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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores contested placemaking practices in Saint-Denis, where urban b/ordering is being reconfigured for the spatio-temporal needs of the 2024 Olympic Games. It sheds light on situated tensions and fragmentations within this assemblage, amassed through urban entrepreneurial ambitions.

Paper Abstract:

This paper shed lights on the contested place-making practices in Saint-Denis, a stigmatised banlieue on the northern periphery of Paris, at a spatio-temporal conjuncture where b/ordering practices are being reconfigured in multiple ways to meet the needs of the approaching Olympic Games. B/ordering, in this study, is understood beyond the image of stable walls, as pliable socio-spatial interventions that mediate the operationalisation of urban entrepreneurial ambitions. The shifting dynamics of b/ordering assemblage through laws, regulations at the national and municipal levels (1) mobilise disposable migrant labour to meet the urgent infrastructural needs of the mega-event, and (2) remake Saint-Denis into an urban site of hope, investment, and infrastructural violence. The paper explores a bottom-up understanding of the situated tensions in this process, based on an ethnographic fieldwork in Saint-Denis, across its multiple urban nodes of "otherness" and "low-end globalisation", created through differential belonging to metropolitan Paris, yet distinctly shaped by its socio-material conditions. The complex milieu of the study offers an analytical liberation from the dichotomous narratives often associated with the corporatised mega-events, i.e., the global absorbing the local. Rather, the field is considered as a fractured, multi-scalar “meeting place” relationally analysed through its precarious fragments, where workers, vendors, activists engage in multiple practices of making and remaking of urban space as the political, material, and social possibilities and constraints are being rearticulated.