Mass Transportation in the Neoliberal City: The Mobilizing Myths of the Grand Paris Express
Theresa Enright utoronto.academia.edu
Mass Transportation in the Neoliberal City: The Mobilizing Myths of the Grand Paris Express
This paper situates the Grand Paris transit-oriented development initiative within a political economic context of neoliberalization in order to analyze how the ideal of the competitive global city is embedded in local plans for intensification and densification around proposed metro stations. In particular, I focus on contrats de développement territorial (CDTs) as instruments to facilitate the coordination of transportation and land use and to mediate the overall vision of Grand Paris at the local scale. I argue that by and large, the networked and collaborative urbanism facilitated by CDTs emphasizes economic over social goals. -- Cet article situe le projet du Grand Paris dans un contexte politico-économique de néoliberalisation pour analyser comment l’idéal de la ville globale attractive est incorporé dans des plans locaux pour l’aménagement des espaces situés à proximité des stations du futur métro automatique, le Grand Paris Express. En particulier je me concentre sur les contrats de développement territorial (CDT) en tant qu’outils pour faciliter la coordination urbanisme-transport et pour négocier la vision globale du Grand Paris à l’échelle locale. Je note que, en général, l’urbanisme des réseaux facilité par les CDT met en exergue des objectifs économiques plus que des buts sociaux.

This chapter advances our understanding of the politics of transportation by engaging the insights, tensions and political impacts emerging between dialectical materialism and the mobilities turn. Despite key incompatibilities, the conceptual sparks generated between these approaches illuminate how city-regional urbanization operates through a diverse constellation of social and spatial mobilities. Empirical analysis of the Toronto global city-region demonstrates that strategic investments in urban transportation follow neoliberal logics but also open the possibility for a progressive politics of mobility to emerge from the polycentricism of city-regional space.

In the fragmented context of Paris's metropolitan and regional politics, the Grand Pari(s) design consultation and subsequent public process demonstrate that the Grand Paris Express project, a major new orbital metro line, can become a form of emergent governance and negotiated planning. Although the Grand Pari(s) design consultation can be interpreted as a strategy through which the state regained control of the metropolitan narrative, this does not signal a return to the centralized planning of the 1960s. Instead, it makes apparent new political strategies required to operate in the fragmented, pluralist context of a complex metropolis.

This article examines a conflict between two narratives for the future development of Greater Paris – the 'just city' versus the 'global city' – embodied in two competing regional rail proposals, one put forward by the Paris Region and the other by the French State. The first, Arc Express, was developed by Regional Council to reduce existing territorial inequity. A counterproposal, the Grand Huit, was formulated by the State to serve a network of new economic clusters. A political impasse between these conflicting plans, though a prelude to broader institutional transition, empowered new actors in the negotiation of metropolitan planning. It also engendered experimental tools, such as collective territorial development agreements, with which local stakeholders leveraged the state's agenda to achieve their own objectives and gained greater metropolitan citizenship.

This article examines the diffusion process of social movements, placing emphasis on their geographical dimensions. It focuses on the influence of the anti-austerity mobilization Nuit Debout on local urban collectives in Grand Belleville. Building on a three-year participant observation within the collective Droit à la Belle-Ville in which the authors are involved as activists, the article provides two results. First, it shows that diffusion is a context-dependent process. Anti-austerity mobilization had a particular resonance in Grand Belleville because of place-based political history and previously existing activist networks. Some collectives, such as Droit à la Belle-Ville, act as transmitters because they frame their action on both local and global scales. Second, practices and ideological frameworks move from global to local arenas according to the way local collectives re-contextualize them and define their scale of action. Overall, the study sheds new light on the aftermath of large anti-austerity mobilizations and enhances our knowledge of the contemporary local urban activism struggling for the right to the city.

This article examines the debates and contradictions that surrounded the promotion of congestion pricing proposals in London, Stockholm, and New York City. On the one hand, congestion pricing is a neoliberal urban proposal that seeks to reduce motor traffic in a cordoned area by pricing out certain drivers. On the other hand, the political authorities believe that the success of congestion pricing proposals depends on the degree of redistributive elements regarding spatial mobility that are built into them. Redistribution in the form of improved mass transit provision was proposed in all three cities and was implemented in Stockholm and London. The problem with this political gesture is that neoliberals are lukewarm to redistributive politics and consider spatial mobility to be a matter of capacity and not a right. This means that neoliberal political parties because of their skepticism of redistributive politics, have more difficulties in imposing congestion pricing schemes than Left Parties. The congestion pricing proposal of the New York City failed because it was proposed by a neoliberal city administration without a credible redistributive spatial mobility plan.