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Paris 19_2010/2012

The 19th arrondissement in contemporary
Paris, France is among the twenty
administrative districts that form the city
and has the youngest population. The
majority of inhabitants are French citizens
of West African and North African descent,
commonly known in the Hexagone as ethnic
minorities. In sociology, the term integration
refers to the adaptation of individuals into
a new environment and new situations.
There exist different forms of adaptation,
the most famous ones being integration and
assimilation. In Western societies the
process leading to integration seems to
be regarded quite favourably when it involves
disadvantaged social groups such as women,
the elderly or the disabled. However, when
it comes to the integration of Ethnic minorities,
also experiencing some forms of injustice;
reluctance towards their full integration is
often disguised by calls for their assimilation
within the rest of French society (Traoré, 2011:
13, 86).

If one also considers how the processes of
integration and assimilation act as cultural
constructs within architectural design.
Integration could act as a synthesis of diverse
social and spatial patterns, functions and
processes that encourage informality within
the fabric of cities. Assimilation however
may discourage cultural diversity and aspires
to combine and condition social activities
and suggest that collective memory could
be misplaced (Chaliand, 1989: 5-6).

Gentrification within the 19th arrondissement
means that West African and North African
communities are witnessing the arrival of new
inhabitants with different social and ethnic
identities. These processes have intensified
spatial disconnection between new and existing
residents and further emphasised the loss of
social and cultural memory within the
arrondissement. There is therefore much merit
in exploring how informal communal networks
generated between West African, North African,
Jewish and Chinese communities could intersect
with architectural and cultural redevelopments
that include the displacement and relocation
of the old populace from North East Paris into
the suburbs.

‘Collective or public memory’ could provide
an entry point to explore and map shared
locations, social possibility, participation or
exclusions. People share their recollections
with members of their group and rationally
reorganize their stories of the past in accordance
with others’ understandings of events, with
and against other people situated in conflicting
groups, in the context of alienation and through
the knowledge that their predecessors and
contemporaries transmit to them (Halbwachs,
1992: 48, Karstedt, 2009: 3-4).

Collective memory is also utilised to hide identity
and conversations may connect memories
through acts of collaboration and could offer
flexible frameworks for collective enterprise,
spatial exploration and evaluation of public life.
Social relations require communal modification
and open access to digital media devices, could
allow private sensory, aesthetic, social and
geographical knowledge to inspire new forms
of imaginative civic experiences (Dewey 2005: 38).

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the streets of Paris have historically become
a rich visual resource for photographers,
filmmakers and architects and influence
how residents, planners and policy makers
associate and generate ocular perceptions
of contemporary cities worldwide. Political
institutions use historical photographs of
daily life to visualise, commemorate and
create specific social histories, public
memories and pictorial archives.

Photography and film have been utilised to
explore how collective memories could become
socially embedded in architectural and spatial
frameworks. Creating productive experiences
that activate new oral/visual discourse about
spatial division, social conflict/cohesion,
assimilation, integration, citizenship and
migration in contemporary French society.

Paris 19, Mobility, Memory and Migration
is a collaboration with Abbas Nokhasteh
(Openvizor), Dr Moustafa Traoré (An Open
Eye) and filmmaker Andrés Borda-González.

References:

Chaliand, G. (1989) Minority Peoples in
the Age of Nation States, Ed. Gerard
Chaliand, London: Pluto Press, pp. 5-6.
Dewey, J. (2005) Art as Experience,
New York: Perigee, pp. 38.
Halbwachs, M. (1992) On Collective Memory,
Ed. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 48.
Karstedt, S. (2009) Legal Institutions
and Collective Memories, Ed. Susanne Karstedt,
Oxford and Portland: Hart, pp. 3-4.
Traoré, M. (2011) l’intégration de la culture
musulmane en Grande-Bretagne, des principes
à la réalité, Paris: l’Harmattan, pp. 13, 86.