Spatial Justice for an Open City

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to combat social exclusion in Greater Paris urban area, while the French government is keen on new strategies for transportation and densification to make a Greater Paris. This project turns its orientation to the social question. An important question that is either scarcely been put into consideration by planners or is faced in a naive way. The question for us planners is that how densification is possible with less deprivation and marginalization of the poor to happen, without inequality and injustice to take over? This project tries to find strategies to open the fragmented Metropolitan region of Paris to become a whole that can bring city life for all, to break the barriers to movement for chances of different people to co-appear in public, to walk freely in the (Greater) Parisian streets and to be seen. To bring spatial justice for all, by ‘politics of difference’ and ‘politics of presentation’. To combat segregation and social exclusion. While focusing and testing the strategies in the Northern Banlieues of Paris, the project addresses the problem with large scale intervention, to bring city life to the first ring of Paris, and connect people to the centre, once again break the walls for the sake of movement. But as the project argues the walls are not just a Peripherique Boulevard, the actual peripheral wall that disconnects people is a Metropolitan scale continuous set of barriers as thick as three times the city of Paris, housing millions inside. Regarding the regional scale problem, the project aims to open this multi layered closed Metropolis, providing access to urban space, to integrate space and prepare infrastructural ground for other resources to come and take part in city life: Jobs, services, cultural monuments. This city life is not a new model; it is already there in the 19th century fabric of Paris. Where access to resources such as jobs, shops, monuments, culture and health care is easy to achieve and is visible by walking and through multimodal public transport. This project is based on a presupposition that integration of all parts of the whole society to the principles of the French Republic is the ideal, even if this ideal could be seriously criticised as in practise there has been evidence of the opposite happening. The open city is a translation for this ideal, that there should be an infrastructural base ground for such a unified whole.