Paper short abstract:

Moving from ethnographical fields results to contemporary public space anthropological analysis grounded in the migrant neighbourhood of La Goutte d'Or (Paris), this communication aims to discuss the relation between urban changes and boundaries negociation in a global city like Paris.

Paper long abstract:

La Goutte d'Or is an historical working class and migrant neighbourhood of Paris, with a specific everyday life, combining a density and diversity of population that makes it one of the most cosmopolitan areas in Paris. A place where "foreign/ strange" practices take place on the streets, characterizing the general atmosphere of this north-east Parisian area that makes the visitors, as much as the inhabitants, feel "elsewhere". La Goutte d'Or is, in fact, a North and sub-Saharan African centrality in Europe.

This district, integrated into the core of Paris at the end of the XVIII century, is nowadays suffering from a new discrimination as a "foreign" part of the city that has to be transformed into "a neighbourhood as all the others". We observe today a new negotiation of an invisible boundary between what should be inside and what should be outside the French capital; what would fit and what is not fitting with the image of Paris within the so called process of general gentrification of the city. This paper aims to outline the complexity of the arena involved in this process: from inhabitants to local community organisations, from the voluntary sector, to the policy making institutions and local political figures, the wish for "normality" and the desire to preserve the specificity of this neighbourhood are both narratives that orient action, participation and local media production.