Spectral denivelations:la mémoire du railand topographical excess at the Jardins d'Éole

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Abstract The cityscape's ability to cultivate intersubjective understanding is problematic today, when many citizens' sense of place is shaped by mobility and imagery, and the design of new urban places needs to reconcile contradictory imaginary geographies and avoid narrowly place-bound forms of memory. Tensions between the representation of solidarity and difference in the urban landscape are explored through analysis of a recently completed park in Paris. While the Jardins d'Éole's use of palimpsest-like railway traces to integrate various programmes seems to reinforce mutually exclusionary forms of memory and identity, recent socio-spatial transformations of the Ile-de-France suggest an alternative reading. Claire Denis's recent film 35 Rhums is used to understand the metropolitan-scale 'solidarity of the mobile' wrought by the RER rapid transit system and to speculate on how this park's railway-based design might map a multiplicity of 'non-sites'. Notions of spectrality and topographical performance suggest that in the Jardins d'Éole, la mémoire du rail helps reinvent histories even as it engages new spatialities and landscape cultures. Keywords: ideationmovementperformancespectralitytopography Acknowledgements My thanks to Elen Deming at University of Illinois for the lecture invitation that led to this article, Georges Descombes for his many insights concerning the creation of the Jardins d'Éole, two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft and Gary Ferguson for correcting my French translation, grammar and spelling. I am also grateful for research funds provided by Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences which allowed me to visit the park and quartier. Greg Bussien, Oliver Kleinschmidt and Danielle Mericle provided invaluable advice and assistance in sourcing and preparing images. Any errors or omissions remain my own. Notes As Corner warns, 'If ideas are images projected into the cultural and political imagination in ways that guide societies as they try to manage change, then their absence can only precipitate social regression into memory (nostalgia) on the one hand, or complete deference to technology (rational expediency) on the other'. Like Corner, I use the term 'project' in the sense of external manifestation of a mental image or idea that is both a manifestation of a vision and the action of making that vision manifest. Thus 'contemporary space' is characterized by 'a growing [….] destabilization of the local incorporated within the ubiquitous global flow transmitted by infrastructural networks'. See Clementi 2003 Clementi, A. 2003. "The New Aesthetic of Networks". In Infracity: strategie infrastrutturali/ infrastructural strategies, Edited by: Clementi, A. and di Venosa, M. Barcelona: Actar. [Google Scholar]. Encompassing both the objective operations in and subjective interpretations of space, 'locale', according to geographer John Agnew, is neither 'location' (somewhere certain objectively-measurable social, economic and logistical processes occur) nor a 'sense of place' (a partial, imaginative and implicitly subjective interpretation of space). See Moore 2003 Moore, S. 2003. Technology & Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]. Sometimes called 'Little Africa', this quartier has been home to a succession of immigrant communities since the 1950s. Also, until recently, a major drug dealing strip. That is, zone d'aménagement concerté, or comprehensive urban regeneration project, in which public and private sectors work as partners. Jardins d'Éole has been written about in several publications. See, for instance, Carapinha & Diedrich 2009 Carapinha, A. and Diedrich, L. 2009. On Site: Landscape Architecture in Europe, 148–151. Basel/Boston: Birkhäuser. [Google Scholar] and Reed 2005 Reed, P. 2005. Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape, Edited by: Reed, P. New York: MoMA. [Google Scholar]. For instance, the use of closed, self-regulating aquatic systems, 'xeriscaping', re-use of stone from old perimeter walls, hand-scythed meadows and green roofs on all buildings. Les jardins d'Éole, 2006: 3. In the widest, southern portion of the park there are as many as six of these bands. Complete with refreshment pavilions, benches and tree allées. This competition proposal used the principle of programmatic indeterminacy to combine on a given field a series of activities that would interact and set off a chain reaction of unpredictable events. See Boyer 2003 Boyer, M. C. 2003. "Cognitive Landscapes". In Re-Envisioning Landscape/ Architecture, Edited by: Spellman, C. 16–35. Barcelona: Actar. [Google Scholar]: 32. 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Memory in Architecture. Daidalos, 58: 23–37. [Google Scholar]. That is, 'this "still more" is not more of the same (however). Differences are always discovered in the spread of topography: contrast and complementarity structure relationships among its serial situations and sites'. See Leatherbarrow 2009 Leatherbarrow, D. 2009. "Unscripted Performances". In Architecture Oriented Otherwise, 43–67. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. [Google Scholar]: 63. That is, 'For landscape to be thought of as a theatre capable of stimulating memory and bringing the past into the present, it needs […] to be encountered, sensed, and performed. It is ultimately through the two-way dialogue between landscape and subject that memory is activated and past becomes a substantive part of everyday life'. See Della Dora 2008 Della Dora, V. 2008. Mountains and Memory: Embodied Visions of Ancient Peaks in the 19th Century. Transactions of Institute of British Geographers, 33/2: 217–232. N.S[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 229–230. Other than as free-standing monuments, that is. Walter Benjamin's vision of the city as a vast repository of eclipsed relics and obsolete fashions, containing hints of modernity's ephemerality, could be seen as another example of this Parisian enfolding of declarative and non-declarative memory. To the degree that the projet urbain promotes a 'history that is interested in memory not as remembrance, but as the overall structure of the past within the present', it exemplifies Nora's notion of 'rememoration'. See Nora 1996 Nora, P. 1996. "General Introduction: Between Memory and History". In The Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Edited by: Kritzman, L. Vol. 1, i–xx. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]: xxiv. Paris currently receives over 30 million visitors annually. Most of its manufacturing industries started moving to the outer ring of new towns and industrial areas in the 1960s, and many of these subsequently moved to other parts of the world. Greater Paris comprises an inner ring of older villages incorporated as part of the city in the late 19th and early 20th century, and an outer ring beyond the Périphérique (originally, the Murs des Thiers) of newer towns and industrial areas. Examples include Parc de Bercy, the Jardins Atlantique, Parc André Citroën, Parc Martin Luther King, and Parc des Cornouailles in Ivry. The best known is probably the Promenade Plantée. That is, 'The landscape beyond the rue Riquet, where the bridge crosses the tracks of the Est railway, is for me one of the most beautiful in Paris, with an immense all round vista towards the rue d'Aubervilliers and the disused building of the Pompes Funèbres Municipales, designed by a belated imitator of Ledoux, towards the repair shops for rolling stock of the Nord railway, whose semi-conical nesting roofs suggest the scale of a prehistoric reptile'. See Hazan 2010 Hazan, É. 2010. The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, London/New York: Verso. transl. D. Fernbach [Google Scholar]: 204. Paul Fargue, quoted in Hazan 2010 Hazan, É. 2010. The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, London/New York: Verso. transl. D. Fernbach [Google Scholar]: 179. The rue d'Aubervilliers forms the eastern boundary of the park. In fact the quartiers on either side of Jardins d'Éole, historically La Chappelle and La Villette, were centres of industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is, the social and cultural relations they facilitated, and the apprehensions of the nation's populations they embodied (spatial/territorial memory). See, for instance, Bocard & Ayrault 2005 Bocard, H. and Ayrault, P. 2005. De Paris à la Mer: la ligne de chemin de fer Paris-Rouen-le Havre: Ile-de-France et Haute-Normandie, 239Paris: Series: Images du patrimoine. Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel [Google Scholar]. Today this network, which was first formulated as part of plans to create La Defence and link central Paris with the ring of new towns planned in the 1950s, reaches the outskirts of the metropolis, and converges at Les Halles. According to anthropologist Marc Augé, the métro map has itself become a lieu de mémoire, a ritual-object that overdetermines the history it is supposed to represent, as well as the act of using it: 'The train threads its way through our history at an accelerated pace. It shuttles untiringly […] among great men, important places and great moments. […] To take the train could therefore be to engage in some way in ancestor worship'. Following Augé's comments about the métro map, one might speculate how the less historical, more geographical RER map becomes a new kind (and scale) of aide-mémoire, in which personal memories of previous trips (rather than significant historical events) guide citizens through the city. Albeit mostly as consumers or poorly paid workers. Thus, Les Halles is sometimes called 'the centre of the banlieue'. In English 35 Shots of Rum, released in 2008. Denis's filmography includes several films in which protagonists appear to be in a setting that seems alien to them. 35 Rhums is loosely based on her mother's relationship with her grandfather. The film's only place-identifying shot—a standard blue enamel street sign for rue de la Gaudeloupe—locates its protagonists in the narrow quarter Hazan calls a 'lost world', between the lines running into Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord. This quarter has traditionally been the home of railway workers. Including an extraordinary four-minute opening establishing sequence. In filmic language, the 'establishing shot' is a crucial take that sets up the fundamental spatial relationship among subjects and objects subsequently shown in more detail. For a powerful evocation of a similar 'collectivity of understanding', see Augé 2002 Augé, M. 2002. "Solitudes". In In the Metro, 27–52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. T. Conley (transl.) [Google Scholar]: 27–52. Reijndorp 2003 Reijndorp, A. 2003. "Sense of Movement: The Moving UrbanSpace". In In Transit: Mobility, City Culture and Urban Development in Rotterdam, Edited by: Meurs, P. and Verheijen, P. 84–92. Rotterdam: NAi. [Google Scholar] calls this kind of spatial identity a 'mobitype'. For the most part, the prevailing aesthetic became that of the 'undesigned' landscapes associated with railways in both city (dull grey wooden cabins, galvanized steel light poles) and country (stabilized earth paths, rows of trees lining embankments). An alternative tree planting strategy for the northern, terraced part of the park, in which rows of fruit trees reiterated the overall geometry of the parallel traces, was never implemented. That is, '(U)rban materialities are (re)produced by the importation of matter from elsewhere and embody the historical and contemporary connections between places, the product of complex, enduring, and predictable connections between people, places and technologies across multiple and distant spaces and time'. See Edensor 2011 Edensor, T. 2011. Entangled Agencies, Material Networks and Repair in a Building Assemblage: The Mutable Stone of St Ann's Church, Manchester. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36/2: 238–252. N.S[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 244. That is, 'In city building, level footing justifies encounters. Rectitude so conceived [is] charged with social, legal and structural meanings'. Leatherbarrow 1999 Leatherbarrow, D. 1999. "Leveling the Land". In Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, Edited by: Corner, J. 170–184. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. [Google Scholar]: 177. For instance, in the recent experimentation with perennial planting and community gardening, and the use of the ballcourt walls for graffiti art competitions as part of hip-hop festivals.