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Paper short abstract

How do promises co-produce cities and often undermine sustainable futures? Exploring the promissory dimensions of two cultural institutions in Paris (Institut du monde arabe & des cultures d’islam) sheds light on the attachments formed within and beyond the polarized spatial experience of the city.

Paper long abstract

For several years, I have been concerned—epistemologically and empirically—with the relationship between the city and promise: How do promises enter urban worlds, and how do they co-produce cities? Most importantly, how can we free ourselves from promises that we know undermine the sustainable futures of the urban worlds we inhabit?

To explore these questions, I propose to examine the promissory dimensions of two cultural institutions in Paris: the international foundation Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), conceived in the 1970s and inaugurated in the 1980s, and the Institut des Cultures d’Islam (ICI), created in the 1990s and opened in 2006 by the City of Paris. From the outset, both institutions were situated within polarized political contexts, and their articulations of the “Arab world” and “Islamic cultures,” respectively, were framed as cultural promises meant to counter these contexts.

To grasp the everyday inconsistencies of the urban landscape co-created by these institutions, I will present an analysis of two ethnographic itinéraires—guided walks between the IMA and the ICI. What potential connections do my research partners draw between the two? How do they experience and inhabit polarized social atmospheres? Do they care, and if so, how do they counter them? What else nourishes their attachment to—or fuels their disenchantment with—the city? Researching the city as a “promissory assemblage” helps illuminate the often paradoxical attachments formed within and beyond the profoundly contradictory spatial experience of the city as lived space.