Landscape of Discontent
Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Published:30th Apr '15
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d’Éole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the Mayor’s vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers.
Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic research with northeast Paris residents, as well as an analysis of green architecture and urban design, Andrew Newman argues that environmental politics must be separated from the construct of urban sustainability, which has been appropriated by forces of redevelopment and gentrification in Paris and beyond. France’s turbulent political environment also provides Newman with powerful new insights into the ways in which multiethnic coalitions can emerge⎯even amid overt racism and Islamophobia⎯in the struggle for more just cities and more inclusive societies.
A tale of multidimensional political efforts, Landscape of Discontent cuts through the rhetoric of green cities to reveal the promise that environmentalism holds for urban communities anywhere.
"From Haussmann to Charlie Hebdo, Paris has always demanded our attention. Efforts to vigilantly reimagine the city and its inhabitants remain one of the most important tasks in this urban century, and Andrew Newman’s Landscape of Discontent provides masterful insights into what urban nature has been and can be."—Nik Heynen, University of Georgia
"Andrew Newman has crafted a dynamic account of how local residents and activists can transform a social and physical urban environment by drawing in the very political forces—including city planners—that imagine themselves as the true shapers of that reality."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
"This is a fantastic book that should be required reading for anyone invested in debates on the right to the city, urban political ecology, and the cultural politics of belonging in contemporary France."—Antipode
"An important contribution to a small, but growing body of Anglophone literature on housing and the built environment in late twentieth-century France."—H-France Review
"Landscape of Discontent makes an important contribution to the politics of urban development, environmental activism, political power, and ethnocultural relations within the contemporary global city of Paris."—American Anthropologist
"The author describes the grassroots protests opposing the rail company–led project for economic development and the political moves leading to the building of the park, bringing to light the actions and motives of activists and inhabitants, through interviews, conversations, and his own involvement in daily activities in the neighborhood."—Journal of Urban Affairs
"Through research with residents, activists, and urban planners, Newman weaves together a detailed ethnography of grassroots mobilization with a structural analysis of neoliberal urbanism."—Metropolitics
ISBN: 9780816689637
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 38mm
Weight: unknown
296 pages