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The 1919 Greater Paris competition was the first attempt at metropolitan planning in France. Paris was then the fourth largest city in the world. As in other metropolises, congestion and hazardous urban growth were its main problems. The need of planning was evident. However, the long-term city–suburb conflict, the legal constraints, and the political divergences hindered the realization of a comprehensive plan. In this context, an international competition was launched. The prize-winner was the French architect Léon Jaussely. Although Greater Paris competition did not result in a comprehensive plan straightaway, it constitutes a turning point in Paris’s planning history. Through research on unpublished sources preserved in different Parisian archives, this paper aims firstly to reconstruct the process of the competition. The thorough reports of the jury offer an entirely new approach to the study of this kind of competition, since they allow us to comprehend the preoccupations of the administrations in charge. Secondly, it intends to examine the projects, connecting their solutions with international models and debates. It focuses on those concerning the comprehensive plan and particularly on Jaussely’s awarded project. Finally, the long-term influence of the competition will be discussed and regarded within the international context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the phenomenon of "jaytalking," a popular type of urban speech in Paris during the fin-de-sicle, the usual form of which was graffiti written on the streets and other public spaces of the city. It explores the forms that graffiti took, the spaces used for jaytalking, the types of messages left by jaytalkers, as well as some of the discernable traits of the authors of graffiti and their readers. It examines this graffiti--whether political, obscene, sincere, humorous, or just plain cranky--as a means by which ordinary Parisians hijacked the city street, creatively resisting the limited and sanctioned uses of that space and turning it into a canvas for their opinions, resentments, and rage. And it asserts that city streets in the late nineteenth-century, despite their careful regulation by the Paris police force, continued to be places of inventiveness, defiance, anger, humor, and self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]