Ttesting

by Wangũi Kamonji

An innovative urban development program is activating positive change in low-income neighborhoods across Mexico City. Despite winning the World Habitat Award in 2011, the city government's Programa Comunitario de Mejoramiento Barrial (Community Program for Neighborhood Improvement, or PCMB) is surprisingly little-known outside Mexico.

Socioeconomic inequality is deeply engrained in Mexico City's spatial structure, and neighborhood wealth generally corresponds with the quality of public services. The PCMB addresses this problem by funding revitalization projects in economically depressed areas. While living in one such area, El Pedregal de Santo Domingo, I noticed the program's impact on freshly painted buildings that were formerly concrete gray.



Inspired to learn more about the PCMB, I met with economist Manuel Luis Labra Illanes, a member of the Malacate Civic Association who has been actively involved in developing the program. Our conversation is transcribed below.

Can you tell us about how the PCMB came about?

The PCMB came out of the Programa de Mejoramiento de Vivienda (Home Improvement Program, or PMV), which the Mexico City government started in 2000. The PMV helped improve people's houses through loans repayable over eight years, but it didn't address public spaces and other shared resources. So we began planning the PCMB, which launched officially in 2007.

So the main difference between the two programs is that the PMV is for homes and the PCMB is for broader neighborhood projects?

Yes, and the PMV is a credit system while the PCMB is a public benefit program.

What are the core elements of the PCMB? How does it actually work?

The guiding principle is that neighborhood residents decide what to do, how to do it and who will do the work. They administer the government funding. That's what makes the program unique.

Another essential component is that it's a competition — community groups compete for available funds. In 2015, for example, there were 677 entries and roughly 200 projects funded.



Does the amount of funding vary each year?

The city government's Social Development Secretariat (SDS), which is responsible for the program, allocates funds that vary slightly from year to year and average around 100 million pesos. We carried out a study and found that, for a program of this kind in a city like ours, the base budget should be about 300 million pesos.

How many times can a neighborhood group secure funding?

Up to five. Applicants can receive a maximum of 500,000 pesos in the first year and a million pesos after that.

How do you evaluate applications, distribute funds and prevent irregularities?

There's a program committee made up of five civil servants and five civil society members who decide which applications to fund. The most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods take precedence.

The program committee releases funds to a neighborhood representative, and that person has to be on a project committee. Local assemblies elect the members of these committees. If there are no project committees in a given neighborhood, residents have to establish them in order to receive funding. Each project has an administrative committee that monitors project spending and other implementation requirements to prevent irregularities.

What specific issues do funded projects address?

There are three main focal points: public space, infrastructure and neighborhood image. Projects can, for example, establish open squares, community gardens and needed infrastructure. They can also attend to neglected parts of the urban fabric through maintenance and beautification.



Can you share your thoughts on the program's results so far?

About 1,000 projects have been funded, covering each of the neighborhoods most in need and improving government services after decades of neglect. We're especially proud of reaching communities like Tepito, which are known for severe blight and violence.

The Legislative Assembly of Mexico City recently approved a law through which the program budget is set each year and protected against rising inflation. This law also protects against threats to the PCMB's existence under new administrations. You see, there are politicians who don't like the program because grassroots administration makes it hard to control from above.

What's in store for the PCMB in coming years?

A few things. One is a problem with the current model: we have to figure out what happens when neighborhoods reach their funding limit. This is a discussion we're currently having.

We're also discussing ways to fund larger projects — libraries, cultural centers, schools — with broader impact on neighborhood identity. This has real potential for reversing cycles of marginality. Opportunities are often closed to people from high-poverty areas, but social stigma declines with visible signs of progress. So neighborhood improvement signifies many things. We'd like to fund 30 medium-to-large projects a year through the PCMB or create a parallel program for this purpose.

Another thing I'd like to see is a process for building relationships between neighborhoods with similar issues in different cities. There are nation-to-nation links and city-to-city links but I don't know if there are neighborhood-to-neighborhood links.

Do you have any advice for people who are interested in starting a similar program?

It's important to design the program with local communities instead of trying to impose a prefabricated model. The process has to be participatory, emerging through strong relationships with neighborhood residents.

The original vision may be different from the way it develops in practice, and adaptability is key. When we began, we didn't imagine that we'd be attending to basic sanitation infrastructure, because that's the work of the central government. We were very theoretical in our conception of public space, viewing it as a kind of panacea for all the city's problems. When I visited Colonia La Cruz, part of the Gustavo A. Madero borough, I was surprised to see how residents adapted the program to their infrastructural needs.



It's really important to begin where you know people are interested — where there are community leaders and responsible participants. If you start out in a place where residents are apathetic, or where there are extreme social conflicts, the chances of failing increase exponentially. Start with a promising location, ensure the effectiveness of the program, and then you can move to more challenging situations. If not, funders will lose confidence in the project. Social programs come under a lot of fire, so it's critical to build a reputation for successful work.

Wangũi Kamonji is a recent graduate of Wellesley College who researches urban socio-environmental issues in countries worldwide, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Vietnam. She blogs about her experience at Sustainability from the Roots.

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Source: Te Aria Nui Charitable Trust

“The scholars’ contest over whether ‘the commons’ would be understood as a historical set of social relations, as a metaphor for a primitive past that spawned an enlightened future, or simply as a scenario for decision making was overtaken in the 1960s with the rise of a new trope, which continues to circulate to this day. In a 1968 article in Science magazine, the biologist and environmentalist Garrett Hardin illustrated his argument on behalf of regulating population growth by describing a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ ...

“A loosely defined ‘property rights movement’ ran variations on the theme of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ as it fashioned solutions that ranged from ‘free market environmentalism’ to World Bank-sponsored ecological management. At the same time, although efforts to privatize state services and property received their greatest boost from the hard facts of fiscal crisis, that movement also scored points off the trope of commons in ways that helped usher in the public-private partnership as a model for governance of public property and hence public space. ...

“Some have suggested that the fantasy of limitless private wealth has distorted the vision and values of propertied Americans, turning self-interest into a crabbed and literal-minded miserliness. Cold War anticonmmunism, the economic trauma of deindustrialization, and the political disruptions and gains of social movements in the 1950s and 1960s left economic elites fearful rather than confident in the assimilative powers of public institutions. And, as was true among environmental activists, leftists as well as libertarians thought that public officials could not be counted on to protect or advance the common good. Some scholars suggest that with abundance, Americans outgrew their collective need — even their capacity — for a public realm. Others argue that the public itself was felt to have become too large, too inclusive, its rewards too widely disseminated in too many forms — too democratic. Whatever the cause, the demise of the idea of a democratic public domain in the United States is a loss that extends beyond its borders.

“It is not possible, of course, to construct a global public; at a global scale, the ideas of democratic access and accountability associated with public space stretch beyond recognition, for people do not live their lives as members of abstract communities or spaces. Of necessity, common property regimes around the world are represented as sharply bounded, local, and delimited, usually with reference to particular kinds of resources, such as fish, land, and forest. The discourse of property rights has created ways of imagining that those independent systems of allocating property rights and sharing resources might continue at the sufferance of international proprietors — the NGOs who are taking figurative ownership of the globe’s ‘future’ and who in their capacity as guardians have set about evaluating the efficacy and efficiency of any given system to determine which should be left in place and which should be reformed. Local practices can create their own space for unexpected contingencies, new openings that can redirect strategic calculation on a larger scale, of course. But without larger institutions of government, there are not many ways most ordinary people with limited means can collectively deliberate over what they wish to control or leave for their descendants by way of shared resources, institutions or public spaces.

“Historically, public space was created as public property, and if that institution has run its course, if there is no language or theory that affirms that people can build and maintain governments that can build and maintain public space, we should all pay attention, for we have observed one more tragedy in our own time.”

— Elizabeth Blackmar in “Appropriating ‘the Commons’: The Tragedy of Property Rights Discourse,” 2006

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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by Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan

In the words of John Holland, "the city is a pattern in time." Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether crossing the street, making a phone call or entering the subway, our traces are retained in the city's memory.


Arbatskaya Station, Moscow Metro. Source: Insight Guides

As the world becomes more digitized, so have our traces, joining the massive aggregate known as big data. This information is updated daily by sensors tracking social media, traffic flows, retail transactions, mobile phones, GPS signals and many other sources. A virtually limitless trove of quantitative measures, it has the potential to add new dimensions to our understanding of human experience in urban environments. But the positive and negative aspects of this potential defy measurement.



The Moscow Metro is full of urban traces. An estimated 70 percent of Muscovites, representing almost all social strata, use the Metro on a regular basis. This is inevitably tied to interaction with technology, both directly (validating tickets, riding escalators, using emergency call stands) and indirectly (being recorded by CCTV). The Metro's underground passages have become urban laboratories for collecting and analyzing data.


Crowded platform in the Park Kultury Station. Source: RIA Novosti

Macro data are among the oldest and most widely used sources, offering a snapshot of the past that can be used to forecast general trends. We know how many passengers used the Metro in the past few years and can thus predict the approximate number for the current year. What we do not know, at least from publicly available statistics, is how busy each station or train is at a given time, which is more intriguing.

Social media provides user-generated data from digital telecommunications and the Internet. Today, anyone can add to big data via cell phones and computers, sharing their thoughts or simply their locations. Digital networks collect information as people update their statuses and chat with friends, contributing to global databases that archive this activity.


Regularity of Foursquare check-ins in the Moscow Metro.

The Foursquare social network allows users to show where they are by "checking in" online. They can also rate places and leave tips for others based on their experience. These data show, for example, that stations in Moscow's outlying residential districts have surprisingly higher rates of check-in per user than those in the city center.

Biological data can tell us about human-environment interactions at local and global scales. Recent studies have addressed outdoor settings and their influence on experience. Yet there is relatively little research on the impacts of indoor transitive spaces, like subway stations.


Human ecological data from the Sokolnicheskaya Line (click for an enlarged image).

Earlier this year, as students at the Strelka Institute, we built a wearable data-collection tool to gather information on human-environment interactions in the Moscow Metro. The device measures galvanic skin response, body temperature, air temperature, humidity, noise levels and light intensity. This helped us identify where people experience stress or excitement, shedding light on contextual factors that influence their experience.

Embedded technologies are capable of recording, correlating and even anticipating human behavior. They can inform urban governance and play important roles in safeguarding health conditions, reducing criminal activity, improving transit efficiency, and other public services. At the same time, they can threaten privacy and facilitate the abuse of power.


Speculative forms of data collection and use in subway stations.

Data collection is becoming part of everyday life for Muscovites and visitors who use the Metro. Each person, train and station holds insight into solving urban problems. However, it is essential to remember that people decide how to apply data. These decisions must be transparent and democratic, with careful attention to potential errors and misuse.

Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan are 2013 graduates of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. Gulnaz is now a doctoral student at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal, and Artur is a project director at the Moscow Department of Transportation.

Credits: All images are by Gulnaz Aksenova and Artur Shakhbazyan unless otherwise noted.

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by Alex Schafran

Virtually everywhere you go in the Parisian banlieue, you will find large signs drawing attention to "urban renovation" — major facelifts for large housing projects (cités), new public spaces in the centers of villages and towns, better integration with the myriad transit projects currently underway, entire blocks of housing.

Omnipresent construction, like most initiatives in France, is being done by a complex network of public, private and semi-public actors operating at every scale. Ideologues of either state or market would be incapable of understanding new development in France, for everything is a public-private partnership when you drill down deep enough. Regardless of who seems to be in charge of a project, there is liable to be a large billboard outside the construction zone with a celebratory rendering of what this space will look like — be it a revitalized public park, a downtown shopping zone or an eco-housing development built by a major developer. This, of course, is nothing unique — billboard-sized renderings have become part of the international language of city-building.



What is notable about these billboards is the people shown occupying the new space. It doesn't take a scholar of race to guess that the answer is not those who look anything like the population of the banlieue.


The actual center of Argenteuil (above) and the rendered version (below).



The shocking thing about the "whitewashing" of places like Argenteuil, Choisy-le-Roi, Villetaneuse, Drancy and Asnières is how thorough it is, and how little it matters if it is formally a public or private venture. For me, what started as a passing observation has evolved into a research project. Of the hundreds of people in what are now dozens of renderings I've encountered in housing projects across four districts (departments), there are only a few people of color. And not only are the white people everywhere, they are often particularly blond and bourgeois or seemingly part of the vast "bobo" class that has started to gentrify places like Montreuil and Pantin. At times it feels like a bad joke: in a major poster for the T8 tramline — which will connect Épinay-sur-Seine with Saint-Denis — the only black person, among over 50 people, was playing basketball.



Although I can't prove quantitatively that this is a false rendering — France doesn't collect data on race, based on a tenet that since race exists only in theory, in theory it doesn't exist — not only do these cities have significant communities of color, I'd bet my bike and camera that many are now majority minority. I'd also be willing to wager that in many communities where these renderings have been tacked up in public space, they have been false for a generation now. Moreover, these renderings belie the fact that people in the public spaces of metropolitan Paris are strikingly diverse, both in the banlieue and in the city itself.



There are a few exceptions to the many disingenuous billboards on display, including the group picture (above) from Argenteuil. But even this one, clearly intended to promote the harmonious vision of a multicultural and inclusive society, erases one of the most visible aspects of life in metropolitan France: Muslim women with head scarves. Spend five minutes on a busy street, in a park, on transit or outside a school at dismissal, and you will realize that women with their heads covered are part of the firmament in contemporary Île de France.


A couple on a bench in Parc Lefévre, Livry-Gargan. (The woman's hair is not red.)

Head scarves are a lightning rod for controversy in theoretically secular France. The urbane nation where James Baldwin felt so at home will surely be aghast at this whitewashing; but even much of the progressive wing of the French establishment would likely sit on their hands at the failure to show women in head scarves occupying public space, even if they are an undeniable presence.

Credits: All pictures by Alex Schafran.

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by Deen Sharp


Trenton Oldfield in the River Thames. Source: The Independent

In 2012, Trenton Oldfield threw himself into the River Thames to protest elitism in Britain. Oldfield intentionally timed his leap to disrupt the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge, yet he may have underestimated the British establishment's love of sport. His act provoked a starkly revanchist reaction: he was sentenced to six months in prison and deemed unwelcome to continue living in the United Kingdom. He is now fighting deportation to Australia.

Oldfield and his partner, Deepa Naik, are the founding directors of This Is Not A Gateway (TINAG) and Myrdle Court Press, which serve as platforms for examining and transforming cities. They recently published the third volume of their book series Critical Cities: Ideas, Knowledge and Agitation from Emerging Urbanists, which features writing and images by an international group of contributors from a wide variety of fields.



The volume has four sections: Erase, Stretch, Relinquish; Archipelago; Agency; and Stratification. Archipelago and Stratification are the strongest and most enjoyable, in my view. Archipelago is about the "avant-garde spaces of modern capitalism." The authors feature surprising uses of financial districts in Hong Kong, Cyprus and London, with emphasis on the social, cultural, economic and political relations within them.


Source: "People of Corabstos," a photographic essay by Jhon Arias in Critical Cities, Volume 3

"Pink: The Art of Being Confident," a photographic essay by Oldfield and Nanna Nielsen, is a fun and prescient analysis of the City of London in 2006. Alongside pictures of people wearing pink shirts to work, the authors share their reflections: "We wondered if the 'the City' [sic], despite being awash with scientific graphs and business models, was still dependent on the emotion of confidence." Nielsen and Oldfield capture this confidence in thirteen portraits, finding in the pink shirts a "symbolic 'canary in the mine'" for cities today.


Source: "Pink: The Art of Being Confident," a photographic essay by Nanna Nielsen and Trenton Oldfield in Critical Cities, Volume 3

In Stratification, the reader is taken past the confidence of the global city: "Underneath the promises (and experience) of democracy, efficiency, creativity and endless 'possibilities' lie some worrying unintended consequences." This section highlights related inequalities in Beirut, Bogotá, Zagreb and London, behind the corporate gloss of a "globalising neoliberal machine."


Source: "People of Corabstos," a photographic essay by Jhon Arias in Critical Cities, Volume 3

Fadi Shayya, Fouad Asfour and Lana Salman give a detailed account of the ways in which violence, sectarianism and political economy intertwine to shape — or deform — public space in Beirut. They assert that "conflict is still there in all its different forms: political, sectarian and armed; new traumas seem to sustain the everyday, and the geopolitically divided spatiality of sectarian geography persists and increases." In keeping with the book's theme, the authors offer a critique and call to action in shaping their city's development from below.


Source: "People of Corabstos," a photographic essay by Jhon Arias in Critical Cities, Volume 3

Agitation against the abuse of power is one of Critical Cities' central themes, but the editors' political analysis is all too frequently agitating. The book is littered with hyperbole: "everyone alive today knows it is possible to overthrow regimes" and "the axis of evil — capitalists, the military and religious leaders," to name a few. Added to this are some blatantly inconsistent attacks; Oldfield and Naik call academics to task for "flying around the world networking with one another," only to later boast that a London TINAG festival attracted participants from "across the planet."

The passion that inspired Oldfield to leap into the Thames is present throughout the collection, and has both a positive and a negative impact. This is an impatient book, bursting with cutting insights and calls for action. The sweeping arguments and sense of urgency, however, create a maelstrom characteristic of the "neoliberal" city at the center of its critique. We are taken from one place to another in a rush of global capital flows. There will surely be a new volume displacing this one, then on to the next — the regime expands, the city is interrogated, and all that is solid melts into air.

Deen Sharp is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York.

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by Noalee Harel, Ruth Sappelt and Jackie Sly

Some urban treasures are hidden in plain sight. The documentary film "On the Map" shows how MIT professor Annette Kim and her research group, the Sidewalk Lab (SLAB), trained themselves to see anew in Ho Chi Minh City. In the process, they helped open the eyes of planners to one of the city's greatest assets: street and sidewalk vendors. Through rigorous observation and cartography, SLAB worked to protect the rights of these entrepreneurs and highlight their positive impacts on the city.



While filming "On the Map," we found inspiration in SLAB's unique approach to research, analysis and visualization as a path toward understanding. We focused on the use of critical cartography for spatial analysis and public engagement. Kim elaborates on this process in her new book "Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City."


GIS survey data laid onto a cadastral map, indicating the presence of sidewalk vendors in Ho Chi Minh City. Source: SLAB

SLAB is now hosting an exhibit at MIT's Wolk Gallery through November 15, which features their latest experimental maps based on 15 years of fieldwork. The exhibit will then travel to Ho Chi Minh City, where the team hopes it will encourage debate on the legitimacy of public vending in a non-participatory planning system. It will also show in Los Angeles, home to the world's largest Vietnamese diaspora. Details on upcoming events can be found on the SLAB website.


Fruit vendors restock along the street. Source: SLAB

Noalee Harel, Ruth Sappelt and Jackie Sly are students at MIT. Noalee is a Comparative Media Studies major, with a special interest in documentary production and science journalism. Ruth is a Master of City Planning candidate who focuses on social justice through public leadership and media. Jackie Sly is majoring in Mechanical and Ocean Engineering and minoring in Writing. They co-produced "On the Map" for a film class taught by Bill Lattanzi in the spring of 2013.

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by Pierre Nadilon

My first encounter with Tubism was at a house party with a large poster of the London Underground hanging in the living room. Looking closer, I found that the Tube stations had names like Semantics, Leonardo Da Vinci and Fordism. The map was full of intriguing references that served as perfect conversation-starters for the many guests who gathered around it that night.


Harry Beck's design for the London Underground map from 1933. Source: Connections

The poster's designer, Sean O'Mara, encouraged me to try doing my own Tubist posters. It wasn't easy but I began to learn by experimenting with themes like scientific inventions, the Arab-Israeli conflict, LGBT celebrities, songs about Paris, social sciences, poetry and religious rites. Some people asked me to do Tubist portraits based on information from their friends and Facebook profiles.


A Tubist portrait by Pierre Nadilon.

Tubism makes it fun to wander through topics and spot connections. At the same time, it has been criticized for a lack of originality bordering on copyright infringement. I agree that designers who created the original subway maps deserve credit. Tubist imitation is based on respect for the enduring quality of their work. It is also useful for adding an element of surprise: subtly altering well-known images helps bring playful unexpectedness into everyday settings.


"LGBT Pride" version of the San Francisco Muni map, by Pierre Nadilon.

It isn't clear whether Tubism is art, design or something else. Artistically, it draws upon pastiche and trompe-l'oeil. Based on Marcel Duchamp's view of art as the interplay between intent, realization and perception, one might conclude that Tubism is artistic when intended and perceived that way. Simon Patterson's adaptation of the London Underground map, for example, is now part of the Tate collection.


Simon Patterson's famous altered Tube map, "The Great Bear" (1992). Source: Londonist

According to Nelson Goodman, art performs symbolic functions in different contexts, creating aesthetic experiences from specific perspectives. He finds the question "What is art?" less important than "When is art?" Tubists may create aesthetic experiences, but presenting information in unexpected ways is usually a higher priority. In this respect, Tubism is a form of communication design. It is even used for résumés and advertisements, but it is not always so pragmatic.


"Axeland" advertisement by BBH Asia Pacific. Source: Coloribus


"Metro Wine Map of France" by David Gissen. Source: The Atlantic

Despite Tubism's questionable originality and identity, it is a fresh newcomer in the world of street expression. Tubist posters can be attached quickly to walls any time without attracting much attention. In public space, they are akin to understated graffiti or psychogeographic urban interventions. As digital tools for design and printing become more accessible, Tubism could flourish in cities around the world.


"Le Plongeon" version of Line 6 on the Paris Metro, by Pierre Nadilon.

Pierre Nadilon is a digital, conceptual and urban artist based in Paris. He is currently working on a comic with psychological ingredients. Pierre is always willing to share what he knows with people he doesn't know.

by Alex Schafran

I imagine that most people, when confronted with the end of a two-year sojourn in the City of Lights, would make plans to visit the unvisited museum (Louvre, check), finally scale the Eiffel Tower (soon, surely), eat the uneaten or discover the exhibition that will change history. The 19th century romantic in me feels pulled to Benjamin's passages and Baudelaire's promenades, even if they're overdone as subjects of literary flânerie. Harvey's Sacre Coeur is part of my daily run, part of life on the Hausmannian edges between the gentrified and the gentrifying.


Parc des Impressionnistes with La Defense in the distance.

Intramuros Paris is still fascinating, still full of impressive and controversial interventions into the urban fabric. The gigantic Rive Gauche project continues to unfold, as does the Batignolles, transforming vast space once dedicated to train infrastructure without sacrificing trains as a mode of transportation. But as Laurent Vermeersch and I have argued on Polis, the banlieues (residential districts beyond the city center) are the main course for any conversation about change in metropolitan Paris and the Île-de-France region.


The Clichy-la-Garenne commune, outside central Paris. Source: Les éditions illimitées

In the comments section of Vermeersch's post, an anonymous reader asks how the banlieues' reputation for monotony survives despite their incredible diversity. The answer is, in part, included in the comment: "True, many people living in the City of Paris don't often set a foot in suburbs, but how many people living in Manhattan, Central London, San Francisco set the foot in the suburbs or in the outer districts of those cities? This is quite normal ... people living in the central area of the city don't go often in the periphery." Normal, yes; conducive to actually knowing anything about your region, no.

So, armed with "L'Indispensable" (my old-school, low-tech guidebook), a streeted-out road bike and a proper camera, I've begun a mad dash around the first three rings of the banlieue. I hope to experience the diversity of this most misunderstood of contemporary urban spaces as it rapidly transforms. The pace of change eludes the navigational powers of my Indispensable (as well as Google and Apple combined); this project seems destined to continue long after I lose my Parisian address.

Extramuros Paris is a bevy of surprising discoveries, a crazy patchwork of historical layerings with micro and macro interventions that make your head spin. All the things you'd expect to find are there — enormous cités (housing projects), freeways, old factories, new office complexes, residential neighborhoods of varying social compositions, malls and outlet stores, single-family homes and reminders that the banlieue is also suburbia. One of my favorite unexpected gems is the parks: not the fact that there are parks, but that there are awesome parks.


A field to rest in can be hard to find in Paris, but not at the Parc des Chanteraines.



Two of these parks are in the northern transect, which crisscrosses the meandering border between the Hauts-de-Seine (92) and Seine-Saint-Denis (93) banlieue departments. Parc des Impressionnistes, in Hauts-de-Seine, is a bizarre update of Monet's perspective on urban life (the original is still accessible at Parc Monceau). It sounds hokey but it's totally brilliant, with quiet forested nooks, water lilies and big open fields. Wedged between train tracks, factories, neo-Haussmanian apartments, older modernist cités, a sewage treatment plant and various architectural remnants, it boasts a view of both the Sacre Coeur and La Defense, allowing one to contemplate the entire history of the Île-de-France in one sunny afternoon on the grass. Socially, it feels very much like a place between old and new industries and populations, a park that refuses the stereotypes associated with Hauts-de-Seine (bourgeois) and Seine-Saint-Denis (racialized poverty).


Parc des Impressionnistes. Source: Google Earth


Neo-Hausmannian buildings line the Parc des Impressionnistes.

A few miles to the northeast lies the incredible Parc des Chanteraines, a meandering 75 hectares of fields, lakes, bird sanctuaries, pony clubs and prairies. Work on this park began in 1978 and proceeded in stages. From inside, it's hard to believe that you're surrounded by industrial zones. The landscape even cascades across a major freeway, such that you hardly realize what you're doing as you walk to the other side.


Parc des Chanteraines. Source: Google Earth


You are standing on top of a seven-lane highway.

The expansive fields are also an escape from the demographic monotony of the Buttes Chaumont and other leisure spaces of Bobo Paris, where more and more I feel surrounded by people who look like me. Chanteraines boasts a hyper-diverse set of parkgoers seeking respite from the concrete and steel that surrounds it. With the opening of the Saint-Denis/Asnières extension of the T3 tram, this respite is even more accessible from the racialized heart of Saint-Denis. On a sunny afternoon, you get a sense of just how nice this can be.


People of many different backgrounds meet in the Parc des Chanteraines.

Whether or not the transit-led revolution in the Parisian banlieue will be successful is a complex question that will unfold for another half-century, at least. Paris is not simply connecting the periphery to the center, but also taking on the more progressive challenge of connecting the periphery to itself. It certainly helps to have nice places to connect to — places that offer something unavailable inside the walls of the Boulevard Périphérique.

Credits: Photos by Alex Schafran unless otherwise noted in the captions.

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