Paper short abstract:

Are uncertain urban contexts capable to open new spaces for collective (re)actions to the global city production? Through an analysis of the north eastern districts of the peripheral ring road of Paris, we will analyze the interaction between the urban politics renovation projects and the actions and perceptions of citizens inside political and public space.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of the cities analysis as places where the spatialization of global economy process and inequality take place together with new forms of social relations and citizenship (Sassen 2008), what we would like to question are the specific dynamics which take place around the construction of big urban projects.

The meantime of the political and physical conception of urban development is understood as the uncertain temporal space in which we can observe closely the power negotiations and the formation of conflictive discourses about the right to the city (Lefebvre 1968).

The proposed case study is the new renovation planning of the Parisian "boulevard périphérique", ring road built on the site of the last fortifications walls which encloses the administrative center of Paris. This renovation inter-municipal process started ten years ago, embraces an history of continuous transformations of this symbolic, physical and political limit, and, at the same time, the construction of a new vision of the Greater Paris as a global competitive metropolis.

The choice of placing the research in the uncertain time of transformation and on the uncertain thickness of the limit, will give us the possibility of taking a snapshot of the process of space production in which new potential claims arise.

What happens when a limit which used to be uncertain and unthought, becomes the center of a new reflection for the contemporary city model? Which is the place for informal liminal practices and bottom-up strategies in this political and physical urban shifting?