a symbol of gentrification in bas Belleville.

When the librarian S. Amiri spoke about the changes she sees on Rue Denoyez, the steet where she grew up, her observations include moral judgements about changes in her neighborhood’s composition: “Je sais pas si vous avez vu la Rue Denoyez ; c’est changé depuis là—ça devient de plus en plus d’atelier d’artiste . . . Depuis cinq ans, ouais. C’est vrai que, avant, dans la Rue Denoyez, il n’y avait que des habitants, il n’y avait que quelques cafés. Maintainent ça devient un atelier d’artiste. . . moi, j’aime pas . . . J’aurais préferé que ça reste un quartier populaire, un quartier des habitants.”109 Such observations note new cafés and art studios as markers of gentrification. This pattern claims space for a segment of the population that is imagined as, if not truly composed of, white well-off young people of the creative class110. The gentrified imaginary of Belleville marks certain spaces as belonging to certain groups: whole streets, or just certain cafés. These imaginaries, I found were often triggered by both aesthetics—the gentrifier’s café generally exposed more curated decorating—and the bodies that occupied the space—such spaces were not diverse in age or race. This imaginary allows residents to locate Belleville among parallel processes occurring in cities across the planet, and reclaim ‘truer’ visions of the neighborhood based on memory and narrative. The quartier-gentrifié imaginary, on the other hand, fragments people’s vision of Belleville. Whereas the previous imaginaries often juxtaposed Belleville with the rest of Paris, or bourgeois Parisian districts in particular, this imaginary breaks Belleville into in-groups and out-groups based on one’s social position in the power geometry of the world city.

Such an imagination is not always a negative evaluation of the changes occurring in Belleville. In many cases interlocutors reference gentrification as a process active in their neighborhood, and pointed to such changes improving the quality of life for residents in Belleville. S. Amiri pointed out this ambivalence when she spoke about the changes she sees on the Rue Denoyez. Less public delinquency on Rue Denoyez and in bas Belleville generally, in her opinion, is tied to the idea that Belleville is a gentrifying neighborhood: “Après ça peut être bien—après ça peut changer completement . . . ça veut pas dire que ça soit pas du mauvais coté, mais que ça soit du bon coté. . . . là, ça devient plus calme qu’avant” 111. This sort of ambivalence was noted in each discussion regarding class changes occurring in Belleville. Related, I argue, is the analysis that those coming into the neighborhood are not Paris’s wealthy, but middle-income, socioeconomic precarious young folks who are enticed by Belleville’s affordability. In an interview with 109 Translation: “I don’t know if you’ve seen Rue Denoyez; it’s changed since then—it’s getting more and more art galleries. . . Since five years ago, yes. It’s true that, before, in Rue Denoyez, there were only residents, there were only a few cafés. Now it’s becoming an artist’s studio. . . me, I don’t like it. . . I would prefer that it stayed a populaire neighborhood, a neighborhood of residents.”

110 Richard Florida writes of the creative class as transformative group for cities, especially for neighborhoods like Belleville which are prone to negative readings à la quartier-ghetto imaginary.

111 Translation: “Well, it can be a good thing—it can change things completely. . . it does not mean that it’s all bad, but that it could be good. . . here it’s calmer that before.”

70 i-D magazine journalist Malou Briand Rautenberg, urban sociologist at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, Anne Steiner argues: C'est la spéculation immobilière qui fait que les quartiers deviennent plus chers.

Comme on ne peut plus acheter ou louer à prix raisonnable dans certains arrondissements, les gens se déplacent vers les anciens quartiers populaires. Ces quartiers deviennent alors plus jeunes, leur particularité est d'avoir une rue plus vivante, ce qui les rend de plus en plus attractifs pour une certaine jeunesse.112 The imaginary of Belleville as a quartier-gentrifié is thus inscribed into world city dynamics that concentrate speculative capital in the central city, which price out middleincome populations and push them towards more marginal neighborhoods like Belleville.

The tension between Bellevillois.esrlt;fdcx of immigrant, popular backgrounds, and the new inhabitants, is a testament to the plurality of world city flows identified by Robinson.

There are world city flows that have brought generations of non-French immigrants to Belleville—which allow them to carve out space for themselves. Other flows are at work within the city—between districts—particularly in the domain of real estate that reproduce the city’s divided class geography. Massey, in World City, asserts that gentrification is a “neoliberal urban strategy” toward class domination, and I find that this imaginary is often—though not always—analyzed in such a light. 113The result is that the spatial agency of all those in Belleville becomes more contested as new social fragmentations arise, and that the work of locating becomes harder within such a vexed imaginary.

Performing the Neighborhood In the seminal text, Society of the Spectacle, situationist Guy Debord first wrote: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”.114 For the Situationists of mid-20th century Paris, urban life had been disillusioned by commercialism into manipulative representations of imagined reality. From the Situationist, I maintain the stance that urban life is performance, and I add that these performances are oriented via schema—or, ‘imaginaries,’ as they are constructed interpretations of place. People embody certain schemas based on their positions in space and in society. In turn, performances of and in place are constantly enacted among people and their environment. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” wrote Debord, “but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”.115 112 Malou Briand Rautenberg, “jeunes, bobos, et coupables : et si on n’avait rien compris à la gentrification,” January 6 2016, https://i-d.vice.com/fr/article/593943/jeunes-bobos-coupables-et-si-onnavait-rien-compris-la-gentrification. Translation: “It’s real estate spectulation that makes neighborhoods more expensive. Since one cannot buy or rent at a reasonable price in certain districts, people move toward formerly populaire neighborhoods. These neighborhoods become more young, their particularity is to have more lively streets, which makes them more and more attractive for certain youths.”

113 Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 90.

114 Massey, pg 5 115 See above.

71 What does the performance of Belleville look like, and how is it implicated in processes of locating and world city-making? My experience in Paris-Belleville made clear how people affirm the imaginaries in which they are inscribed by acting, dressing, moving, and congregating in certain ways and in specific places. Through performing, Bellevillois.es make and find spaces where they can both affirm these imaginaries as well as their place within the social geography of the neighborhood. This is how the spectacle is enacted by individuals and groups in the neighborhood, and not solely as a result of capitalist dynamics looking to conquer urban space. These performances are, thus, important ways in which Bellevillois.es cultivate their spatial agency. By performing the neighborhood in idiosyncratic ways, they not only become inscribe in certain imaginaries, but they shape the landscape of such imaginaries in the neighborhood— determining what is possible for future actors.

Performance is an important concept for the critical analysis of how societies and cultures work. In Butch Queens Up in Pumps, anthropologist Marlon M. Bailey theorizes performance as a way that “human beings fundamentally make culture, affect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world, especially for those with limited or no access to State power and privilege.”.116 In his study of Detroit’s Black LGBT Ballroom subculture, Bailey applies his theory of performance to the ways he observed this community craft new social worlds, including unique gender and kinship systems. In my study of performance in and of Paris-Belleville, I also observed performance as an important factor in the constant (re)creation of the social worlds of the neighborhood. In the following case studies, I expose different ways that previously discussed schema orient performance, how performance (re)creates the social worlds of Belleville, and how these are all implicated in the translocal flows of the world city. Additionally, I reference different modes of performance in urban space that I extrapolated from field observations: (quasi-)public inhabitation (e.g. occupying space in bars, cafés, restaurants, tabacs, and their terraces), commercial exchange, and cultural production.

Commerce in Belleville A large part of the public social performance in and of Belleville is predicated upon the transactional exchanges that go on in shops, eateries, and markets of the neighborhood. The act of buying, selling, and even perusing, is not simply economic.

Rather, in Belleville, they create and maintain social and cultural ties and influence one’s understanding of the neighborhood. Through my field observations, interviews, and literature review on the neighborhood, I found that commercial establishments in Belleville inscribed in the world city largely fall along two lines: postcolonial, and hipster/bobo. These establishments can, and often do, fall into more than one category given the diversity of populations sharing the neighborhood. More importantly, these establishments make room for the various imaginaries of the neighborhood to become visible. This process of manifesting imaginaries is what I called performance. The performances in Belleville’s commercial establishments draw upon world city systems to survive, and reproduce them in return. Through capitalism orients commerce overall, the world city systems at work here are mostly based on non-dominant demographic groups.

116 Massey, 18.

72 Take for instance the Maghreb restaurants, cafés, bakeries, and shops along the Boulevard de Belleville, between Metro Belleville and Metro Ménilmotant. These are places where the Franco-Maghreb population maintain a cultural community outside of their historical homelands. The many Maghreb—mostly Algerian, Tunisian, and Lebanese—establishments in Belleville claim territory for Maghreb actors in ParisBelleville. These commercial sites, thus, provide space for the performance of the quartier-monde, as space is appropriated by actors marked as ‘foreign.’ Additionally, in the many Maghreb restaurants and bakeries in bas Belleville, the act buying and consuming transcends the material and becomes a moment of urban spectacle. Especially during Ramadan, and regularly during periods of warm weather, commerce in these sites bring to life the imaginary of Belleville as quartier-village, but in a way that is distinctly postcolonial. Muslims gathered after prayer to break their fasts in the late evening, families bonding over meals at halal or kocher restaurants, and men gathered for hookah in certain cafés—all of these are everyday examples of how commerce in Belleville perform and reproduce the world city. Locating themselves in and through Belleville, Maghreb populations use commerce to organize in-community—thereby turning the commercial establishment into a stage to perform the quartier-monde and quartier-village.

Left: Chinese restaurant, le Nouveau Palais de Belleville, on Rue de Belleville. Right: Maghreb bakery on Boulevard de Belleville.

Postcolonial commerce exists for the other ethnic groups concentrated in the neighborhood, as well. Notably, the East Asian population along Rue de Belleville.

Similar to the Maghreb population, East Asian immigrant communities to Belleville have found their niche in the affordable and adaptable infrastructure that this neighborhood provides. The performance of the neighborhood, again, comes to life in sites of commerce—facilitated by transactional relationships between buyer and seller, and in the quasi-public space that such establishments provide. I observed how Belleville’s Chinese and East Asian community uses the space of markets and grocery stores for socialization, more so than restaurants and cafés. Their performance of Belleville, thus, is situated in and shaped by the relationship-building and chance encounters that occur while shopping for goods in one’s neighborhood. For many in Belleville, the Chinese community exercise the quartier-monde and quartier-village imaginaries through this social, commercial activity. As histories of immigration in Belleville—both real and fictitious117 117 Les Deux Vies de Ning is a fictional children’s book that references the space of Belleville as a place for the performance of Chinese culture in a nation-state outside of the People’s Republic of China.

73 —attest, this activity is only possible because of the translocal flows and trans-scalar power geometries118 that have made Belleville what it is today.

In these cases, commercial activity facilitates the transformation of imaginary into action by (re)territorializing space for postcolonial populations to come together and produce the world city that works best for themselves.

Through similar means but with different results, hipster and bobo-oriented commerce in Belleville also draws on translocal systems to perform certain neighborhood imaginaries. Commerce is a performance that does not only fall along ethnic or religious lines—class also structures how imaginaries are enacted in the world city. In preceding sections, I have discussed the class-based implications of global economic restructuring in cities—namely that gentrification manifests global trends in urban geographies. The migration of a multicultural hipster and bobo class to Belleville over recent years, thus, not only changes the class composition of the neighborhood—it shifts the who and how of the performance of Belleville, too. Interlocutor’s testimonies along with literature on the neighborhood attest to the changing face of Belleville; that is, the changing class makeup of the neighborhood’s performers. Nearly all those interviewed for this study noted the in-migration of younger, more aisé populations to the neighborhood. This population frequents many of the same café-restaurants as residents in other classes— though conversations with a few longtime residents indicates that the migration of this class to Belleville has shifted points of congregation for some.119 Social mixing between ethnicities and classes, nevertheless, is central to the performance of Belleville. By reappropriating commercial space, this performance adds manifestations of the quartier gentrifié and quartier-artiste imaginary to those already enacted by immigrants. It also reflects the world city dynamics that restructure urban life and rearrange populations in urban space.

Another commercial activity of note are markets that occur along the Boulevard de Belleville and Rue des Pyrénées on a bi-weekly and weekly basis, respectively. These markets serve an economic role in the neighborhood—providing fresh, affordable produce, meat, and goods for the many working-class people living there. They also perform ideas about Belleville as a community, reflecting the quartier-village schema.

The performance looks like dense crowds of shoppers moving between stalls, trying to find their vendors of choice amidst a flurry of shouts, discussions, and a myriad of goods on display. It also looks like commerce à la sauvette: informal and extra-legal buying and selling where people without access to formal means make money by selling cheap goods, found items, or hand-made crafts. As noted in the previous section, these markets are regular, though ephemeral spaces for neighbors to interact. Markets in public space stage interactions, which refract certain understandings of Belleville. The market in bas Belleville, for instance, manifests an understanding of Belleville as the populaire front, while the one in haut Belleville, is performed in such a way that reads more aisé. Here, 118 Power geometries are trans-scalar when they breach the distinction of global, national, regional, local, and urban—and when they function as frameworks at all levels. Take the power geometries specific to neoliberal capitalism for example: they orient global trade as well as gentrification block-by-block through a uniform ideology that works with different institutions and actors depending on scale.

119 Some interlocutors referenced that, once bobos and hipsters crowded out more working-class populations diverse in age, they stopped frequenting those specific café-restaurants. Interestingly, this shift in behavior was usually qualified by time of day: crowding-out was felt during the evening more so than in the daytime.

74 the shopper and pedestrian feel less crowded, have choices between market food and food from organic grocers, and interact with a more homogenous group of shoppers and vendors. The performance of this market, while still enacting the sense of community related to the quartier-village, is also aligned with the vision of Belleville as a gentrifying space.

Le Marché de Belleville at Couronnes.

The work of locating Belleville is often performed in such commercial settings.

The ways that Belleville is understood comes to light in these quasi-public spaces, which are generated through transactional relationships. These spaces allow for socialization via the enacting of imaginaries specific to this space. Locating, I theorize, is about understanding as well as exercising spatial agency. The shoppers, vendors, and proprietors all make claim to space in Belleville by the types of commerce they perform.

Whether that be ethnically inscribed or based on class affinities, the very act of commerce is a spectacle that allows people in the neighborhood to embody their imaginations. This embodiment, I argue, creates affective ties to certain types of commerce (e.g. cafés, bar, restaurants, religious stores, non-franchise supermarkets, open-air markets) and to certain ways of engaging in this activity—be it with family, among friends and neighbors, or other groups with which one identifies. The many translocal currents running through Belleville generate this multiplicity of specificities—all of which have their share in distinguishing the neighborhood among Parisian geography. Moreover, the translocal currents one is inscribed in determines the schema(s) that orients their behavior in the neighborhood. These are crucial differences that perform the world city on the ground, and attest to the importance of the neighborhood in world city system formation.

(Quasi-)Public Café Inhabitation Along the major axes of Belleville—Boulevard de Belleville, Rue de Belleville, Rue des Pyrénées, and Rue des Couronnes—there exist a myriad of cafés that play a vital

75 role in shaping the social world of Belleville. In many cases, interlocutors referenced the streets—and specifically the Rue de Belleville—as representational spaces in their neighborhood. The streets are where the imaginations of Belleville see the light of day— where schemas orient performance in very visible space. Thus, the streets are where the lefebvrian idea of representational space are transformed into spatial practice. Cafés along these streets pull together the heterogeneous translocal currents in Belleville, and showcase the imaginations active in the neighborhood at work for all to see.

A scene at a café-restaurant, Mon Cœur, and bakery situated at the top of the Parc de Belleville.

Cafés, a tired Parisian cliché, are nevertheless important for animating the performance of the streets. In Belleville, I found that the inhabitation of its variety of cafés—which serve as restaurants, bars, cultural venues, and even informal social centers and banks120—offers a rather clear case of the neighborhood in performance. Anne Steiner aptly identifies how the café adopts a crucial geographical role through people’s performance therein: Le café, lieu où l’on s’éxpose, où l’on se met en scène, donne à voir la mutation sociale du quartier, porteuse, pour les plus fragiles des anciens habitants, d’une sourde menace. Occupants des terraces et occupants des rues et des porches s’exhibitent et se défient alors, affichant leurs differences de look, de pratiques, de valeurs, de statuts, dans une surenchère qui peut devenir explosive.121 120 Anne Steiner, “Les cafés du bas Belleville: de la mixité au cloisonnement ?” in Belleville, quartier populaire (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 165. In Anne Steiner’s chapter, she cites an interview with the proprietor of Chez Freddy—a now-closed café on Rue de Tourtille in bas Belleville: “Nous les patrons de café, on est la banque de l’ouvrier.” Translation: “Us café owners, we are the worker’s bank.”

121 Anne Steiner, 160. Translation: “The café, the site where one exhibits oneself, gives sight to the social mutation of the neighborhood—the carrier, for the most fragile of the longtime residents—of a gnawing threat. Occupants of terraces, streets, and stoops exhibit themselves and challenge each other—putting their differences in look, practices, values, and status on display—in a one-upmanship that can become explosive.”

76

Steiner’s reading of the contemporary geography of cafés falls hard on the performance of conflict in the neighborhood—specifically between classes and between new and longtime Bellevillois.es. Steiner’s analysis points to the different ways that café-goers see themselves and their place in Belleville’s social geography: artist, immigrant, worker, activist, parent, visitor, etc. The analysis also, importantly, points to the reciprocal act of la mise en scène—or ‘staging’ and ‘activating’. While viewing others inhabiting Belleville’s cafés as performers, one is also seen as a performer by the other—be it as a passerby or as a café goer as well. Cafés set the stage for one to see and be seen—to perform and be performed.

Aux Folies seen from across Rue de Belleville, in October 2017. The northern end of Rue Denoyez sites to the left of the café.

Two cafés in particular stuck out as particularly important places where the neighbor’s performance takes shape: La Vielleuse and Aux Folies. These two caférestaurant-bars appear as the most inhabited sites of their kind in the neighborhood— there is almost always social activity going on inside and outside these establishments.

On a warm evening, or on weekends, these cafés overflow with patrons who occupy space inside at the bar, at tables indoors, and on the sidewalk terrace. Not surprisingly, both La Vielleuse and Aux Folies are situated on the same block. La Vielleuse is situated on the carrefour de Belleville, while Aux Folies is adjacent to the pedestrian and graffitifilled Rue Denoyez—both at the nexus of Belleville’s Maghreb and East Asian communities. Steiner notes that the owner of Aux Folies is an Algerian man, and an interlocutor mentioned that La Vielleuse is owned by a Tunisian man. The geographical situation, I gather, is an important factor in how these inhabited sites perform the neighborhood, and explain how they are able to connect the translocal flows coursing through Belleville.

77 The quasi-public status of these cafés is central to their roles as settings for the performance of the neighborhood. I say “quasi-public”, because, though they are open to practically anyone who can afford the cheapest item on the menu, the cafés are still private property owned and managed by private interests. The public character of the cafés manifests in the way that they occupy space that extends into the public territory of the streets. The front facing terraces make perfect stages for the performance of certain schemas at work in Belleville. Indeed, those who patron La Vielleuse and Aux Folies appear to prefer inhabiting their exterior terraces in good weather; more patrons sit outside rather than inside on a warm day, despite sound and air pollution on the busy streets. Thus, it becomes evident that choosing to eat, drinking, and/or smoke on the terrace is an act of self-exhibition wherein the patron watches the neighborhood being performed in front of them. The whirl of cars and scooters, of pedestrians on the move, and others idling about the carrefour, or up and down the steep Rue de Belleville, captivate these café inhabitants. In turn, they too become performers while they inhabit the cafés. These interactions maintain and create new intersubjectivities through the embodiment of the quartier-village imaginary, and enact the divisions of the quartier gentrifié that Steiner wrote about. One ought to go to these terraces to see and be seen because it is through intersubjectivity that groups creates the close social relations and fight atomization, or—conversely—claim territory and exclude others. In any case, performance through inhabitation and passive forms of seeing foster a sense of location.

These cafés have their differences in how they perform the neighborhood. At the most frequented intersection in the area—what I refer to as the carrefour de Belleville— La Vielleuse attracts a diverse crowd that varies by time of day or night. At first glance, La Vielleuse seems like any other café at an important Parisian intersection: busy, socially mixed, exhibitionist, and a meeting place. While this all is true, my observations of and in La Vielleuse elucidate the idiosyncrasies of the café. Here, conversations occur in numerous languages—notably in French, Arabic, and Chinese—between people with different understandings of the neighborhood based on their conversation and comportment. In particular, Sylvie Conord’s 1994 study of socialization among JeudoTunisian women in the neighborhood identifies this café as a “lieu d’ancrage, un port, [ou] un refuge” for the population.122 Even today, Tunisian interlocutors mentioned the importance of La Vielleuse for both Tunisian community that stretches from this neighborhood back to Tunis. Many of Belleville’s Tunisians come from the popular district, Hafsia, in Tunis, and stories about the Tunisian enclave in Paris center La Vielleuse in their depictions.123 The central geography, orienting schemas, and favorable conditions for immigrant settling have all contributed to the performance of a wordily Belleville at La Vielleuse.

The inhabitation of La Vielleuse is, thus, the quartier-monde and quartier-village in conversation and in action. With my distance as a relative outsider, and as a researcher with a keen eye for understanding spectacle and the urban environment, I have come to know La Vielleuse today as a place where both schemas orient how patrons act in-place 122 Sylvaine Conord, “Sociabilité des femmes juives tunisiennes: Approche photo-ethnographique,” in Belleville, quartier populaire ? (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 178. Translation: “. . . an anchoring site, a door, [or] a refuge.”

123 In my interview with S. Amiri, she stated that La Vielleuse and Couronnes are locations known by both Tunisians in Paris, as well as those back home who learn about Belleville/Paris (through stories and visits) through these spaces.

78 and how pedestrians observe the café’s social world. The constituents of this café reflect the mixed ethnic reality of Belleville—employing and reaffirming the confluence of translocal flows therein. Indeed, the mixing that occurs in this café reflects the translocality of the carrefour and the neighborhood: those who choose to stop at the Vielleuse come and go within the city, the region, the continent, and the globe. Even though a fixed location, this café acts as a prism where translocal flows are refracted through performance of the quartier-monde. This is one way that the world city is crafted on the scale of the neighborhood. People’s active embodiment of an imaginary such as this does the work of world city-building just as it locates the neighborhood in this same world city.

On the other hand, the patrons I observed at Aux Folies in 2017 appeared to be a less heterogeneous group, especially in the evenings when young people from across northern Paris flock to the bar. Though the café also serves a Maghreb clientele, especially during the day, Aux Folies is known as the hipster hangout in Belleville par excellence.124 On a typical Friday evening, one finds the interior and exterior of the cafébar packed full, particularly with young Parisians of a certain bohemian persuasion. Its location near the metro allows for Parisians from outside of Belleville easy access to the space; indeed, young people throughout the northeast sector of the city are familiar with the establishment. And its placement at the corner of the Rue Denoyez—known for its graffiti and art studios—and Rue de Belleville’s many Chinese markets and eateries, acculturates Aux Folies along both artistic and cosmopolitan lines. The imaginary of the quartier-monde is attempted, but not performed successfully in this space, in contemporary Belleville.

On the other hand, the quartier-artiste is performed through the interaction between the café’s surrounding built environment and the bodies who inhabit its terrace.

The dynamic brings to life the latent imaginaries that exist of Belleville and showcase them to the neighborhood in its front-facing terrace. The performer and the spectator alike are then able to locate this space according to certain schemas—which, if powerful enough in their imaginary of Belleville, can stand for the whole of the neighborhood.

Longtime residents may walk by Aux Folies in the evening and not only see a bar full of artist-types, but think back to a time when Aux Folies was not ‘on the map.’ Similarly, new working-class immigrants of varying ages and ethnicities may feel excluded from the contemporary Aux Folies given what sorts of imaginaries they are able to perform.

Those who inhabit Aux Folies on the other hand, glancing to the street life around them, see a neighborhood that reflects their imagination of Belleville as a steadfast populaire and immigrant enclave set apart from the homogeneity of bourgeois Paris. Through the inhabitation of a single café, multiple performances are had, and various imaginaries of the neighborhood are refracted and embodied. In this way, the complexities of world city systems are drawn out in the space of everyday life, rather than elite financial capital. The world city—read from the neighborhood perspective—is a vastly complex and performative concept, not a simple map of financial flows between business districts around the world.

124 It was only though reading Roselyne de Villanova’s chapter in Belleville, quartier populaire ? that I learned that Aux Folies was created by a Tunisian immigrant and served as a social center for the JuedoTunisian population in Belleville. This is a testament to the changing performances in the neighborhood.

79 (Re)Constructing the Neighborhood The Parc de Belleville, one of the most important sites that Bellevillois.es identified in their neighborhood, is a recent construct. Inaugurated in 1988 after design and construction by the City, the Parc de Belleville provides the most stunning view of the Paris from one of its highest vantage points. From the plaza at the top of the park, one sees almost every Parisian monument: the Eiffel Tower, les Invalides, Notre Dame, Tour Montparnasse, la Sorbonne, and le Centre Pompidou; affects of belonging to an urban community and alienation apart from the whole are stirred up from such a view. With the spectacle of the city in front of you, it is easy to forget the history of this hillside park.

Spanning bas and haut Belleville, a sub-neighborhood of informal residences—S. Amiri referred to them as “squats”—were built on the site since the annexation of Belleville in the late 19th century. Small vineyards were replaced with new structures as the city expanded from its core. By the mid 20th century, this part of Belleville was a particularly impoverished one—as remembered by the lifelong residents I spoke with and the neighborhood activist, Jean Rozental.125 Residents of this informal settlement were deprived of resources otherwise found in the city—and owned by wealthy Parisians. In its desire to clean up the ‘insalubrity’ of the neighborhood, the State intervened in the 1980s to transform this informal settlement into a picturesque park; the Parc de Belleville was inaugurated in 1988. This park has subsequently been inhabited by generations of residents who gather for leisure, meals, meetings, festivities, and small markets. Those who perform the space of the Parc de Belleville in such ways reconstruct the park anew: changing its symbolic landscape through street art, ephemeral markets, cultural performances, and annual festivals. In this section, we look to the ways that everyday actors (re)construct Belleville—in turn locating their neighborhood, cultivating relational/mutual spatial agencies, and making the world city.

Imaginations and performances of Belleville change, negotiate, and rearticulate the material and symbolic realities of the district. This generative process between imagination and performance is what I refer to as (re)construction. Lefebvre’s notion of the spatial triad and the production of space prove useful as I theorize how Belleville is constantly (re)constructed through imagination and performance.126 Lefebvre notes that space is produced through a dialectic between three factors: representations of space, representational space, and spatial practice. If imaginaries align with representational space and performance with spatial practice, then the (re)construction of space falls more squarely in the realm of representations of space. Lefebvre characterizes the latter as a “conceived” space—thought up and prescribed by planners, but influenced by the prior two factors all the same. Since officials began attempts to ‘clean up’ Belleville through urban redevelopment, representations of space have led to massive reconstructions. I add that representations are likewise created by Bellevillois.es; they may not take the form of formal plans of land use imbued with legal authority, but they are still powerful in shaping imaginations and performance of the neighborhood. Unlike official representations of space produced by dominant city actors, alternative representations have the added benefit of growing individual and group spatial agency. Thus, by even 125 Jean Rozenthal, Belleville, je t’aime : hier comme ajourd’hui.

126 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.

80 attempting to reconstruct their environment, Bellevillois.es cultivate spatial understanding and shape uses of their environment.

Translocality is necessarily important for the (re)construction of the neighborhood. Space in Belleville is under reconstruction precisely because of the ties it has, in reality and in imaginary, to elsewhere. Belleville is only what it is today given successive ways of migration: from Paris central, the Maghreb, East Asia, and innumerable other areas. Indeed, without workers fleeing Haussmannian renovations to Paris, this former agrarian village may look very different today. Later generations of inmigrants from around the world, beginning in the 20th century, continue to re-territorialize the neighborhood as they invest their various cultural traditions in space. By creating commercial establishments to stage translocality, or by holding cultural events in public space, translocal immigration shares practices between Paris-Belleville and a plurality of elsewheres. In the 21st century, we see new trends of migration toward Belleville that bring more well-off populations and more capital to the neighborhood. On one hand, there is translocal in-migration of capital and populations from within Ile-de-France. On the other hand, more dominant forms of capital (e.g. new and relatively pricey apartments) arise in Belleville given the restructuring of the neoliberal market, which manifests itself in world cities.127 The complex of translocal ties that is increasingly concentrated in the district concurrently (re)constructs the neighborhood and the world city.

Spatial Differentiation & Homogenization Lefebvre famously writes in The Production of Space, that “. . . (social) space is a (social) product.”.128 He was right—space is a not a mere container, but a construct that is generated by, and generates, complex social interactions. My research in Belleville suggests that the polemic patterns of differentiation and homogenization create new ways that its urban fabric is constructed and used. Based on Belleville’s social role within Paris as an immigrant neighborhood, and its position within translocal flows, the neighborhood is shared between many groups. Belleville’s ethnic, class, and religious groups imagine and perform their shared neighborhood in similar and different ways, as previously explained. Thus, over time, sectors of Belleville are territorialized by different groups, and used for different purposes; new spaces of belonging and novel practices arise throughout these changes. Simultaneously, there are trends within the imagination and performance of Belleville that construct homogenized spaces—large urban redevelopment and gentrification are two ways that space becomes homogenized. The polemic forces of differentiation and homogenization are crucial to understanding how contemporary Belleville is (re)constructed, and have implications for world cities overall.

As has been noted, Belleville is a neighborhood of unparalleled ethnic mixing. All interlocutors described to me how waves of immigration have shaped their neighborhood for as long as they could remember—be it fifty years, or five. The social geography of Belleville, however, is not as perfectly mixed as the quartier-monde imaginary would attest. In modern day Belleville, different ethnic groups clearly call different quarters of the neighborhood home. Through commerce and residential dynamics, Algerian, 127 See: Massey, World City; Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis;” Sassen, “Who’s City Is It?” 128 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 46.

81 Tunisian, Sub-Saharan African, European, Turkish, and East Asian residents invest differently in the urban fabric. Translocal flows circulating through Belleville bring these groups to the neighborhood, and forces within the world city arrange them in space. Once an area’s community of place forms, these groups often influence such translocal flows to bring others from their community into their neighborhood.

Thus, different ethnic enclaves are constructed over time, and territories are constantly (re)constructed. Currently, the Rue de Belleville between the carrefour de Belleville and Rue des Pyrénées, as well as some adjacent blocks in the 19th and 10th arrondissements, are home to much of its East Asian residents, commerce, and organizations. Around the corner, on the Boulevard de Belleville, urban space is chiefly occupied by the (Judeo-)Tunisian community. On and around the Rue des Couronnes in both the 20th and 11th arrondissements, there is a notable Muslim population made up of Algerians and Sub-Saharan Africans; this enclave is anchored by three mosques and displayed notable animation during the month of Ramadan in June 2017. Additionally, three interlocutors located Rue Ramponeau as a street that plays host to an immigrant Sub-Saharan African population of note. In haut Belleville, both field observations and interviews pointed to the prominence of Europeans of diverse background. There still exists less ethnic and class diversity of residents and commerce in haut Belleville—seen through signage, ethnic bodies, and types of urban uses. For example, haut Belleville is home to a mix of ethnically-identified restaurants (e.g. French, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, American), biologique grocers, artisanal foods, boutiques, and specialty goods stores. Whereas, in bas Belleville, one sees a prominence of either East Asian or Maghreb restaurants, grocers, and cafés, as well as telecommunications stores, miniature chain markets, bars, and large non-ethnicallyaligned café-restaurants.

The differentiation of Belleville’s urban fabric is evident. The imaginary of Belleville as a quartier-monde makes room for immigrant groups to perform their respective cultures in Belleville, while the quartier-village imaginary orients toward intersubjectivities reminiscent of small towns. Because creating and maintaining intersubjectivities is easier when subjects share a language and/or culture, Belleville’s spatial—and, as Lefebvre would argue, social—composition is fragmented among a plurality of affinities. The differentiation of Belleville’s geography, I contend, is a testament to the capacity its actors have to exercise spatial agency in a district long forgotten by global finance and marginalized by the State. Their ability to locate themselves and those with whom they identify within Belleville apart from the rest via a reformulation of urban space, also attests to the constructive dialectic between imagining, performing, and (re)constructing.129 At the same time as differentiation plays a powerful force in the (re)construction of Belleville, so too does homogenization. Homogenized space can be most clearly seen in the urban development projects that mark pockets of Belleville’s landscape; HLMs (Habitations à Loyers Modérés)130 and new parks form the majority of such spaces. These 129 Differentiation is based, in part, on the distinguishing factors between Bellevillois.es that make the group exercise of spatial agency easier. However, I do not wish to over-state fractures within the neighborhood. While real, the neighborhood is also (re)constructed through relations of solidarity that transcend group divisions. Such examples will be attended to later in this section.

130 The French equivalent of “rent-controlled housing”, HLMs are public or private residential structures that receive at least partial public funding. Large HLMs, those that house hundreds or some thousands of

82 are sites where lefebvrian representations of space have bulldozed old sections of the neighborhood deemed unsafe or unsightly. Subsequently, the State designed the social housing complexes which would replace prior informal settlements. The style of these cités are mostly homogenous: similar usage of color (white or gray), material (concrete), and site plans (single entry to a primary structure, followed by a courtyard, and then a second structure). Despite the destruction and homogenized design by the State, the performed imaginaries at hand in Belleville have imbued difference into the imposed structures. The inhabitants of the large HLMs are often of immigrant background, and their facades have been appropriated by varying styles of street art and signage. Political posters as well as graffiti are central to many imaginaries and performances of Belleville; the homogenization of its fabric is met with the fierce capacity of Bellevillois.es to locate their neighborhood space for themselves.

A three-dimensional representation provided by Google Maps of a sector bas Belleville. The large buildings with ample green space between them are HLMs constructed by the City of Paris in the late 20 th century to provide affordable housing for those living in the site’s former residences deemed ‘insalubrious by the City).

Another level of homogenization is at work in Belleville: gentrification. Within the confines of Belleville, gentrification may appear as just a new form of spatial differentiation. However, as Massey reminds us, gentrification is the local manifestation of global capitalism.131 Global capitalism shows itself to be a machine of homogenization; districts like La Défense and the 16th arrondissement of Paris attest to the flattening qualities of this system in the built environment. In these places, the global capitalism limits what is possible: structures within it appear to follow the same norms, and people’s behaviors follow suit. Though, in Chapter II, I underline the miscalculation behind readings of La Défense and the Eiffel Tower’s grounds as solely sites of dominance, it would be wrong to ignore the actual hegemony of global capitalism in such areas. In Belleville, gentrification tends to assimilate spaces to the dominant culture of the Parisian elite or bourgeois—manifest on the ground as ‘bobo’. Organic grocers, boutique cafés, residents, are often referred to as “cités”.

131 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 121-22.

83 new apartments and art galleries all connote a degree of gentrification in Belleville. As my interlocutors and other researchers on Belleville note, gentrified reconstruction poses a threat to the differentiation exhibited in the neighborhood.132 Whereas the State’s urban redevelopment attempts homogenization, gentrification is homogenization guided by the Market.

Like anywhere else, this Market is built through translocal exchanges that result in investment and accumulation. Particular to Belleville, however, is that its imagination and performance as a multicultural, artistic, and ‘progressive’ neighborhood has attracted a capitalist class seeking non-dominant acculturation by living or investing in the neighborhood. As de Villanova notes in Belleville, quartier populaire ?, this type of homogenizing force has constructed new and conflicting urbanisms in the district. The tension between differentiation and homogenization in Belleville orients Paris as a world city. Will Paris be a world city of gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods à la New York, or will it be a world city where a diversity of actors brought there through translocal flows have the chance to cultivate spatial agency and build locales of belonging? The capacity of Bellevillois.es to understand, claim, and act in space by drawing on and appropriating translocalities—even in the context of homogenizing forces —points to the latter alternative.

23 Rue Ramponeau Reconstruction of the neighborhood changes uses and meanings of space. As alluded to in the previous section, this process need not be solely about building new physical structures (though it is consequential), rather about shaping territory and possibilities in the urban environment. The story of Belleville’s 23 Rue Ramponeau attests to the ways that grassroots reconstruction draws on imaginaries of the neighborhood to empower actors to lay claims to space, perform it, and invest materially and symbolically in it. Moreover, the site’s history exposes conflict rooted in polemic world city systems coming to a head in 21st century Belleville—wherein both systems seek to shape the performance of the neighborhood along imaginaries that sustain them.

Three key groups come to play in this story: militant artists of Belleville, the City of Paris, and non-Bellevillois cultural associations. Their conflicting claims to the same place promote oppositional visions of Belleville, and inscribe themselves in different world city systems: working-class migration, elite capital flows, and middle-ground networks of professionalized artists.

Currently, at the site of 23 Rue Ramponeau are renovated artist workshops located in a former key factory. The establishment is named Villa Belleville, and is managed by la Mairie du XXème arrondissement and the cultural organization, Collectif Curry Vavart.

Like most parcels in this section of bas Belleville, 23 Rue Ramponeau extends far beyond its gated entrance; it is only after walking below and between a few apartment buildings that one reaches the workshops in the middle of the parcel. The first time I visited the Villa Belleville was during the Journées de Portes Ouvertes organized by Ateliers d’Artistes de Belleville, when I witnessed artists and visitors in conversation. I came to 132 Roselyne de Villanova, “Belleville, créativités et démocratie locale ?,” in Belleville, quartier populaire (Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2011), 185.

84 learn of this space’s long history through a conversation with a longtime resident. 23 Rue Ramponeau was, in fact, the site of the last barricade during the conflicts to maintain the Paris Commune against Napoleon III’s army in 1871. Despite such symbolic importance in Paris-Belleville’s militant history, no marker of this past is present at the site. Either you know or you do not—and most do not.

The contemporary exterior to 23 Rue Ramponeau. This single entrance leads to Villa Belleville, as well as apartment buildings.

Before the Villa came into existence in 2015, it was inhabited by la Forge de Belleville. La Forge was a collective of roughly a dozen artists who, in 1991, began squatting the site of the abandoned key factory in order to stop the city’s plan to build a parking lot and supermarket. The group was composed of artists already residing in Belleville—many in squats on the very same block—and whose struggle to save the former key factory was supported by two powerful grassroots associations active in Belleville: la Bellevilleuse, and les Ateliers d’Artistes de Belleville.133 La Forge artists successfully squatted the site until 2011—rotating studio space between Belleville artists.

Six years prior, in 2005, in an attempt to expel la Forge, le Mairie de Paris put out a call 133 La Bellevilleuse was a group of residents in bas Belleville who organized, in 1989, against the project to demolish and re-build seven blocks—including the block between Rue Ramponeau and Rue de Belleville where la Forge was located.

85 for organizations that could take over the site for “sociocultural” animation. In 2008, the city awarded the site’s title to an association called TRACES for this very purpose.

TRACES, however, was met with fierce opposition and did not succeed in retaining the space. La Forge artists remained in place, but under constant threat of expulsion. In the meantime, they shared their space with a new street art collective called La Kommune— an creolized homage to 23’s historic geography—which filled the exterior walls of la Forge’s courtyard with layers of graffiti. In 2011, the City expelled la Forge from 23 Rue Ramponeau, and for two years the Caserne Ephémère—a cultural association with the goal of professionalizing artists so their work could be exhibited and sold in the global art market—managed and renovated the site. It was only until 2015 that the Mairie du XXème began collaborating with Collectif Curry Vavart to manage the site and the artists who inhabit its studios under the name “Villa Belleville.”

Thus, the moment I walked into Villa Belleville for the first time in May 2017, I was entering a space under long dispute. Between the fight for the future of Paris—and, by extension, the French empire—between the Commune and the French State in the nineteenth century, and the struggle for control over artists’ studios in a former key forge in the twentieth and twenty-first, 23 Rue Ramponeau has known several phases of contested reconstruction. In no way is this history made evident, however, on the street, nor via the media circulated by Villa Belleville. The militant occupation of space by Belleville artists posed a threat to the power geometry of the City as dominant to the neighborhood. Indeed, it was the spatial agency cultivated through the many grassroots translocal currents intersecting in Belleville that threatened the City’s interests in securing space for global capital in Paris. As Paris began shifting to a neoliberal economy, reproducing the kind of world city structure that Friedmann first hypothesized in 1981, it found itself confronted with counter-spaces such as la Forge that secured space for purposes other than capitalist reproduction.

World city systems in conflict have led to the current use of 23 Rue Ramponeau: a negotiated vision between State power and neighborhood associative control. Instead of being demolished and reconstructed into a supermarket and parking lot, the artist-activists of Belleville were able to seize control of a formerly deteriorating structure and imbue within it material and symbolic value. The process of locating la Forge erupted suddenly in 1991 with a militant occupation, yes, but was also elaborated afterwards over years of DIY renovations and cultural programming. Such an elaborated process of locating was only possible through implicating the surrounding neighborhood communities. By drawing on varying imaginaries of Belleville as a quartier-village, -ouvrier, -monde, -militant, and of course quartier-artiste, la Forge brought residents into its studios. The public succeeded to animate the space with community events and partnerships, and so continued the struggle of sought-after squatting urban real estate. For example, la Forge and la Kommune would host workshops for neighborhood schools, organize “concerts de soutien” as an alternative fundraising method, and co-organize with les Ateliers d’Artistes de Belleville to foster the network of artists in the district. These are all performances oriented by the amalgam of neighborhood imaginaries valued by la Forge. Because the association was able to coalesce such a breadth of Belleville’s imaginaries into one space and a single struggle, they were able to build a large base of supporters and admirers. La Forge, for this reason, did not go down without a long, hard fight.

86 Despite its closure in 2011, La Forge succeeded in (re)constructing Belleville and the world city processes in which it is inscribed. Their fight to retain the extant built environment of the neighborhood drew on the various immigrant groups inhabiting Belleville—from Europeans, to Chinese, Tunisians, and Sub-Saharan Africans. They also gained support from the younger, newer generation of Bellevillois.es that aligned with the vision of Belleville as space where artistry is supported and solidarity with your neighbors is expected. Their collective succeeded in bringing artists to the neighborhood from around the world, again, drawing on the already existing ties maintained by Belleville’s immigrants with locales elsewhere. In these ways, la Forge implicated itself in the creolization of Belleville; the studios were a crucial site of social mixing for two decades, where youth, adults and elders of all stripes coalesced. Moreover, this mixing was not neutral, but politically visionary: they affirmed imaginaries of Belleville as historically militant, diverse, and populaire as the path toward the future. In this way, la Forge contributed to a neighborhood’s ecology of militant associations that is still traceable today. Les AAB continue to blend artistry with activism, leftist bookstores like Jargon Libre celebrate Belleville’s unique history and geography, and sociocultural centers and cafés alike continue the work of social mixing.

Despite the labor put in by la Forge to (re)construct a populaire and diverse Belleville, the site ended up being assimilated into the auspices of the State and commercial flows of art. The Situationists would call such a circumstance recuperation— wherein radical spaces, ideas, or images are appropriated by the society of the spectacle.

In the recuperation of 23 Rue Ramponeau orchestrated by le Mairie de Paris, the work of la Forge to locate the site as an important cultural hub in Belleville through renovations and cultural programming is appropriated as a means of promoting the hegemony of the City over the Neighborhood. The collaboration between Curry Vavart and the City neutralizes la Forge’s explicit political tinge, and invisiblizes 23’s long insurrectional history. The genre of world city system that pushes le Mairie de Paris to recuperate 23 is allied with those already dominant at La Défense and in the central city—that is, financial and large-scale economic flows between powerful locales the world over.

Villa Belleville, is thus not only a reconstruction of 23 Rue Ramponeau. In fact, it is the reconstruction of the neighborhood and of the world city articulated in a single space. Thus, the analysis of this site points toward responses to the questions posed at the end of the last subsection: Will Paris be a world city of gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods à la New York, or will it be a world city where a diversity of actors brought there through translocal flows have the chance to cultivate spatial agency and build locales of belonging? Looking strictly at the trajectory of Villa Belleville, the response leans toward the former—gentrification manifesting itself in the neighborhood as the result of structural realities that reproduce hegemony. However, on a more ecological level, the work of la Forge remains in Belleville through those it shaped into community activists, the equity-based imaginations it mobilized and (re)produced, and the performances of heterogeneous community that it gave space for embodiment. In some cases, especially when confronted with ultra-hegemonic trajectories of global capitalism, even maintaining what you already have can be a form of reconstructing the neighborhood. Today we wait to find out what further conflict and communities arise at 23 Rue Ramponeau.

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Top: Exterior courtyard and alleyway of Villa Belleville. Art on the courtyard walls remain from the la Forge and la Komune occupation. Bottom: Interior view of the art studio space of 23 Rue Ramponeau.

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Locating Belleville is a dialectical process between imagining, performing, and (re)constructing the neighborhood. Actors in Belleville—residents, merchants, workers, and visitors to the neighborhood—are all inscribed in this process to differing degrees and in different ways. Their collective activity in the neighborhood, however, pinpoints exactly where the neighborhood falls on the map of Paris. That is, their locational activities draw upon translocal flows to differentiate Belleville from other Parisian quarters, align Belleville materially and symbolically with various places elsewhere, and orient how Paris functions as a world city. How do Parisians think of themselves in the context of the world, and how do others around the world interact with images, performances, or constructs from Paris? The analysis of Belleville in this chapter brought us closer to answering these questions.

The focus on locating Belleville understands Belleville as a geographical construct that does not exist a priori; the work of locating that these actors engage in on a daily basis is what brings Belleville to life. Locating also takes into account the everchanging nature of what Belleville means and is. The neighborhood is performed and reconstructed depending on the dynamics between competing and overlapping imaginaries. In this chapter, we saw that performances of ethnic community arise in

88 Belleville when both physical and imaginary space are claimed by such ethnic groups.

The Judeo-Tunisian or Chinese populations locate themselves among quartier-monde and quartier-village imaginaries. They also locate their communities in a part of the urban fabric with space accessible to groups without existing fixed capital. The uses of space of different populations and affinity groups delimits how people ought to act in Belleville, as well as how Belleville functions as a neighborhood. Without the dialectic between spaces of representation, representational spaces, and spatial practice like these, Belleville would be placeless—without location.

For actors in Belleville, the ability to locate their neighborhood comes with great consequence. Being able to locate the place where one exists—especially places in one’s immediate environment—is crucial for understanding the power geometries at work in that specific location. Locating through imagining, performing, and (re)constructing allows actors to understand who has power to do what, where, how, and when. Who can walk into the hookah bar on a Friday evening? Where can you go to make street art? How can you find culturally-appropriate services from neighborhood associations? Where can you find your homeland’s music performed? All these are considerations rooted in power geometries—as Massey has elaborately in common cause—as mundane as frequenting an open-air market, and as consequential as fighting to save a whole block from demolition.

Both field and literature research has shown me that one’s ability to act in contested, heterogeneous urban spaces hinges on their ability to understand the space, and then to pool spatial agencies; such is the process of cultivating spatial agency. The process of locating, thus, is a key factor in cultivating spatial agency in a neighborhood like Belleville. Where residents are often marginalized from elite capitalist decision-making, locating can become a process for reclaiming the power to act and (re)construct space from the grassroots.

It is through such reclamations—in Belleville, and other neighborhoods like it throughout the world—that the world city takes on a multifaceted character. However dominant the flows of financial capital between world cities may be, this field-based analysis contends that people shape the spaces of their everyday life in ways that exist outside of, though often influenced by, the dominant world city flows. Friedmann and Sassen located one side of the world city; Massey opened the field up to social and cultural considerations; Robinson destabilized the mere notion of “world city.” In this study, I argue that the concept of world city has value, but only with the deep appreciation of the numerous ways it is imagined, performed, and (re)constructed.

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Chapter IV Conclusions & Next Steps Throughout this study of Paris-Belleville, several factors have become evident.

Primarily, that the concept of the world city is complex and contested term, but one that is nonetheless theoretically and pragmatically important. From the beginning, I make precise the term ‘world city’ as a translocal processes in which cities internalize geographies of elsewhere and externalize geographies of here. For scholars, activists, planners, and policy-makers alike, the ‘world city’ is a crucial point to comprehend in order to make sense of how cities are changing and how they are doing so in interactive ways. Unfortunately, however, the idea of the City has conglomerated into a monolith— one that gives preference to centralized State and corporate power, those which can easily effect systems and flows. This brings me to this piece’s second contribution: the understanding that neighborhood processes within cities are at the heart of world city formation. Indeed, I argue—with theory in one hand and field work in the other—that the ways that translocal processes are articulated in neighborhoods translates to the functioning of world cities and world city systems. Such considerations only became evident after putting Belleville in conversation with diverse theories on world cities, spatial production, psychogeography, and translocality. The following sections of this chapter will delve deeper into concluding considerations of the current study, and identify steps to elaborate upon this analysis in the future.

(Trans)Locating & Cultivating Spatial Agency One is always in contact with innumerable translocal flows; some of these flows may be more mundane or more consequential than others. For example, migration or global capital investment are dynamics that relate places to each other, and that drastically shape lives and landscapes. Like people, places also come into contact with translocalities—each place imbued with specific meanings and potentialities based on the flows inscribed therein. In this paper, the act of locating has been developed as an active process by which such slippery and complex realities are understood, and their potentialities deployed, by actors in the urban environment. To locate is to find a place or position, to establish something apart and in relation to others. A study of Paris-Belleville makes evident the importance of translocality in relation to the locating process in the world city; actors understand and manifest Belleville by drawing on ties to both elsewheres and heres. This is true for the contemporary ethnic communities in the neighborhood, as well as for other communities of affinity such as artists and activists, which develop collective and idiosyncratic visions of Belleville among a plurality of geographical meanings and situations. Belleville is not, and cannot, be located in a vacuum.

The fieldwork founding this analysis elucidates the centrality of spatial agency for the locating to be achieved. The ability to act in space is not a given. Rather, it is the fruit of one’s work to understand their environment, coordinate with others, and make claims

90 to space. Whether or not an urban actor can make their way from point A to B to C is tied to their spatial agency, just as the capacity to manipulate urban land uses and symbols in the built environment. I identify three factors that both generate and employ spatial agency: imaging, performing, and (re)constructing. My study of Belleville bears witness to the dialectic that develops between these three factors as actors struggle to locate their neighborhood. Translocality is important when we consider spatial agency, too, because it deeply informs the environment one seeks to understand, use, and change. With at least tacit understandings of Belleville’s translocal ties, accumulated over the decades, spatial agencies are cultivated and the process of locating starts to unfold.

Shifting Boundaries (of City and Neighborhood) One of the major contributions of world city studies is that it deepens the geography of a city to account for the plurality of connections that it maintains with supposedly exterior elsewheres. Like the razing of Paris’s walls, urban studies injected with translocality destabilizes the confines of the city. No longer is there is there direct exchange between discrete heres and elsewheres, but a network of locales. The contribution of a deep understanding of translocal geographies is mirrored in the neighborhood of Belleville. If we are to account for the ties that immigrants keep with their homelands, the interactions between residents of Belleville with residents of other Parisian quarters, and innumerable other types of locale-to-locale exchange, then the boundedness of Belleville to its corner of Paris becomes precarious. Indeed, like the world city, the geography of the world neighborhood takes the form of a network as well as an area. World cities and neighborhoods, read through on-the-ground observations and translocality, destabilize the normative geographical boundaries that society constructs.

The map shown at the beginning of Chapter III attests to the ways people actually understand Belleville’s situation among Parisian geography. This map coalesces resident imaginaries of where Belleville is, and highlights the overlaps and inconsistencies therein. Additionally, it makes evident the expansion of Belleville into neighborhoods that are not historically thought of as belonging to the neighborhood—notably, Ménilmotant and Colonel Fabien. Putting this figure in conversation with historical understanding gained from interviews and a literature review, also exposes that some places traditionally belonging to Belleville are falling off the map of the neighborhood: Place des Fêtes and swaths of haut Belleville as well. This mutating collective understanding of where Belleville is situated, I hold, is tied to the importance of translocality in this neighborhood. Strong translocality on the ground can appear as multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and/or diversity; the more Belleville concentrates translocal ties, the more its Parisian boundaries center around the most visible signs of otherness and elsewhere: Boulevard de Belleville, Rue de Belleville, and Rue du Faubourg du Temple. This study shows how and where the boundaries of Belleville are shifting within Paris, and points to the transforming borders of City and Neighborhood alike.

91 (Re)Shaping the World City The world city is shaped by translocal dynamics that play out in spaces of everyday life within and between specific locations. The world city has long been theorized as primarily the center of control for neoliberal globalization. Theorists like Sassen and Friedmann have written extensively on the central role certain cities have in directing novel patterns of accumulation and polarization of wealth in cities and around the world. But this view is not singular: in Chapter I, I offered alternative perspectives on world cities from Massey and Robinson. Massey, in the book entitled World City, notes “it is necessary to include far more” than the economic world view in order to understand the swath of operations at hand in world cities. Massey’s analysis holds the place of economic restructuring as central, but opens up the field to the multiplicities that are inherent to cities. Pushing us even further, Robinson critiques the implicit understanding of world city as western cities in much of this literature as single-minded. By arguing that “All cities are world cities,” Robinson makes a postcolonial claim: world citydom is experienced anywhere since the flows that build this condition come from everywhere.

The conception of ‘world city’ has been worked and re-worked among these, and many other, authors. In this work, I adopt an approach equally critical of tradition models of world cities as Massey and Robinson.

The world city should only be understood by taking into account the multiplicities of world city flows and innumerable possibilities that lie within these urban spaces. In this work, I put the above theories in conversation with psychogeographic and critical geographic theory and practice. The ways dominant systems articulate themselves into both imaginaries and performances of the city are crucial for (re)constructing the world city. Injecting world cities theory with lefebvrian dialectics sends us deeper into the multiplicity of ways the world city is made on the ground. This dialectical approach also alludes to the many world cities locatable in a single ‘city’: the world city of the elite, of the immigrant, of the international student, etc. Additionally, I contribute to novel theories on world city formation by incorporating Situationist thought and practice. The Situationists’ explicit critique of the commodification of urban life and of urban space orients the way I understand the world city. Against this system, actors create spatial practices counter to the ways dominant currents intend for space to be used. For world city studies, the Situationist perspective directs attention to the ways people finesse and transgress normative and dominant imaginaries and performances of space. In turn, this study paid close attention to the terrain of the world city itself to understand the conflict and correspondence involved in shaping the world city.

The neighborhood has not been sufficiently studied as a space where the fashioning of the world city occurs. The study in and of Paris-Belleville’s geography seeks to right that wrong by paying attention to the ways that translocal flows are maintained, harnessed, and produced by actors in the neighborhood. Because the actors who I studied—and indeed the space of the neighborhood itself—are often disenfranchised from dominant practices of city governance or global trade, they are often overlooked in world city discourse. The insights from Belleville, however, contest that those (re)constructing space in their neighborhoods are, in fact, keenly implicated in the translocality at the heart of world city system formation. These actors build models for living together in world cities. Belleville, in this sense, represents Massey’s insight

92 that neoliberal globalization is not the only present or future imaginable. Indeed, when Belleville is asked Massey’s question, “What does this place stand for?”, neoliberal globalization is often an afterthought. Belleville is a place where stable nationalities break down in the face of migration, where intersecting world city flows compete for territory, and where the work of shaping the world cities is taken up by actors far outside the confines of city hall or corporate office buildings. Throughout this study, I present onthe-ground evidence that contends that much of world city formation takes place in populaire, immigrant neighborhoods like Belleville The current study not only reveals the world city forming work of Bellevillois.es —it also critiques the permeation of theories that world cities are solely nodes competing for capital and global power into urban policy and planning. For residents of world cities —particularly those not at the institutional decision-making tables—this sort of policy framework sweeps their considerations and experiences aside. Private and public urban redevelopment projects are planned in the neighborhoods of most marginalized; in Paris, this looks like facilities for the 2024 Olympics constructed in Seine-Saint-Denis, the attempted construction of a supermarket and parking lot on Rue Ramponeau, and the completed renewal projects of HLMs cités. On one hand, these actors are significantly marginalized, even oppressed, within the normative hierarchal power geometries at work in the world city. On the other, actors in Belleville and similar neighborhoods still find ways to harness and build translocal exchanges in ways that develop their spatial agency and contribute to how world cities are formed. While the formative work done in Belleville may be overshadowed by the more spectacular, dominant variations in central cities, this work has brought to light vital considerations for elaborating the theory and practice of world city formation.

Diluting Dichotomies Although a major aspect of this work is the valorization of the neighborhood as an epistemological and ethical framework for understanding world cities, it also destabilizes the oppositional categories of ‘City’ and ‘Neighborhood’, and ‘Local and ‘Global’. The ways that people in Belleville carry on the activities of their daily lives—be it marketgoing, cafés inhabitation, or building new spaces for social encounter—cannot be easily compartmentalized into global or local. The ties that generate and orient the possibilities for space to be used, constructed, and changed transgress globality or locality. These ties are neither abstract, nor specific; they are simultaneously rooted and routed in heres and elsewheres. The dichotomy between local and global breaks down in face of a throughout appreciation of the complex strategies everyday people make and use urban space in the 21st century. Belleville also points to the dissolution of the related dichotomy between Neighborhood and City. My observations in the neighborhood and other Parisian areas over several months disproved the idea that the City has the final say of its constituent neighborhoods. Indeed, my research has proved the opposite. Bellevillois.es, having cultivated spatial agency that is routinely exercised in the space of their everyday lives, have the final say in how their urban environment is used, inhabited, imagined, and performed. In building my analysis with the goal of destabilizing such hegemonic dichotomies, I envision world cities with power geometries much more inclusive of the variety of actors and geographies at hand.

93

Next Steps This work presents preliminary elements of an elaboration of world city studies to the space of the neighborhood. It interrogates both the theory of geographers and the spatial practices observed on the ground in Belleville. Through the analysis synthesized through theory and practice, the importance of spaces like Belleville for world cities becomes clear; by locating one’s neighborhood amidst translocal flows, one contributes to world city formation. However, we are still far from understanding the world city in all its nuance. The current study opens up doors for future analysis. Also, there are certain inadequacies in this analysis that ought to be amended in future research.

Firstly, I hold the that new vocabulary should be experimented with in order to better reflect the dissolving conditions of globality and locality. In my study, I took up the term ‘translocality’ as the synthesis between the local and the global, and the product of the dialectical relationship between globalization and transnationalism. Translocality acknowledges the fluid nature of activity on the ‘local’ level, ties here inexorably to elsewhere, and forgoes statist imaginations of sovereignty. However, the approach I adopted is admittedly still translocal—it places value on locales and the connections between them. Translocality does not escape the global-local dualism, but shifts agency to the local. It is my hope that the current work serves as a stepping stone toward theory and practice that creates new alternatives outside of the global and local dichotomy. In Massey’s World City, the writer identifies a possible step forward: local internationalism.

According to Massey, this is a framework for political action, opposed to imperialism, that would mutualize political economic systems according to specific histories of exchange (read: trade, colonization, imperialism, speculation). Hers is a responsible model for a progressive sense of place and politics. On a more profound level, though, how can we conceptualize the destabilization of the scales of our geographies? Perhaps this limitation is one based on our language’s restrictions, but perhaps we can build new vocabulary to reflect our realities.

On another note, the preceding analysis concerns itself almost exclusively with, what in lefebvrian geography would be called, spatial practice and representational space.

That is, the analysis I laid out in previous chapters revolves around the ways people conceive of space, how they generate imaginaries to reflect and refract their conceptions, and how they act in space. However, an essential element must be added for a comprehensive picture of the world city space to be formed: representations of space.

According to Lefebvre, this is space as (re)presented by scientists, planners, and policymakers. Thus, representations of space include maps, models, plans, and designs. In Chapter III, I negotiate the inaccessibility of this part of Lefebvre’s triad to the public; I contend that representations of space are also constructed in collective psychogeographies, as well as in non-institutionalized settings such as community centers and association halls. Though I do begin to uncover some of the informal representations through my research—notably in the collective ideas about spatial differentiation in Belleville—I acquiesce that more research should be conducted into the roles of planners and policy-makers in the shaping of the world city in neighborhoods. For example, the work of Paris’s and France’s urban redevelopment agencies have had major influence in

94 the fate of the neighborhood—specifically by prescribing certain zones as ZACs (Zones d’aménagement concerté), inscribing some as QPVs (Quartiers prioritaires de la politique de la ville), and building HLMs on many of these sites. The role of planning in forming and maintaining the world city from the vantage point of the non-central neighborhood has been little explored. For instance, what does the Grand Paris project—the project aimed at building a regional Parisian political economy in Ile-de-France—have to say about world city formation in Paris, and how will it impact marginalized actors in neighborhoods like Belleville? There exists much room for discovery in this area, and I argue that urbanists have an ethical imperative to better understand such processes in order to envision alternative power geometries in the world city.

Lastly, I believe that there are major insights to be had through comparative analyses between neighborhoods like Belleville in different world cities. A comparison disenfranchised from city politics could signal culturally and historically related phenomena. For instance, comparisons between London’s Brixton or Peckham, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Berlin’s Kreuzberg, and Capetown’s townships would bear compelling insights regarding how geographic specificities differentiate relations to translocalities and orients imagining, performing, and (re)structuring the world city.

Comparative analyses would deepen our intellectual engagement with the world city from the neighborhood perspective. Comparison, too, could emphasize the translocal links connecting neighborhoods throughout the world, and the ties that engage neighborhoods in mutual processes of construction. For example, Belleville is noted as being tied to the popular Tunis neighborhood of Hafsia. A look into the processes involved linking neighborhoods would generate new insights for the world city field as a whole, and reframe how we think about our cities’ global connections. *

*

*

This thesis aimed to develop both a deeper and theoretically innovative understanding of the contemporary landscape of Belleville. Specifically, I looked into the ways Belleville is inscribed in world city dynamics such as migration, trade, social movements, gentrification and capital investment, diasporic community-building, and more. As writer, student, activist, and researcher, I aspire to produce knowledge with and for communities. In this case, shedding light on the spatial agencies of Bellevillois.es combats negative stereotypes of immigrants and working-class people as impotent, marginal, or ‘communautariste.’134 Though this analysis acknowledges the marginalization of many actors in Belleville, it also imagines a future where their capacity to build sovereignties and solidarities is less dominated. The process of studying Paris-Belleville, indeed, showed me that spatial agencies are often collectivized by Belleville’s actors to thrive within marginalized conditions and to build spaces at least partially outside of hegemony. I assert that analyses like this are important for furthering counter-hegemonic projects. A better world is possible, but knowing that better worlds exist, and how to get there, are key prerequisites.

134 “Communautarisme” is a French word that is often used pejoratively in reference to anti- or nonassimilatory practices of immigrant groups. In dominant culture, communautarisme is seen as a direct threat to the French Repubic.

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Sunset at Parc de Belleville, looking south toward Montparnasse.

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