A place to breathe in the Dense city: Community gardening and participatory urbanism in Paris

Abstract

Community gardens have emerged in Paris as a way to create green spaces in the city's densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. One such garden is the Goutte Verte, a temporary, nomadic community garden that, with the agreement of the city and its developers, occupies vacant lots awaiting the construction of new-build social housing. The continued existence of the Goutte Verte is placed in opposition to much-needed housing in the city, with poor, unemployed, and middle-class gardeners alike caught between a desire for green space and a demand for comfortable housing. Drawing on participant observation and interviews conducted in 2013-14 and 2019, I demonstrate how community gardens act as a material alternative to urban planning and governance that often fail to account for a right to a "place to breathe" in the city-a situation that is increasingly fraught as city planners treat new construction as the primary solution for affordable housing in Paris.