‘Seeing like a city’,or ‘seeing like a state’ in a city? Paris,capital of femonationalism

Abstract

This paper questions the ‘seeing like a city’ vs. ‘seeing like a state’ opposition through a detailed discussion of urban politics in the city of Paris, France, a prime example of the ways in which the national remains a driving dimension of city life. This claim is examined by a consideration of the shortcomings of Paris’s recent and timid commitment local democracy, lacking recognition of the diversity of its citizens, and the ways in which the inclusion of more women in decision-making arenas has failed to advance the ‘feminization of politics’. A common factor in these defining features of the Hidalgo administration seems to be the prevalence of ‘femonationalism’ and its influence over municipal policy-making.

Keywords

Paris participation femonationalism

Several arguments have been made in recent years about what ‘seeing like a city’ involves, in contrast with the traditional modern mode of ‘seeing like a state’ (Boudreau, 2017; Magnusson, 2012; Scott, 1998, Valverde 2011). There has been an insistence on a difference in scale, as well as nature, in forms of governance that have to deal with the local experiences, lives and difficulties of diverse citizens whose needs are no longer addressed by receding states. What I want to do here is offer a reading of these changes from the local and situated vantage point of the city of Paris, the epitome of high modern city planning in the writings of many (for instance Scott, 1998 or Harvey, 2005).

In this piece I enter into dialogue with the work of Valverde (2008, 2011, 2012, 2014), Van den Berg (2017, 2018), Parker (2016, 2017) and Boudreau (2017, 2019). What these scholars have in common, beyond being female academics, is their reliance on detailed empirical studies, and their refusal of ‘high theory’ at the expense of contextual, in-depth understanding of what actually goes on in cities. All emphasize the importance of the everyday, seemingly mundane occurrences and the nitty-gritty of how people in different positions of varying power interact within the urban spheres they depict. They also focus on the local, or, in the case of Parker adopt a ‘partial, place-based’ approach. They do this while considering cities as a whole, rather than just the micro-local household or neighbourhood studies that feminist research has long advocated (Valverde, 2014). In other words, they make serious claims to redefine what ‘urban politics’, ‘city governance’ or ‘political economy of place’ actually means in pragmatic, materialist, grounded ways, at odds with the grand theorizing of some urban scholars and arguably far more nuanced and compelling than overarching narratives about for instance ‘planetary urbanization’ (Giroud, 2015, McLean, 2017).

I situate my conversation with these works firmly in the place I speak from, the city of Paris, aiming to say something that will, I hope, enrich, challenge, unsettle any generalization about the relationship between cities and politics. One of my objectives will be to show how Paris is at odds with the narrative of ‘denationalization’ of urban politics after the demise of Keynesianism (Boudreau, 2017: 27). In many ways, Paris is a counter-example to Boudreau’s assertion that “(p)olitics in global cities is driven by global processes much more than by national debate” (Boudreau, 2017: 27). Indeed it is no coincidence that, when discussing the shift from ‘pre-modern’ to ‘modern’ ways of understanding cities’ activities, Valverde quotes two French authors (Lefebvre and de Certeau), products of their specific national culture as much as of their time (Valverde, 2011: 308): arguably the modernist drive remains strongly rooted in French ways of doing politics, even at the local scale, and national debate remains a leading factor explaining what occurs in the French capital. Paris does not seem propicious to the emergence of an ‘urban logic of political action’ likely to take the place of a ‘state-centric’ one (Boudreau, 2017: 17), for reasons that this piece will elaborate on.

Scott surmised that Jane Jacob’s gender and ability to see through a “woman’s eye” was essential to her powerful critique of high modernism in city planning (Scott, 1998: 138–139), and Parker underlines the dearth of women in charge of municipalities as a factor for the overall “masculine” disregard for the everyday and the social fabric of the city (Parker, 2016). It therefore seems relevant to focus on the specific Parisian path within a general drive toward incorporating “diversity” and “gender equality” into urban politics, as part of cities’ efforts to counter patriarcal, heteronormative, racist and nationalistic tendencies.

There are several major ways of framing this issue: the vision of ‘feminized’ urban politics depicted by municipalist movements inspired by Bookchin who advocate a role of cities in the welfare of their inhabitants, horizontal decision-making and the co-construction of policies (Nez, 2016; Roth and Shea Baird, 2017; Subirats, 2018); the European drive toward ‘gender mainstreaming’ in urban planning and city management, and the aim for ‘fair-shared cities’ (Sanchez de Madariaga and Roberts, 2013); and last but not least, the transformation of cities through ‘genderfication’ (Van den Berg, 2017, Van den Berg and Chevalier, 2018) with ‘gender-friendliness’, along with ‘family-friendly’ and ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ policies, being used to roll back working-class culture and urban practices, even as these are increasingly racialized. It is quite clear that Paris falls short of the ‘municipalist’ ambitions, and also of the less politically radical aims of gender mainstreaming; this piece will look at the ways in which it may more closely fit the ‘genderfication’ narrative. It will adopt a feminist perspective on policy-making, but with an important caveat, which is that conflicting views of feminism are at play in France (as indeed elsewhere) and that intersectional feminism is far from dominant in the city administration or among elected officials. The theoretical framework of ‘femonationalism’, coined by Sara Farris to address the ways national policies in several European countries use ‘feminist’ arguments to discriminate against migrants or people of migrant origin (Farris, 2017), has great relevance to the way the Parisian municipality systematically associates gender issues with issues of migrant integration.

Some of the empirical material in this piece was gathered as part of a collective three-year project on local gender equality policies, funded by the city of Paris. As part of this project, we carried out 15 interviews with city employees and elected officials, both at the central and arrondissement levels, between 2015 and 2017. We also conducted a large number of observations at the city’s workshops or events on gender issues between 2014 and 2017, attended citizen consultations on aspects of a plan for ‘equality’ and participated in working groups and training sessions organized by city services. While we had expected to carry out our research in close cooperation with the section of the city administration responsible for gender and diversity issues, difficulties arose which this paper will analyze. The project also included short fieldwork periods in Barcelona and Berlin, which provided perspective on alternative European paths towards gender mainstreaming in city management and local democracy. Further material is drawn from the city of Paris’s website and official communication material, particularly for the more recent years.

The first section of this paper will provide some context on Paris’s enduring embeddedness in the national, and the shortcomings of its recent and timid drive toward local democracy in the past two decades. The second considers the scales and jurisdictions of ‘diversity’ in Paris, and underlines its failure to embody the cosmopolitan metropolis, and its disenfranchizing of non-European foreign inhabitants, even as it claims to legislate for the national. Lastly, I look at the pitfalls of ‘municipal femonationalism’ and the limits of a drive for gender equality that falls short of the ‘feminization of politics’ that the election of Hidalgo had led some to hope for.

The always-already post-political city

A tightly packed city of over 2 million inhabitants within a reduced 105 square kilometres surface, Paris also concentrates high proportions of wealthy families (over a third of French households which paid the ISF, the wealth tax, in 2014). An average density of 20 000 inhabitants per square kilometre decreases quite markedly beyond the limits of the city proper, as does the proportion of wealthy and influential people. Similar effects are to be noted on the housing markets, with prices reaching considerably higher levels ‘within the walls’, even in the more peripheral arrondissements, and even in areas with social and physical characteristics very similar to those of the banlieues (Guérois and Hancock, 2011), though traditionally working-class areas beyond the walls, such as Montreuil, are also becoming gentrified to some extent as Parisian homes become unaffordable to growing sections of the middle-class.

It is fair to say that Paris has long had a sense of superiority with respect to its banlieues, obviously bolstered by the huge wealth of the inhabitants of its central and Western arrondissements, and the fact that jobs are also still massively concentrated there. It is however also fair to say that this superiority has long been paid for by inferior democratic representation, with respect to neighbouring entities: because governments were long fearful of Paris as the revolutionary city of the Commune, the city had no elected mayor until the 1970s, and was governed by a prefect directly named by central government. Jacques Chirac, who was the first elected mayor between 1977 and 1995, subsequently went on to win the Presidential election, confirming the widely held idea that leading Paris was an ideal way of gaining an international profile and statesman stature. Paris belongs to a select group of cities in the world which were long considered too closely linked to national power structures to have an elected mayor of their own, usually in very centralized countries in which political and economic power overlap in the same city: Mexico City or Buenos Aires, for instance, share in that distinction.

Paris is seen in many ways as too important a political arena to be left to normal local politics. Overall, despite efforts to create a culture of decentralization, citizen participation and local democracy, little has changed since the 2000s, when the former head of legal affairs of the muncipality stated: “Paris still hasn’t cut the umbilical cord connecting it to the state (…) Paris is not a “local” government, it is a “capital” government” (Spitz, 2004: 120). A highly centralized administration has only very gradually been decentralized, with the twenty mairies d’arrondissement holding relatively little power and budgetary autonomy with respect to the huge central mairie. Created as part of the decentralization reforms of the 1980s, they perform everyday administrative functions but lack both political and financial independence from the central mairie, despite the fact some arrondissements are more populated than large cities in their own right (nearly 240 000 in the 15^ème, between 135 000 and 200 000 in each of the peripheral arrondissements from the 11th to the 20th). Our interviews with elected officials in charge of equality policy at the level of arrondissements made clear that very little funding is allocated to them, and that it remains as centralized as does decision-making.

The origins of the gender equality policies are closely connected to Anne Hidalgo, the current mayor of Paris, who was in charge of women’s rights during mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s first term (2001–2008). Delanoë was the capital’s first openly gay mayor and aimed to shake up the very traditional ways Paris had been run under right-wing mayors in the previous quarter century. Hidalgo, under Delanoë, implemented a policy for increasing the opening hours of municipal services to make them accessible to workers (“bureau des temps¹”), developed the funding of women’s rights associations, and tackled more symbolic issues such as the names of streets. An Observatoire de l’égalité femmes-hommes was established in 2002 to implement what was designated as “politique de l’égalité intégrée à l’action municipale” (“politique intégrée” or “approche intégrée” being the usual way of rendering “mainstreaming” in French). In 2007 Paris officially signed the European Charter for the Equality of Women and Men in Local Life (promoted by the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, the European section of United Cities and Local Governments). Reports at the time pointed out that Paris had already implemented a number of the recommended steps (education to equality, professional equality, provisions for violence against women …). However, the City failed to issue the “plan for equality” that all signatories of the Charter were committed to submitting within two years after signing the Charter.² Generally speaking, equality and gender issues took the back seat during the second Delanoë term, which saw Hidalgo take the urban planning portfolio, and a less influential official, Fatima Lalem, taking the equality portfolio. Though this change may have played a part, it is also possible that an unfavourable national context contributed to the relative disappearance of gender equality from the Parisian agenda in during the 2008–2014 period: national debates took an increasingly toxic turn at the time in relation with the debate about same-sex marriage, with the prominent conservative ‘Manif pour tous’ grouping leading a public controversy about ‘gender theory’, branding it as both an import from Anglophone countries, out of place in France, and as holding the potential to destroy society. One of our informants within the city administration who organized a seminar for municipal employees in February 2014 on the theme “Gender and city” was instructed to change the name to “Equality between women and men and city”, because “gender” was seen as too “ideologically loaded” term, and then forbidden to make the proceedings of the seminar available:

The head of the service (for equality) didn’t want us to release the proceedings, a document which dealt with gender, public space, equality between men and women, cities. She didn’t want us to because she considered it was an issue outside of the scope of what a city must do, and what it should recommend. (interview, 04/06/2015)

A similar backpedalling occurred in terms of local democracy and openness to ‘diversity’, reversing the drive toward citizen participation in decision-making initiated during the terms of office of mayor Delanoë, between 2001 and 2014 (Nez, 2008). Analysts of Paris’s attempts at “participative democracy” (Gardesse, 2015; Humain-Lamoure, 2010), and in particular of the much-vaunted “participatory budget” (Amadieu, Framont, 2015), have pointed out their limitations. Their shift online (Douay, 2016) and Hidalgo’s strong presence on social networks such as Twitter (Douay and Reys, 2017) have also been criticized as ‘democracy theatre’. The fact that Hidalgo has more followers on twitter than many national politicians says a lot of the national visibility of her office, but it does not grant Parisians a say in the decision-making processes of a city that remains exceptionally aloof and opaque, and which boasts of its social media presence as though it were actually a sign of democratic accountability. As Valverde rightly emphasized, “it is dangerous to assume that those who show up (or phone their councillor) are those whose voices matter the most” (Valverde, 2012: 10) and the same applies to digital means of communication, which suffer from the same forms of exclusion as more traditional ones, due to inequalities of access and ability to successfully navigate platforms and websites.

It may be that ‘urban life is political life’ (Boudreau, 2017: 52), but concerted efforts on the part of city governments not to relinquish any significant part of urban governance can prove extremely effective at disenfranchizing even the most highly-educated³ and wealthiest city-dwellers of the country. ‘Municipal politics’, in Paris, does not prove ‘permeable to informal (non-state) actors’ (Boudreau, 2017: 26), and retains strong similarities with national politics. The current administration’s efforts seem dedicated primarily to ‘living up’ to Paris’s international reputation, upholding its global prestige and economic competitivity, rather than addressing inhabitants’ concerns and demands. Thus, paradoxically, the classes that are most influential in shaping French political decision-making are also among the most deprived of a say in the day-to-day running of their own city and local environment.

The disappropriation of Parisians is compounded by processes whereby Parisian events ‘go global’ at high-speed—for instance the Notre-Dame fire instantly making international headlines—and a lack of genuine local journalism, even as a high proportion of media employees and journalists live within the bounds of the city.⁴ It has been shown that being the focus of the national press (papers, television, radio and online media) could actually prove a constraint of local policy, for instance regarding the creation of places of worship for religious minorities (Hancock, 2020): municipal subsidies for mosques, which are legally forbidden but frequently voted for by municipalities in the guise of support for ‘cultural’ associations, are much less likely to pass unscrutinized in Paris. This can play out in several ways, with the national importance of Paris making it the focus of scrutiny on the part of politicians trying to ‘score points’ in national contests, and the tendency on the part of mayors of Paris to aim for a career in national politics, meaning their policies whilst heading municipal institutions have to conform to exacting standards rather than reaching out towards minorities and seeking local accommodations with their electorate’s needs or demands.

Scales and jurisdictions of “diversity”

In an interview on July 18, 2016, Hélène Bidard, the Communist elected official responsible for gender equality, anti-discrimination and human rights, who had previous experience of working in a smaller city in Seine-Saint-Denis, stated that:

“people who work at city hall, yes, there is a distance, inevitably. It’s as if they worked for a département. They don’t work in the city. Them, you have to … we often have to shake them and say “Go out there and meet inhabitants directly!” (…) it really feels more like working in a ministry than working in a city. It’s really to do with size”.

Admittedly, the city of Paris’s huge, rambling administration is a Behemoth that even insiders find difficult to navigate and comprehend: the municipality employs a little over 52,000 people,⁵ making it a major employer and one of the most administered cities in France (with 1 municipal employee for 43 inhabitants). But beyond sheer size, this sense of it being more like a ministry than a city also has to do with what the city does and doesn’t do, echoing Valverde’s (2008) perceptive discussion of jurisdiction: she argues that “(t)aking jurisdiction for granted (for example, by assuming that immigration is state-level but garbage disposal is municipal) thus naturalizes and blackboxes differences in modes of governance that could benefit from being closely questioned.” (Valverde, 2008: 3)

The confusion of the national and municipal, and the resulting power struggles, are exemplified in the way the city of Paris dealt with the so-called “migrant crisis” in Europe between 2015 and 2017: while the rich capital of France predictably attracted many of the migrants who made it to Europe, mayor Hidalgo insisted that dealing with large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers was in fact the state’s responsibility, and not the city’s. The unique role of the city of Paris was further emphasized when Hidalgo presented a law proposal for the welcoming of migrants in July 2017,⁶ a highly unusual move since normally mayors are not competent to propose national legislation. Furthermore, the gist of the proposition was that the burden was to be shared out nationally rather than concentrated in Paris.

The proportion of foreign nationals among inhabitants in Paris is a rather modest 14,8%, much lower than in neighbouring Seine-Saint-Denis where it varies between 21% and 30% (for “territories” 6 to 8 of the Greater Paris: APUR, 2016: 27). If there is a ‘world city’ in the Parisian urban area, it lies outside the confines of the city proper, in the banlieue (its northern and eastern parts in particular). These unsung banlieues are seen by many as the breeding grounds of the terrorists, and likely to house and protect them—the city of St-Denis is often forgotten when the November 2015 ‘Paris attacks’ are discussed, though the Stade de France located there was among the targets of terrorists, and its population suffered one of the worst aftershocks to the attacks when a raid was carried out by the police to arrest some of the people responsible for the attacks. The nearby city of Aubervilliers had one of its mosques wrecked by a police search. Both cities are connected to Paris by the métro, and lie less than 10 kilometres from the historical Cathedral Notre-Dame (the point zero of all French roads); if this were any other city, they would be considered part of Paris, but not so in the French capital. This is one of the mechanisms whereby ‘diversity’ has been kept at arm’s length and deprived and/or immigrant populations have been denied they belong, even as they are indispensable to the city’s economy.

Valverde (2012) advocates a return to planning at the scale of entire cities, to overcome the emphasis on local projects and neighbourhood-scale issues that Jacobs did a lot to romanticize and prioritize. In Paris, this is considerably hindered by the political and administrative divisions of the urban area. The recent creation of a “métropole du Grand Paris” uniting Paris with the so-called “petite couronne” départements has primarily consisted in developing much needed transportation infrastructure linking the banlieues in order to limit through-traffic in the city. One emblematic project is that of the ‘Roissy express’ that would connect the Charles-De Gaulle airport with the city while by-passing the very populated and deprived Seine-Saint-Denis, in dire need of improved accessibility.

There are all manner of controversies about who belongs in “world cities” and to whom they belong. Arguably, one of the things that municipal authorities, in these cities, have to deal with, is arbitrate between competing claims and uses. In Paris, the presence of migrants is one of the questions pushing for municipal arbitration, but it is far from being the only one.

There are questions, in many cities, about AirBnB and similar platforms, and the ways in which their growth, while favouring foreign visitors, are removing many flats from the market and pushing an affordilibity crisis for local residents: this issue has been on Paris’s agenda for several years, since there are more listings in Paris than in any other city worldwide, including New York City, and that the listings are massively for entire flats (APUR, 2018). Parisian attempts at regulation, prohibiting AirBnB (and similar platforms) rentals for over 120 days a year, still fall short of the more drastic rules imposed in some cities, and they lack in means of enforcement (APUR, 2018). A further arbitration that is ongoing in Paris is between partying, clubbing-oriented activities, and residents’ claims for peaceful nights: since 2014, the city’s ‘Council for the Nighttime’ (Conseil de la Nuit) aims to promote and regulate nighttime activities.

Another less formalized area of municipal arbitration is the delineation of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ uses of public space, and increasingly, (un)desirable categories of users. Arguably this is one of the more complex municipal activities, involving numerous actors and sometimes contradictory policies (Froment-Meurice, 2016). That difference exists and may be central to the experience of urbanity (Boudreau, 2017: 105) does not imply that city policies necessarily make place for it when it comes in a form less valued than international tourism, especially under a national regime of universalism in which the recognition of difference remains problematic, if not anathema to a country’s understanding of itself (Delphy, 2010).

Boudreau writes:

“Municipalities can either modify their administrative structures by setting up committees composed of members from diverse communities, or they can act through various employment equity programmes for local public service, fostering awareness-building with municipal staff about intercultural issues, desegregation measures, and financial and technical support for ethnic associations, etc.” (Boudreau, 2017: 107)

But this depiction of municipal-level action to recognize difference is far from applying in full in Paris, where committees representing ‘diversity’ have all but disappeared. During the first Delanoë administration, a consultative council for Parisians not from the European community (‘Conseil consultatif des Parisiens non communautaires’) was created in 2002 to acknowledge the fact that European Community nationals had gained the right to vote in local elections in 1998 (Shahshahani, 2002). In addition, a major campaign entitled “All Parisian/all citizens” called for candidates for this council and an “Observatory for local democracy” was instituted. Both have completely disappeared under Hidalgo, since 2014. The most recently created council is the The Parisian Council of Europeans, created in December 2018 as part of the European INCLUDE project, with 61 members. It should be emphasized that among the 330,000 foreigners living in Paris, less than a third hold a European nationality.⁷ This means a large majority of foreign residents in Paris no longer have even a consultative voice in policy-making.

“Democracy at the scale of the city, particularly in today’s increasingly economically divided cities, requires careful attention to the mechanisms used to solicit input and allow for citizen participation”, in the words of Valverde (2012: 11). What is striking in Paris is that neither foreigners, other than Europeans, nor women’s associations or other minority groups, have dedicated representative institutions. The list of ‘representative institutions’ listed on the City website⁸ also makes quite clear that the City considers itself more accountable to economic lobbies and private actors than to its inhabitants.

The 20th arrondissement had a groundbreaking council to represent the interests of foreign nationals, created in 1995 by recently elected local mayor Michel Charzat, who was then in the Socialist opposition to right-wing rule. This was quietly dropped under 20th arrondissement mayor Frédérique Calandra, a major figure of Parisian socialism,⁹ who is strongly evocative of what Farris (2017) calls ‘femocrats’: women in positions of power who invoke women’s rights to stigmatize foreign or Muslim men. Hancock and Mobillion (2019) showed that ‘femonationalism’ functions as a driving force of municipal policy in Paris generally: highly significant is the fact that the municipal ‘Direction démocratie citoyens territoires’ (service responsible for democracy, citizenship, and territorial inequalities) includes a section addressing ‘égalité, intégration, inclusion’ which is in charge of equality between men and women as well as integration policies for foreign nationals. ‘Femonationalism’ (Farris, 2017) has been at play in the 20th arrondissement in particularly striking ways under Calandra, with notorious incidents of racist harassment against employees.

Major disagreements within the ruling coalition of Socialists, Communists and Greens occurred in particular about the management of Chinese sex workers in Belleville (Lieber, 2018). These sex workers were protesting police brutality and repression and gained the support of some Green local elected officials, in particular in the 20th arrondissement. These events combined many of the issues on which Parisian Socialists hold a position rife with contradictions: while claiming to make rolling back violence on women a priority, they refuse to consider that undocumented migrants such as these Chinese sex workers come within the remit of this policy. The category of ‘women’ with which they work remains exclusionary (Hancock and Lieber, 2017) and their particular brand of femonationalism rejects intersectional approaches. This is true also of supposedly gender-friendly policies that fail to incorporate non-heteronormative understandings of sexuality (Biarrotte, Bonté, forthcoming). In Paris generally, ‘ethnic’ associations may be supported, but not any ‘ethnic’ associations: support for the Muslim associations of Paris, for instance, has been reversed (Hancock, 2020).

Boudreau notes that “municipal discourse with regards to diversity and racism is important because it formulates models and contributes to differentiating one city from another” (Boudreau, 2017: 107). Considering the situation in Paris, however, it is obvious that the discourse held by Hidalgo and other elected officials about inclusion and hospitality is in fact at odds with what the municipality actually does¹⁰ and the means deployed in the service of so-called ‘priorities’. This is true regarding policies for the recognition of citizenship of foreign nationals, or for the mainstreaming of gender concerns.

Femonationalism against the feminization of politics?

Parker mentions the minute proportion of female mayors and city councillors in the US as one of the signs of the reign of ‘masculinity’ over city affairs, which she links with the devotion to the market (Parker, 2016). However, what the case of Paris illustrates is that having women in positions of power does not per se guarantee a rolling back of masculine, market-oriented concerns, in particular if and when these women resist intersectionality with the same energy as their male counterparts resist gender equality. If there is a ‘feminization’ of political personnel in Paris, it falls short of the ‘feminization of politics’ described by municipalists, with a rolling back of whatever had been put in place in the previous decade to foster greater citizen involvement in policy-making.

As a result of France’s laws on “parité”, the Conseil de Paris (the elected council that governs both the city and département of Paris, pending its transformation into) comprises a majority of women (50,9% as of the 2014 elections) and its elected president, Anne Hidalgo, is also a woman.¹¹ While symbolically important, this does not per se guarantee that gendered issues will be taken into account, nor does it vouch for a ‘feminization’ of municipal politics. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a belief among our respondents in Paris that there was no need to do anything to ensure equality since it is already a given of French nation-wide equality policies, in particular the quota schemes ensuring women are among candidates and elected representatives at all levels. Danièle Pourtaud, who holds the responsibility for “equality between women and men” in the 14th arrondissement, was adamant that “everything had been done” from the early 2000s onwards, and that national legislation passed by the Jospin government in 2000 to enforce quotas for women in elective responsibilities had been sufficient to bring about all the necessary changes in the administration of the city of Paris (interview at the mairie du 14^ème arrondissement, 14/09/2015). She further extolled the action of Delanoë between 2001 and 2014, in particular the plan to promote more women to responsibilities and scrutinize hiring and promotions from a gender perspective (which began in 2005).

One of our interviewees, an elected official of a central Parisian arrondissement, clearly considered that the fact the responsibility for women’s rights had been devolved to a Communist rather than a Socialist¹² was a sign that it was granted little importance in the general pecking order of the municipal government (interview, 25/09/2015).

At the time of these interviews, not very long after Hidalgo’s first election and a first official ‘communication’ stating her commitment to gender-sensitive approaches to the management of the city, there was a widespread belief that her term was going to continue and extend the gender-sensitive policies implemented under Delanoë. The timing also seemed right because of the new crucial role granted to local governments by transformations in the Politique de la Ville legal framework and new legislation aiming for ‘real equality beween women and men’, in 2014. Both aimed at making gender equality (termed ‘égalité entre les femmes et les hommes’) a joint responsibility of the state and local governments. We submitted a project on the deployment of gender approaches in Paris, with comparative perspectives on Barcelona and Berlin, in the belief that we would be able to work closely with the service handling this issue.

We were disappointed, since the handful of people working on gender questions seemed to keep researchers in general at arm’s length, withhold information, and generally made the whole process extremely painstaking. It seemed that the last thing the city wanted was a bunch of geographers, planners, anthropologists and architects looking at the policy-making process. Strong tensions among those city employees appeared to make the joint construction of research impossible and we were only ever called on when they wished to demonstrate that the city was ‘doing something’ about gender. We were made to feel less and less welcome in city-sponsored events, as a result of our efforts to advocate intersectional perspective on gender and sexuality.

A culmination of this fraught relation, as well as a patent demonstration of the city’s poor participation drive, was the resounding failure of what the administration tried to pretend was a series of public consultations on its equality policy, in the autumn 2016. We only found out about these meetings undirectly, from colleagues, though we had been enquiring for months about the ‘equality plan’ the city was supposed to issue. We organized to attend every single meeting, between September 22nd and October 15th, 2016. Though different themes were supposed to be foregrounded in each meeting,¹³ the meetings were very difficult to distinguish from one another.

The city had hired the services of a consultancy, Egaë, headed by a former Socialist politician, which offers training about discriminations. And as a matter of fact, the major portion of the meetings was run like a training workshop about discrimination law and mechanisms rather than as a participatory meeting with a policy-making agenda. Attendance was dismal, with rarely above a couple dozens of participants in municipal venues with much larger capacities,¹⁴ many of whom were city employees posing as citizens. In all workshops, group discussions were held about various types of discrimination, but hardly any policy proposals were presented (and when they were, it was on printed lists that groups in the public were asked to rank by importance, the facilitators proving unable to explain the rationale behind any of them, from whom they originated, or what they would entail in practice). When spontaneous proposals arose from the public, they were fielded as ‘interesting input’, but nothing was made of them. In each workshop, time pressure was invoked to cut short the discussion and rush attendants into handing in their ballots and leave the venue with little or no exchange with others. In fact, all the meetings ended before the official time stated on the announcement.

The facilitator told participants who had registered with an email address that they would receive the results of the consultation and a link to the results of all the meetings. This never occurred and the page that had been used to organize registrations became ‘error 404’ very rapidly in the following weeks. To this date (August 2020), no sign of a ‘plan égalité’ can be located on the City’s website.

When we submitted to our informant in the City’s Mission Egalité a report that was very moderate in its criticism but which we encouraged her to use to lobby for more funding, more collaborators and an altogether strengthened policy, she refused to have it circulated, calling it ‘ideological’ and full of inaccuracies (which, considering her unwillingness to communicate data on her work or allow her co-workers to be interviewed, went down badly with our group). What we had done was merely compare the actions conducted and means devoted to gender equality policy in Paris and two other cities of comparable size (Berlin and Barcelona), and the facts spoke volumes: minimal budget, too few people, and/or employees of insufficient standing or influence employed in an area that the municipality claimed to make a ‘priority’ contrasted strongly with the commitment in terms of budget and workforce in other major European cities. More offensively for a Parisian employee, maybe, we had also conducted parallel fieldwork in neighbouring banlieue cities such as Aubervilliers, and found that their engagement with the issue was proportionately considerably greater (despite Aubervilliers being one of the poorest cities in France).

Among the proposals our report fielded was the idea of consultative councils of women or feminist groups, at the central level and in each district, as exist in Barcelona and Berlin. This suggestion was met with derision, and with an insistence that women were already massively represented among elected officials and needed no further representation. Paris’s actions in terms of gender policy fall short its official commitments and public claims, which does not prevent Hidalgo from pretending that Paris is a beacon of gender equality on the world stage. This striking discrepancy can hardly be underlined by feminist groups or associations too dependent on the city’s goodwill, subsidies and continued contracting to allow them to publicly criticize the municipality.

This did not prevent Anne Hidalgo from running in 2020 on a platform that purported to be feminist.¹⁵ Tellingly, most of the proposed policies had securitarian dimensions, with a foregrounding of ‘women safety audits’ and the creation of a 5,000-strong municipal police force, as means to ‘re-conquer public space’. The contradictions in Hidalgo’s position were however made glaringly obvious as, after her election, she included in her team a politician, Christophe Girard, who had publicly supported a known pedophile writer.¹⁶ When he was forced to step down, in July 2020, Hidalgo took part in a standing ovation to the man, initiated by the head of Parisian police Lallement, who has become a reviled figure for his violent repressive measures on all progressive social movements in the capital.

Concluding remarks

I was interested in the implementation of gender equality policies not only out of feminist persuasion, but also because I believed it could make a major breach in the wall of difference-blindness that French Republicanism opposes to any contestation to the domination of a caste of white middle-class males, opening the way for a true politics of difference and the inclusion of many who have long been regarded as outside the scope of full French citizenship, and denied a full right to the city. While fully aware of the critique of gender mainstreaming that accuses it of depoliticizing gender, I still considered that it had potential as a political lever in the French universalistic context. It was therefore disappointing to see how the city’s tendency to fear democratic procedures and diversity rather than embrace them led to political stalemate, and the rise of ‘femonationalism’ as the defining feature of the city’s policies. This tendency analyzed by Farris (2017) in reference primarily to state policies also holds considerable explanatory value for municipal policies and decisions made locally on who to include in or exclude from actions purporting to aim for ‘equality’ or ‘participation’. Centralized power combines with confusion of the municipal with the national scale, exclusion of the diversity of the banlieue, and a particular brand of mainstream ‘universalist’ feminism to explain why the Parisian municipality sees ‘like a state’ rather than ‘like a city’. The fact that the municipality sees the capital first and foremost as a beacon of the nation instills nationalistic concerns into everyday running of the city, echoing a ‘modernist’ understanding of ‘the citizen’—notwithstanding the fact that this abstract figure may now sometimes be female.

Since 2014, Paris has illustrated what Van den Berg calls ‘genderfication’, “the production of space for post-Fordist gender notions (…) apparent in city marketing” (Van den Berg, 2017: 3), which also operates as “a cross-secting system of domination that now (symbolically and practically) privileges certain types of femininities” (Van den Berg, 2017: 9). These white, middle-class, straight femininities that are privileged studiously exclude foreign sex workers, or the lesbian elected officials who were publicly branded as violent and sectarian because they protested the ovation to Girard.

As of January 2019, Paris gained a new status instituted by a law passed in February 2017, making it unique in that it is no longer considered as a ‘commune’ (France’s previously comprehensive net of sometimes very small territorial subdivisions, of which there are nearly 35,000) or a ‘département’ (also a comprehensive net of 101 larger subdivisions). It became an entity named ‘Ville de Paris’ combining the competences of both. The ‘Ville de Paris’ has also gained back from the state a number of local competences such as traffic, bathing, street demonstrations with a festive, sports or cultural motive, building safety and hygiene, noise disputes or fairs and markets. The changes bring it closer to ‘local’ concerns with slight devolution and the rolling back of the state’s role in micro-managing aspects of local life, public security in particular, but reinforce Paris’s exceptional status, setting it apart even from the other large cities (Lyon and Marseille) that are also subdivided into arrondissements. They also were not accompanied by the development of more systems of accountability to residents of the city. Instead, the city instituted a ‘Commission parisienne du débat public’ (Parisian commission for public debate) mimicking the ‘Commission nationale du débat public’, a national body created in 1995. Interestingly, this Parisian ‘Commission’, created in September 2018 to advise the city on public participation, has recommended greater diversity in public participation, with an emphasis on women and young people, and suggested a gendered approach to the city as one of the topical themes to be included in public debate arenas.¹⁷

As a conclusion to their seminal article on Lefebvre’s work on state, space and territory, Brenner and Elden note that:

“Lefebvre’s work is to a large extent a conjunctural diagnosis of the period of high Fordism in postwar France in which he lived and worked. Consequently, Lefebvre’s key concepts and analyses must be pushed, challenged, updated, and rearticulated in order to be made relevant for the contemporary moment of globalized neoliberalization, hyperfinancialized capital, and crisis-induced geopolitical restructuring.” (Brenner and Elden, 2009: 374).

It is striking to me, as a French geographer, that their discussion acknowledges the need to ‘update’ Lefebvre’s thought and tweak it to address the contemporary economic and political situation, but does little in the way of thinking about the location from which Lefebvre was writing—the situatedness of his work and its embeddedness in French thought and French geographic, social and political realities. It is ironical that we, writing in France, have to constantly make the case for the ‘specificity’ of our urban experiences when so many theoretical references widely used in urban studies are borrowed from us. This is compounded by the fact that in French geography we are taught to value empirical material over theoretical elaboration, and tend to be extremely wary of generalizing and claiming to describe ‘global’ trends on the basis of limited evidence.

In this piece I argued that several of the ‘seeing like a city’ narratives are deeply steeped in situated understandings and experiences of the city, or at least, do not sit well with understandings of the city in France, and maybe also in other highly centralized countries where the capital is also the largest economic center. Narratives of the ‘Global North’ are nowadays mercifully balanced with narratives from the ‘Global South’ (Boudreau, 2019) but beyond this, there is little account of the internal diversity of both these general categories. Reading some work, for me, is to be constantly reminded of the extremely divergent ways of thinking about such basics as ‘the state’ or ‘the city’; it alerts one to the difficulty of making Lefebvre’s work travel without engaging in careful translation work, i.e., work to unpack all the intellectual, historical situated baggage that words carry with them (Hancock, 2016). Along with Boudreau, Parker, Van den Berg and Valverde, I rest my case for research on singular cities in order to delineate precisely the remit and limits of ‘global’ urban theory: it seems that the national, nationalism and in Paris’s case, femonationalism, are not to be dismissed quite so fast.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Ville De Paris (Paris 2030).

ORCID iD

Claire Hancock

Notes

Claire Hancock is professor of Geography at Université Paris-Est Créteil, France and a member of the Lab'Urba research unit.

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