Economic and political strategies in the urban requalification project in La Plaine Saint-Denis, Paris

Abstract

There are many academic studies about the urban requalification projects in the metropolis and their socio-spatial implications. However, the constantly renewed strategies in the articulation between the economical plan and the political plan, as an answer to the new necessities of capital accumulation, demand pari passu geographic studies for the elaboration and execution of the urban projects. The relevance of these studies becomes even bigger once the interventions elaborated by the Government and by the private enterprise directly focus in the social-spatial relations (being also modified by them) and generate conflicts that must be unveiled. The generalization in a world scale of the urban requalification projects in the metropolis brings new contents to the contemporary urbanization process. The Government and capital strategies becomes responsible for an increasingly intensity of the metropolis spatial transformations. As the socio-spatial dynamics in certain places of the metropolis are bounded to broader processes, it is possible to report, articulating geographic scales, the transformations in the studied places in our Master's Degree Research (in which we list three fragments struck by the Butantã - Vila Sônia Urban Operation) to spatial processes of the Sao Paulo metropolis as a whole. These processes are linked, on the other hand, to global transformations, which are also concretized in other places of other cities. Thus, the analyzed spatial deployment about the Butantã - Vila Sônia Urban Operation are inserted in the Sao Paulo metropolis reality, whose urbanization has concrete processes linked to the current world characteristics of the capitalist reproduction. As our study objective, we will understand how the urban requalification projects occurring in the region of La Plaine Saint - Denis, in the north suburbs of Paris, are articulated to current political and economic global strategies of intervention in the urban space. As these strategies are responsible for other projects with very similar logics in other world cities, we will enlarge our Sao Paulo specific characteristics study to more precisely articulate them, from Paris and particularly from Saint-Denis, to the world analysis level based on the traces common to the big metropolis of the contemporary period. If in our Master's Degree Research we analyze the urban dynamic by the study of processes developed in a Sao Paulo specific fragment, we can't miss the totality of the urban, articulating the local process with the global ones. Trying to understand these global processes and articulate the levels of political and economic analysis, we will realize theoretical-methodological readings and we will do a bibliographic verification and a reading plan in libraries in Paris on works about the theme of urban requalification processes. We will only be able, though, to appreciate the metropolis in places whose processes are study object if we really learn the concrete relations that happen in these places, automating them in relation to the set of metropolitan spaces. The realization of field work in Saint-Denis will be fundamental, thus, by allowing the confrontation of data and information and capture of the concrete movement of the place socio-spatial transformations. From our objectives and initial hypothesis and from our bibliographic unveiling and in field works, we will search, then, a possible understanding, from the observed processes in Saint-Denis, from economic and political global strategies of the urban requalification project in the metropolis. These urban projects, by presenting similar logics and implications in scale of places, enable to relate the analyzed socio-spatial processes in the Butantã- Vila Sônia Urban Operation to those that we intend to study in La Plaine Saint-Denis. (AU)