Abstract
Community gardens have emerged in Paris as a way to create green spacesin the city’s densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. One such garden is the Goutte Verte,a temporary, nomadic community garden that, with the agreement of the city and its developers, occupiesvacant lots awaiting the construction of new-build social housing. The continued existence of the GoutteVerte is placed in opposition to much-needed housing in the city, with poor, unemployed, and middle-classgardeners alike caught between a desire for green space and a demand for comfortable housing. Drawingon participant observation and interviews conducted in 2013–14 and 2019, I demonstrate how communitygardens act as a material alternative to urban planning and governance that often fail to account for a rightto a “place to breathe” in the city – a situation that is increasingly fraught as city planners treat newconstruction as the primary solution for affordable housing in Paris.
Highlights
Community gardens have emerged in Paris as a way to create green spaces in the city’s densely populated working-class neighbourhoods
Using the case of the Goutte Verte (Green Drop), a nomadic community garden in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, I demonstrate the impact that green spaces have on marginalized residents’ quality of life and on their connection to the neighbourhood, and the disappointments that result from an artificial form of top-down participatory urbanism
While nomadic gardens offer a temporary alternative to urban planning that fails to account for a “place to breathe” in densely-populated Paris, residents’ occupation of open, vacant land places them in opposition to housing development, when new-build housing is presented as the primary solution for affordable accommodation
Summary
This article draws upon a larger, ongoing ethnographic study of gentrification and public space in Paris. The data presented below were collected through participant observation in community gardens and green spaces in northern Paris in 2013–2014 and 2019, and through semi-structured, group, and walking interviews with 12 garden members and visitors. I attended numerous town hall meetings, neighbourhood councils and public consultations in 2013, 2014, and 2019 relating to security, green spaces, regeneration projects, and social housing provisions in the 18th arrondissement. This was supplemented with archival and documentary research, including the official minutes of city council meetings, construction and demolition permits, official SEMAVIP documents and reports, and local association archives (including periodicals, flyers and blog posts). The data provide both a representative depiction of the role of the Goutte Verte in the lives of members during its longest occupation and insight into the tensions that persist between the need for housing and the desire for green space in one of Paris’s most densely populated neighbourhoods
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