Inventing Grand Paris
Visual Culture, Regeneration and the Right to the City
'Inventing Grand Paris: Visual Culture, Regeneration and the Right to the Global City’ is an Arts and Humanities Research Council led by Dr Gillian Jein.
Synopsis of the research project
This project explores the role of visual and material culture in urban regeneration of the banlieues and the placemaking strategies of the Grand Paris Metropolitan authorities. Principally, it examines the agonism and antagonism between art and neoliberal urban planning, exploring the entanglement of the French state’s regeneration programme, ‘Grand Paris’ — a large-scale strategy aimed at transforming Paris into a global megalopolis — and artistic practices that seek to promote the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968) by asserting the voice and visibility in public of socially marginalized groups.
Key outputs
Chapter: Jein, Gillian. Suburbia, Interrupted: Street Art and the Politics of Place in the Paris Banlieues. In Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space. Edited by Christoph Lindner and Shirley Jordan. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Chapter: Jein, Gillian. Speculative Spaces in Grand Paris: Reading JR in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil. In Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City. Edited by Christoph Lindner and Gerard Sandoval. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
Chapter: Jein, Gillian. Urban Dystopias. In Contemporary Fiction in French. Edited by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Project website
