Journal articles on the topic 'Banlieue rouge'

Résumé RÉSUMÉ / SUMMARY La politique municipale française et la banlieue rouge de Paris Le système politique français forme une étrange combinaison de contrôle central et de pouvoir local. Ce paradoxe apparaît clairement dans la dialectique entre la politique nationale et la politique municipale. Ainsi, les grands partis dominent les élections municipales et y font élire leurs adhérents, mais ils se révèlent trop faibles dans leurs structures locales pour jouer un rôle direct dans la gestion des villes. Seule exception à cène règle, le Parti communiste a développé un modèle d'implantation locale fondé sur une étroite collaboration entre les organisations militantes et la mairie. Une recherche menée en banlieue parisienne montre cependant que ce modèle ne fonctionne plus et que la crise profonde que le PCF traverse actuellement tient aussi aux difficultés qu'il éprouve dans la gestion de son empire municipal.

Sur la base d'une enquête menée en 1981 dans cinq municipalités d'union de la gauche situées dans la banlieue «rouge» de Paris, l'auteur examine le comportement d'une section cégétiste d'employés municipaux face à un maire communiste, comment la CGT agissait-elle dans une municipalité socialiste et comment réagit la CFDT

Cet article analyse la trajectoire sociopolitique d’un acteur issu de l’immigration algérienne en France à partir d’une enquête de type ethnographique menée dans une ancienne Cité de la « banlieue rouge », autrefois haut-lieu de l’identité ouvriero-communiste. À travers un engagement associatif doublé d’une intervention dans le champ politique local, l’entreprise conduite par ce jeune homme tout au long de la décennie 2000 éclaire les fondements éminemment sociaux de sa légitimation politique. C’est en effet au plus près des réseaux de sociabilités générationnelles qu’il est parvenu à politiser tout un pan des nouveaux milieux populaires en situation de désaffiliation à l’égard de l’ordre sociopolitique traditionnel.

Le théâtre de la Commune d’Aubervilliers a été le premier théâtre permanent de la banlieue rouge sans un soutien initial de l’État. Jack Ralite a appuyé son fondateur, Gabriel Garran, de 1960 à 1984 et demandé la nomination de Didier Bezace en 1997. Les deux metteurs en scène se reconnaissent une relation de filiation dans leurs références à un théâtre populaire émancipateur, centré sur les auteurs vivants. L’article présente et interroge les conditions de la mise en oeuvre de ce projet dans deux contextes sociétaux différents. Les dispositifs de mise en relation des artistes avec la population locale requièrent dans les deux cas le déploiement d’énergie militante pour décentraliser l’action culturelle dans la ville, ainsi qu’une diversification de la programmation. La désindustrialisation a affaibli les relais d’information dans les entreprises et aggravé la précarité économique. Le mythe de la conscience de classe des ouvriers est aujourd’hui encore plus décalé dans une ville au caractère multiethnique accentué.

Les installations de production de la Compagnie des Eaux de banlieue (CEB) au Mont Valérien traitent l'eau de Seine en aval de Paris sur 2 filières de potabilisation comprenant pour la première (50 000 m3/J) une préozonation, une coagulation au sels d'Aluminium (Aqualenc), une décantation (super pulsator Degrémont), une filtration sur sable, une ozonation, une filtration sur charbon actif en grains (CAG) et une désinfection finale au bioxyde de chlore, et pour la deuxième, une filtration lente sur sable (80 000 m3/j) dite filtration "Chabale". Dans le cadre du remplacement de la filière "Chabale", une unité de démonstration (8 m3/h) eomprenaut une addition de charbon actif en poudre (CAP) avant ultrafiltration sur membrane a été mise en route. Dans cette étude, une comparaison du traitement conventionnel physico-chimique de l'usine et du nouveau procédé d'ultrafiltration a été effectuée. Pour cela, un suivi du carbone organique total et une évaluation du potentiel de reviviscence ont été réalisés en différents points des chaînes de traitement. La matière organique biodégradable (MOB) a été mesurée par la méthode Werner (1980). Les premiers résultats montrent : - l'élimination des MOB est comparable pour les différents procédés; - toutefois, la nature des MOB est sensiblement affectée à chaque type de traitement (ozonation, addition de CAP, filtration sur sable ou sur CAG).

The War on Terror was made global in 2001 through U.N. Resolution 1373. Nassim Amaouche’s 2009 Adieu Gary appears distant from this transformation in international law. Yet its French-Arab protagonists negotiate mass media envisionings of the “terrorist” in ways that highlight the pressures the controversial resolution placed upon Arab and racially mixed populations. Adieu Gary subversively refashions the Western aesthetic and its iconic heroes for this post-9/11 context to signify not strength but weakness. In its appropriation of the ghost town convention, the film thus becomes a unique example of the disrupted, transnational Western which visualizes the disrupted lives of banlieue youth, articulating the psychological disempowerment of an ethnic group framed in legal terms as a potentially violent threat. My paper unveils the richness of this singular film’s commentary on French public discourse through an interdisciplinary framework that combines analysis of Resolution 1373’s impact in France, an awareness of the film’s intertextual gestures to classic Hollywood Westerns, and a post-colonial theoretical perspective. A vision of the terrorist Other, codified in law and propagated in popular culture, affects the French-Arab’s self-perception in the film. The sheriff of the Western, emblematized by Gary Cooper’s lawman from High Noon who seems to haunt the setting, reinforces the banlieue inhabitant’s powerless state. Conservative Islam then becomes the sole route for an autonomous identity; however, the film’s ambivalence reveals how this embrace of Islam further condemns the French-Arab subject to a life in limbo, trapped in an existential ghost town somewhere between life and death.ROZBITY GATUNEK, ROZBITE ŻYCIE — ADIEU GARY I „POSTJEDENASTOWRZEŚNIOWE” PRZEDMIEŚCIE JAKO WYMARŁE MIASTOWojna z terroryzmem stała się globalna w 2001 roku w wyniku rezolucji ONZ nr 1373. Film Nassima Amaouche’a Adieu Gary z 2009 roku wydaje się daleki od tej transformacji w międzynarodowym prawie. Jednakże jego francusko-arabscy protagoniści negocjują massmedialne wyobrażenia „terrorysty” w sposób, który rzuca światło na presję, jaką ta kontrowersyjna rezolucja wywarła na arabskiej i rasowo mieszanej ludności. Adieu Gary subwersywnie przemodelowuje zachodnią estetykę i jej ikonicznych bohaterów funkcjonujących w owym „postjedenastowrześniowym” kontekście, żeby podkreślić nie siłę, lecz słabość. W swoim przyswojeniu konwencji wymarłego miasta film ten staje się wyjątkowym przykładem rozbitego transnarodowego westernu, który wizualizuje rozbite egzystencje przedmiejskich młodocianych, artykułując psychologiczne pozbawienie autorytetu etnicznej grupy, ujmowanej w prawniczych terminach jako potencjalna groźba przemocy. Mój esej ukazuje bogactwo komentarza filmu na temat francuskiego publicznego dyskursu, komentarza opartego na interdyscyplinarnej podbudowie, który łączy analizę oddziaływania rezolucji 1373 na Francję, świadomość filmowego intertekstualnego nachylenia ku klasycznemu hollywoodzkiemu westernowi i postkolonialną teoretyczną perspektywę. Wizja terrorystycznego INNEGO, skodyfikowana przez prawo i propagowana w popularnej kulturze, oddziałuje na wzajemne postrzeganie się w filmie Francuzów i Arabów. Szeryf z tego westernu, symbolizowany przez człowieka prawa granego przez Gary’ego Coopera z filmu W samo południe, który zdaje się nawiedzać okolicę, wzmacnia tkwiących w bezsilności mieszkańców przedmieścia. Konserwatywny islam staje się więc jedyną drogą autonomicznej jednostki; jednakowoż dwuznaczność filmu odsłania, jak owe kleszcze islamu skazują francusko-arabskich obywateli na życie w otchłani, złapanych w pułapkę egzystencjalnego wymarłego miasta, gdzieś między życiem a śmiercią. Przeł. Kordian Bobowski

En 2006, trois ans avant sa mort, Thierry Jonquet fait paraître son dernier roman. Il prend pour cadre une banlieue fictive du 93 en région parisienne. Fidèle aux principes du néo-polar, le roman dépeint les causes, les effets et les acteurs d’une violence sociale omniprésente, sans pour autant proposer de solution. L’analyse montre que le caractère subversif du roman découle moins de l’inscription des motifs violents dans le récit – le rouge et le noir de la brutalité et de la mort – que dans la remise en cause des convictions humanistes du lecteur, placé dès lors dans une inconfortable position.

Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.