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Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In discussing the lifestyle and practices of the Paris group of the contemporary surrealist movement, this paper contributes to debates within economic and political geography that seek to develop the imagining of alternatives to neoliberal globalisation through practices of resistance, and spaces of political and policy engagement. The everyday life of the surrealist movement, in combining creativity with progressive choices and radical economic practices that oppose capitalism, while intellectually investigating ideas of revolution, a different society and utopia, suggests a perspective that contributes to the imagining of such alternatives. This paper outlines the deeply embedded nature of surrealist activity in opposing capitalism and illustrates, as one member of the surrealist group suggests, in quoting Baudelaire, surrealism's insistence for a world in which“action is the sister of dream”. The paper further contributes to discussion on the role of academics in facilitating spaces of political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to 'valorize', 'secure' and socially 'mix' estates. The paper highlights the political and neo-colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land-rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo-colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the 'urban revolution' of 1968 (Garnier) and to the 'anti-colonial revolution' of independence and anti-racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti-colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo-colonial aspects of the French state. [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]

This paper engages with the notion of ideology, bringing together Laclau's theorisation of the specificity of the ideological, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes. Ideology, I argue, works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense. It is in this sense that it is an aesthetic affair. This argument is illustrated with an account of the so-called 'securitarian ideology' in France that characterises the repressive policies of the recent governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of 'autonomy' and 'mixity'. 'Autonomy' (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique 'live' in France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of French national urban policy for the period 1981–2002, organized around three themes: spatial conceptualizations of intervention areas and changing scales of intervention, discursive articulations of intervention areas, and legitimation of state intervention. By relating the transformations of this policy to the contemporary restructuring of the French state, the paper argues that although there are elements of convergence, the contemporary restructuring of the French state differs remarkably from a US or UK-style neoliberalization, partly because of the republican tradition emphasizing the active role of the state for the well-being of its citizens. This restructuring carries the signs of the strong state tradition in France, and is best understood as an articulation of neoliberalism with established political traditions, an articulation that I try to capture with the notion of a “republican penal state”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to 'build-in' neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a 'successful' public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]