Paper short abstract:

Parisian parks and public gardens are landscapes where citizenship and national belonging is cultivated and naturalized. This paper examines how contestation surrounding a new park in a multi-ethnic neighborhood exposes tensions between alternative forms of belonging and assimilation.

Paper long abstract:

Urban parks and public gardens have long been regimented spaces where dominant regimes attempt to fix the socio-political spontaneity of the sidewalk and street. Parks and gardens are places where power acts through landscape, nature, monumentality, and surveillance to create a citizenry. But what happens when public gardens are created to serve a population whose membership in the nation is contested and whose citizenship is an object of struggle? This paper examines efforts to "green" a largely post-industrial, Maghrebi and West African district of Paris, and it focuses on the conflict and negotiations between designers, public authorities, and neighborhood residents in the planning and operation of a new park. In situations where the citizenship of the residents is contested, the question of who defines the political and cultural meaning of the public garden becomes uncertain and open to change.