Urban strategies and collective memory. An upper-middle class municipality in the grand Paris project

Abstract

This article proposes a theoretical point of view in order to show the importance of the collective memory and the urban narrative in the strategic approach of the urban project. The capacity of a municipality to build a local narrative joining the past, the memory and the project, is examined in the second part of the article, in a case study of a collectivity confronted with the project of the Grand Paris and strong socio-spatial transformation since 1950. The conclusions of thirty deep interviews, conducted on the people involved in the city organization allow to differentiate legitimated and rejected places in the spaces of remembering, and the difficulties of this kind of municipalities to be pro active in the Grand Paris project.