Landscaping discontent: Space, class, and social movements in immigrant Paris

This dissertation investigates the importance of environmental politics, cultural belonging, and public space for a multiethnic coalition of residents who demanded land for a park in one of Paris' low-income, predominately West African and Maghrebi neighborhoods. The dissertation consists of an ethnographic case study of activism related to the new park and the politics of urban space with the goal of contributing to anthropological scholarship on urban environmentalism, public space, and struggles for national belonging among France's post-colonial minorities. It is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant-observation with activists, policy-makers, and urban planners. It makes three principal scholarly interventions in the literature on cultural belonging in contemporary Europe, environmentalism in the city, and the political significance of public space, respectively. First, the study suggests that urban politics oriented around space and place allow residents of Maghrebi and West African descent to legitimately assert their cultural belonging in the nation. These "place-making" politics are significant because the majority of the scholarship highlights the de-legitimization of multiculturalism in France and overlooks the spatial dimensions of cultural politics. Second, the dissertation critiques the divergence between the environmentalism(s) of residents and the "sustainable urbanism" of planners. Sustainable urbanism---an emerging global orthodoxy in urban planning---constructs the environment and environmental problems according to a limited, technical purview. It often clashes with the political projects of activists, who adopt an environmental approach in the broadest sense, incorporating a range of social, urban, and political demands. Third, the dissertation suggests ethnographers should take into account the "political life" of small urban spaces and theorize public space as not simply a setting for public behavior, but as an often incomplete social and political project, which residents (and planners) seek to "finish" for their own ends as part of broader political conflicts in society.