Paris Suburb Research Articles

A participatory research to assess how a student citizens’ assembly can facilitate the co-creation of nutrition interventions in higher education settings

BackgroundThe transition period from adolescence to early adulthood is critical for developing new nutritional behaviors, making higher education students an important target group for public health nutrition interventions. Given the complexity of nutrition-related behaviors and their various determinants, involving the student population (the future beneficiaries of interventions) and the partners engaged in their implementation when designing campus nutrition interventions is essential. Citizens’ assemblies are deliberative processes which are more and more frequently organized to co-create solutions to complex problems. This study aims 1) to design and implement a student citizens’ assembly using participatory research methods, 2) to describe its process and evaluate its transferability, 3) to evaluate changes in dietary habits, knowledge and citizen practices among students participating in this assembly.MethodsThis study will take place at a French university (University Sorbonne Paris Nord, USPN) located in socio-economically disadvantaged suburbs of Paris. The student citizens’ assembly will gather a mini-public of 30 students enrolled at the time of the study and a co-creation team of academic and non-academic partners involved in student life, nutrition, physical activity, or public policies. The aim of the assembly is to co-create a set of concrete proposals that would enhance USPN students’ access to sustainable diets and physical activity. The protocol is based on a continuous process evaluation and a pre-post design among the mini-public. A mixed-method framework combining quantitative and qualitative approaches will be developed. This study will make use of (i) field observations of the intervention process and transferability, (ii) data collected by questionnaires on pre- and post- dietary habits, knowledge and citizen practices of the mini-public, and (iii) pre-post interviews with a subsample of the same mini-public.DiscussionRelying on participatory research methods, this study will provide new insights into involving higher education students and diverse partners in co-creating campus nutrition interventions. Through the collaborative work of researchers, higher education students, university representatives, public institutions, and local and community actors, this study will provide evidence-based guidance for designing innovative and contextually-relevant nutrition interventions in the higher education setting.Trial registrationThis research was registered at the ClinicalTrial.gov (NCT06580795; registration date: 2024–08-30; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06580795).

“LA HAINE”: CINEMATIC INSIGHTS INTO PERIPHERY INEQUITY AND FRENCH NATIONAL IDENTITY

The multicultural suburban areas, known as banlieues, surrounding French cities are marked by social inequalities, systemic discrimination, crime, and violence. Mathieu Kassovitz’s film “La Haine” (1995) is set in one such Paris suburb, capturing the daily lives of a group of multi-ethnic friends amidst escalating tensions between the French police and immigrant residents. The film “La Haine”, which received critical acclaim and won the César Award in 1996, serves as a powerful portrayal of life in the banlieues, capturing the essence of marginal inequality. By focusing on the contrasting experiences of suburban youth and the disparities between Paris and its outskirts, the film highlights societal issues that remain relevant even two decades later. This study uses “La Haine” as a lens to explore whether the challenges depicted in the film persist in contemporary society, demonstrating the enduring impact of marginal inequality. Through this analysis, the film emerges as a significant cultural artifact that challenges national identities in France.

Contested urban assemblages: ruination and restoration of postcolonial sites of memory

ABSTRACT Recent work on ruination has explored the capacity of ruins to embody multiple and contradictory meanings within a single site. This paper considers the capacity of ruined sites of memory to disrupt the relationship between past and present, celebration and shame, Self and Other. Ruins produce new expressions of time and space that transcend the intentions of either architect or spectator. Restoration, however, may attempt to overwrite this ambivalence with a single, dominant narrative. As a case study, this paper turns to the garden of tropical agronomy, a palimpsestic ruin in the Parisian suburbs that gives material form to both the imperial past and the process of forgetting the empire. It traces the history of the garden, and various unsuccessful attempts to restore it, before considering the successful renovation of the Tunisian Pavilion in 2020. Drawing from Actor-Network Theory, it analyses these interventions as acts of translation that alternately attempt to impose a singular meaning on the garden and enrich to its multi-layered form. Despite the intentions of human actants, throughout its recent history the garden’s uneasy multivocality has endured. Amidst conflicting and overlapping narratives, the garden haunts post-imperial Paris and undermines its attempts to consign empire to the past.

Significant impact of urban tree biogenic emissions on air quality estimated by a bottom-up inventory and chemistry transport modeling

Abstract. Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) are emitted by vegetation and react with other compounds to form ozone and secondary organic matter (OM). In regional air quality models, biogenic emissions are often calculated using a plant functional type approach, which depends on the land use category. However, over cities, the land use is urban, so trees and their emissions are not represented. Here, we develop a bottom-up inventory of urban tree biogenic emissions in which the location of trees and their characteristics are derived from the tree database of the Paris city combined with allometric equations. Biogenic emissions are then computed for each tree based on their leaf dry biomass, tree-species-dependent emission factors, and activity factors representing the effects of light and temperature. Emissions are integrated in WRF-CHIMERE air quality simulations performed over June–July 2022. Over Paris city, the urban tree emissions have a significant impact on OM, inducing an average increase in the OM of about 5 %, reaching 14 % locally during the heatwaves. Ozone concentrations increase by 1.0 % on average and by 2.4 % during heatwaves, with a local increase of up to 6 %. The concentration increase remains spatially localized over Paris, extending to the Paris suburbs in the case of ozone during heatwaves. The inclusion of urban tree emissions improves the estimation of OM concentrations compared to in situ measurements, but they are still underestimated as trees are still missing from the inventory. OM concentrations are sensitive to terpene emissions, highlighting the importance of favoring urban tree species with low-terpene emissions.

Quality Improvement Intervention Using Social Prescribing at Discharge in a University Hospital in France: Quasi-Experimental Study.

Social prescription is seen as a public health intervention tool with the potential to mitigate social determinants of health. On one side, social prescription is not yet well developed in France, where social workers usually attend to social needs, and historically, there is a deep divide between the health and social sectors. On the other side, discharge coordination is gaining attention in France as a critical tool to improve the quality of care, assessed indirectly using unplanned rehospitalization rates. This study aims to combine social prescription and discharge coordination to assess the need for social prescription and its effect on unplanned rehospitalization rates. We conducted a quasi-experimental study in two departments of medicine in a French university hospital in a disadvantaged suburb of Paris over 2 years (October 2019-October 2021). A discharge coordinator screened patients for social prescribing needs and provided services on the spot or referred the patient to the appropriate service when needed. The primary outcome was the description of the services delivered by the discharge coordinator and of its process, as well as the characteristics of the patients in terms of social needs. The secondary outcome was the comparison of unplanned rehospitalization rates after data chaining. A total of 223 patients were included in the intervention arm, with recruitment being disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than two-thirds of patients (n=154, 69.1%) needed help understanding discharge information. Slightly less than half of the patients (n=98, 43.9%) seen by the discharge coordinator needed social prescribing, encompassing language, housing, health literacy, and financial issues. The social prescribing covered a large range of services, categorized into finding a general practitioner or private sector nurse, including language-matching; referral to a social worker; referral to nongovernmental organization or group activities; support for transportation issues; support for health-related administrative procedures; and support for additional appointments with nonmedical clinicians. All supports were delivered in a highly personalized way. Ethnic data collection was not legally permitted, but for 81% (n=182) of the patients, French was not the mother tongue. After data chaining, rehospitalization rates were compared between 203 patients who received the intervention (n=5, 3.1%) versus 2095 patients who did not (n=51, 2.6%), and there was no statistical difference. First, our study revealed the breadth of patient's unmet social needs in our university hospital, which caters to an area where the immigrant population is high. The study also revealed the complexity of the discharge coordinator's work, who provided highly personalized support and managed to gain trust. Hospital discharge could be used in France as an opportunity in disadvantaged settings. Eventually, indicators other than the rehospitalization rate should be devised to evaluate the effect of social prescribing and discharge coordination.

Design of a bilingual (FR-UR) website on the sensitive topic of sexual and mental health with Urdu speakers in a Parisian suburb: a qualitative study

BackgroundThis article is a continuation of the Musafir study published in 2020. Following the results of this study, we designed an educational website with Urdu-speaking volunteers, using a participatory approach. This type of approach aimed at bringing out situated knowledge around taboo/sensitive topics such as sexual and mental health, by considering the cultural, religious, economic, family, and social background of young Urdu-speaking men. This approach allowed us to build culturally-appropriate content matching the needs of targeted population. We report here the lessons learned from our approach.MethodsUrdu-speaking volunteers were recruited via outreach strategies, for participation in focus groups. Four focus group discussions were conducted on three distinct themes: 1/ Sexual Health Promotion, 2/Hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections, and 3/ Mental Health. The focus groups were recorded, with the written consent of the users. Thematic analysis was conducted after transcription of the focus-group discussion.ResultsWe succeeded in mobilizing 4 Pakistani users, aged between 19 and 30 years. The group dynamics was very rich and allowed us to highlight numerous social aspects related to the importance of the group belonging, the family, and others points of view on these topics. Many Urdu vocabulary had to be redefined and revealed the extent of the pre-existing taboo.ConclusionsNotwithstanding the extreme difficulty of mobilizing an invisible target population on a sensitive topic such as sexual and mental health, our experience highlights the need to consider the knowledge of the people concerned. The participative approach allowed us to fit the content of our medium to, for instance: the collectivist type of society of the target population; the level of literacy in their mother tongue; and to the embodiment of some taboo in their vocabulary. Although time and energy consuming, our approach seems relevant and could be replicated to other communities.

Environmental assessment of daily mobility for the design of neighbourhoods: Coupling mobility microsimulation and life-cycle assessment

This paper aims to develop an environmental assessment methodology of daily mobility for neighbourhoods. Thus, a microsimulation model represents mobility at an individual scale, which is coupled with a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for private cars and public transport to provide a holistic environmental assessment. The model is calibrated using census data and regional mobility surveys, providing information on population, jobs, dwellings, mobility and car fleets. The methodology is applied to a real neighbourhood project in Paris suburbs. Aggregated results show low environmental impacts of mobility compared to previous studies, with 276 kg CO2-eq per individual per year, reflecting the selected central and accessible location. Leveraging the microsimulation approach, disaggregated results highlight strong heterogeneity within both residents and employees, with respectively 17 % and 5 % of each group being responsible for half the emissions. Microsimulation further allows for estimating the effect of various levers to improve the project design. Although location exerts the greatest influence on the environmental impacts of mobility, reducing parking availability also proves very efficient, especially for residents. These findings support the use of microsimulation – instead of common mean approaches – to capture the heterogeneity of mobility behaviours and better estimate responses to levers in neighbourhood design.

The embedded Wh- in situ clause: French tout court? Les spasmes musculaires incontrôlés, je sais pas c’est quoi (France Info 20/10/21)

AbstractAlthough not studied by the generative approach (Shlonsky 2017), the embedded Wh- in situ clause nevertheless belongs to the French language spoken in a large amount of areas, and, we believe, to “français tout court” (Blanche-Benveniste & Jeanjean 1987): until now, it has mainly been studied in Quebec (Lefebvre & Maisonneuve 1982; Blondeau & Ledegen 2021) and in Reunion Island (Ledegen 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2016; Ledegen & Martin 2020), but it has recently been massively attested in the Multicultural Paris French project in the suburbs of Paris (Gardner-Chloros & Secova 2018) and Strasbourg (Marchessou 2018). These new data could be read as a language contact, as a recent linguistic change, or as a long-established “popular” structure (Guiraud 1966), different analytical hypotheses that will be detailed in this study. These recent data also argue in favour of the methodology of ecological corpora, obtained within the framework of a strong acquaintanceship and located at the pole of communicative proximity (Koch & Oesterreicher 2001). The examination of various existing corpora will reveal the structural functioning of the structure and contrast the corpora following the modes of interaction, the oral or written medium, as well as on the chronological axis.

Shopkeepers and urban change: moving beyond gentrification studies?

Though the literature on commercial gentrification has grown considerably since the 2000s, it has several blind spots. Indeed, research has primarily focused on neighborhoods located in central areas, examining the retail landscape as well as consumer practices and identities. In this article, we discuss this literature and put it in dialogue with the literature on retailers and, more broadly, on independent professions. On this basis, we propose an analytical framework for studying commercial change from the shopkeepers’ perspective. The discussion is conducted in light of the concrete transformations of a commercial street located in a formerly working-class suburb of Paris. This case study illustrates the relevance of our approach, showing that even in an archetypal gentrified street, the profiles and paths of shopkeepers are varied, as is their relation to urban change.

Impact of experiencing multiple vulnerabilities on fetal growth and complications in women with hyperglycemia in pregnancy

BackgroundIn women with hyperglycemia in pregnancy living in France, psychosocial deprivation is associated with both earlier and greater exposure to the condition, as well as poorer maternofetal prognosis. We explored the impact of this and two other socioeconomic vulnerability indicators—food insecurity and poor language proficiency—on adherence to prenatal care and maternal and fetal outcomes.MethodsIn a socially deprived suburb of Paris, we selected women who delivered between 01/01/2012 and 31/12/2018 and received care (nurse, dietician, diabetologist evaluation, advice, regular follow-up to adjust insulin doses if requested) for hyperglycemia in pregnancy. We analyzed the associations between individual psychosocial deprivation, food insecurity, French language proficiency (variables assessed by individual questionnaires) and fetal growth (main outcome), as well as other core maternal and fetal outcomes.ResultsAmong the 1,168 women included (multiethnic cohort, 19.3% of whom were Europeans), 56%, 17.9%, and 27.5% had psychosocial deprivation, food insecurity, and poor French language proficiency, respectively. Forty-three percent were prescribed insulin therapy. Women with more than one vulnerability had more consultations for diabetes. The rates for small (SGA), appropriate (AGA), and large-for-gestational-age (LGA) infant were 11.4%, 76.5% and 12.2%, respectively. These rates were similar in women with and without psychosocial deprivation, and in those with and without food insecurity. Interestingly, women with poor French language proficiency had a higher odds ratio of delivering a small- or large-for-gestational age infant than those with good proficiency.ConclusionWe found similar pregnancy outcomes for women with hyperglycemia in pregnancy living in France, irrespective of whether or not they had psychosocial deprivation or food insecurity. Optimized single-center care with specialized follow-up could contribute to reduce inequalities in maternal and fetal outcomes in women with hyperglycemia in pregnancy.

Screen time of toddlers in Paris suburbs: Quantitative and qualitative analysis

BackgroundOur aim was to describe the exposure of French children aged 12–36 months to screens (time, content, age of first exposure) and to analyze different moderating factors: sociodemographic data, parents’ screen time, and other factors (childcare arrangements, language spoken at home, book reading). Population and MethodsWe conducted an observational, cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical study based on 171 questionnaires from parents of children aged 12–36 months who consulted different hospitals in the Paris region during the summer of 2020. ResultsThe median screen time was 1 h per day and was essentially television time. The median age of first exposure for children was 12 months. Among the most-watched sites, YouTube was in first place. One third of the children chose the content they watched alone, and the majority did so without any parental guidance (66%). Children watched a screen during mealtime every day in 25% of cases, before bedtime in 12.3% of cases, and 8.8% had a screen in their bedroom. More than one third of families left the television on in the background most of the time. In the multivariate analysis, a high level of screen time was notably linked to the child's age, the parents’ screen time, and background television. However, the parental reason for exposure “to calm the child” was the most strongly correlated factor with significant child screen time. Reading books appeared to be a determining factor for less screen exposure. ConclusionThese results emphasize the importance of raising parents’ awareness about the potential negative effects of screen exposure (particularly on children's cognitive and emotional development) as early as possible during the maternity period. Implementing this prevention in the maternity wards could be an effective way of informing and educating parents about the potential negative effects of screen time on their child's development.

Genetic diversity of Plasmodium vivax among immigrant patients exhibiting severe and non-severe clinical manifestations in northern suburbs of Paris.

Genetic diversity of Plasmodium vivax among immigrant patients exhibiting severe and non-severe clinical manifestations in northern suburbs of Paris.

Mobilising Against Insecurity, Engaging in Local Civic Life: The Collective Action of Chinese and South-East Asian Inhabitants in a Paris Suburb

Based on a social action research, this article discusses the collective action taken by inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origin in a north-eastern suburb of Paris: targeted by violent attacks, these residents occupied the public space at the base of their residences and demanded the intervention of public authorities. In recounting the different steps of the mobilisation, this article demonstrates how an ethnocentric dynamic was created around security issues and how an ethno-spatial minority was formed within the neighbourhood and the city. It also shows in what conditions this ethno-security action transforms itself into an associative and citizen commitment within the neighbourhood and the city and modifies the perceptions of the actors, their capacity for action and their relations with the neighbourhood and with politics. At the intersection of several fields of research, including the sociology of migration, urban sociology and political sociology, the article shows how ordinary inhabitants of Chinese and South-East Asian origin participate in their neighbourhood's local civic life.

‘L’amour se dit dans un regard’? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives and Alice Diop’s Nous

ABSTRACT Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives (1979) is a short film which interrogates the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants in postcolonial French society by highlighting the hidden labour of Black sanitation workers in Paris. Alice Diop has described Les Mains négatives as ‘the entire subtext’ for her film Nous (2020), a documentary about people living in the suburbs of Paris. At once documents of social reality and experimental meditations on representation and filmmaking, both films examine the entanglements of viewing relations and social exclusion, and interrogate the moving image’s capacity to remedy the ‘invisibility’ of certain lives. This article brings the two films together in order to probe the ethical and political stakes of their strategies of representation, drawing on recent criticism at the intersections of postcolonial theory, and film and visual culture scholarship. This critical lens highlights the political force of the films’ experimental form. Yet bringing the two films into dialogue also allows productive frictions to emerge, exposing in particular the challenging aspects of the representation of Black subjects in Les Mains négatives, which stand uneasily alongside the film’s message of inclusion and recognition.

Surrealism and the slaughterhouse: art and animals in Lotar’s La Villette and Franju’s Blood of the Beasts

In the sixth issue of Georges Bataille’s surrealist magazine Documents, published in 1929, a series of photographs by Eli Lotar documented an abattoir in the La Villette section of Paris. In text that accompanied the series, Bataille described the slaughterhouse as ‘a disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows.’ The photographs chronicled both the banality and the horror of what took place in institutions that had removed the process of killing animals and processing their corpses from human view. Twenty years later, Georges Franju’s film Blood of the Beasts would provide its own exposure of the slaughterhouse, interspersed with quiet scenes of a Paris suburb, at the other end of the surrealist period. This project uses the two surrealist encounters with the slaughterhouse to evaluate the artistic movement’s interpretation of human society’s dependence on violence toward animals.

Sketch, Photo, Sound: Lived and Represented Space of the Child Experience in the Green Built Environments. Studying the Eco-districts in France

In contemporary forms of habitats and more precisely in the eco-districts, the nature presence becomes obviously dominant. The capacity of green infrastructure seems to welcome children in different urban typologies. The study crosses the effect of certain natural urban elements with the children sensory experiences that is reflected on specific behavioral attitudes taking place during the children’s free play. It draws the behavioral map of middle-aged children, about 5–12 years of age, in two selected eco-districts, in Paris suburbs and Grenoble, France, through multi-tasked qualitative methodologies. These collecting data methods include the following triad: children’s drawings, photographs, and sound recordings, where 16 sample were chosen for each. Reintroducing children in public spaces, seems crucial to investigate the form and type of young children’s presence in the Eco-Districts. Considered as special space users, the study aims to unveil the way they conceive, interact with, and experience their surrounding environment.

How Major European Cities Memorialize Mass Terror Attacks: Paris, Madrid and London Facing the Same Memorial Challenge

Abstract: Since the terrorist attacks of January and November 2015, Paris is facing the same memory challenge as other European capital cities before her, consisting in knowing how to create a memorial to publicly mark the memory of mass attacks perpetrated by Islamists. In early 2016, a commemorative tree was planted on Place de la République in Paris. But other projects have since taken shape, including a memorial garden behind Paris City Hall and a memorial museum in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. How and why did this plurality of memorial sites and projects come into being? In order to understand that, this article proposes a comparative detour through Madrid and London following the path of the memorials created in these cities in remembrance of the terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004 and 7 July 2005.

Volunteers, religious communities and users representatives as an alternative for visiting hospitalized patients: The importance of an infection control training.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the suspension of relatives' visits was a common measure in healthcare facilities to prevent the spread of the virus among patients. This measure caused significant adverse consequences for hospitalized patients. Volunteers' intervention was an alternative but could also lead to cross transmission events. in order to secure their intervention with patients, we implemented an infection control training to evaluate and to improve the knowledge of volunteers about infection control measures. We performed a before-after study in a group of five tertiary referral teaching hospitals in the suburbs of Paris. A total of 226 volunteers from three groups (religious representatives, civilian volunteers and users' representatives) were included. Basic theoretical and practical knowledge about infection control, hand hygiene, and glove and mask use were evaluated just before and immediately after a three-hour training program. The contribution of the characteristics of the volunteers to the results was studied. The initial conformity rate for theoretical and practical infection control measures ranged from 53% to 68%, depending on the participants' activity status and education level. Some critical shortcomings in hand hygiene as well as mask and glove wearing putatively endangered the patients and volunteers. Surprisingly, serious gaps were also identified among volunteers who experienced care activities. Regardless of their origin, the program significantly improved both their theoretical and practical knowledge (p<0.001). Real-life observance and long-term sustainability should be monitored. To become a secure alternative to relatives' visits, volunteers' interventions must be preceded by the assessment of their theoretical knowledge and practical skills in infection control. Additional study, including practice audit, must confirm the implementation of the acquired knowledge in the real-life.

Cross sectional survey of Varicella-Zoster virus and measles seropositivity in people living with HIV in a Parisian suburb and a review of current immunization guidelines.

According to evidence-based guidelines, vaccines against measles and varicella are generally recommended to susceptible HIV-positive patients, as long as they are not severely immunocompromised. However, routine screening to determine serologic status is not recommended. We conducted a seroprevalence study of anti-measles and anti-Varicella-Zoster virus (VZV) antibodies in adults living with HIV (PLWHA) consulting at Avicenne University Hospital in a Parisian suburb. Sera were collected in years 2018-2020 and tested by commercial immunoassays in 268 patients. Most of the patients were born in Sub-Saharan Africa (55%) and only 23% in Europe. Measles and varicella seropositivity were present respectively in 91.4% and 96.2% of patients. One patient in ten was seronegative to at least one of tested diseases. In the univariate analysis, only younger age (p=0.027) was associated with a higher risk of measles seronegativity, while shorter time since arrival in France (p<0.001) and shorter time since HIV discovery (p=0.007) were associated with a higher risk of VZV seronegativity. In multivariate analysis no association was found. This study highlights the absence of specific risk factors for VZV and measles seronegativity in PLWHA and supports the importance of routine screening, in order to increase immunization rates and reduce risk of complications.

Complications in Defining the Presence of Tenrikyō in Europe While Discussing Its “Community”

Abstract This paper addresses a central issue linked to research conducted on an eclectic conglomeration of people connected in various ways to the principal European site of the Japanese new religion of Tenrikyō. Although the center itself is in a Parisian suburb and the majority of its key actors are Japanese, the people connected to this center and its associated social world span beyond the Paris region and include various nationalities, countries of residence, and even religious identities. Moreover, the people connected to this center and the presence of the Tenrikyō religion in Europe are largely one and the same, but not entirely. A question commonly posed to the researcher by “outsiders” is how many Tenrikyō “members” there are in Paris, France, and/or Europe, and if they are Japanese or the nationality of the local country (French, German, etc.) The complexities of answering such questions are the focus of this discussion.