Sharing Space: Urban Encounters, Vulnerability, and the Right to the City in Modern French Literature

Abstract

This dissertation contends with the lived experience of public spaces in the increasingly overstimulating, crowded built environment of 20th and 21st century cities, especially centering on the vulnerability of contact in these spaces, which exposes individuals to the interrelationality of ways of being in the city. Sharing Space argues for a specifically urban type of contact, here called the collision, a fleeting meeting that urban life brings about in its randomness and the crossing trajectories of movement. The mutual vulnerability of collisions reveals a tension between antisocial reactions to danger and prosocial possibilities toward community, sociopolitical power, and quotidian dwelling. Starting with close readings of Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Edouard Louis, and Albert Camus, the first two chapters consider the quotidian experience of urban vulnerability and the collision as an instantaneous disturbance of one’s relationship to space and others. Then, the third chapter expands this framework to the culture and geography of the Parisian banlieue as represented by François Maspero, considering how such contact allows for urban legibility. Finally, writing produced by protestors of the Nuit debout movement shows how this contact can be made intentionally, revealing tensions, which touch both the ontological and the political experiences of the city dweller, that frame a way of being in the world that is both interrelational and geographic: Who am I here with you?

Sharing Space shows that the contemporary city and the systems that shape it create an environment that suppresses the collisions of chance contact with others in the daily experience of urban life. The loss of that contact, particularly in spaces like the banlieue which are especially influenced by neoliberalism and other contemporary forces of urbanism, makes the Lefebvrian right to the city difficult to imagine or strive for. However, when inhabitants of the city open themselves to the vulnerability of collisions, it is possible to recognize the social basis of being in the world, a form of convivial living that relies on not simply friendliness or hospitality, but on embracing the co-constitutive nature of public spaces. Finally, the possibilities of imagining the future of the urban experience are considered in a convivial approach to the (post)pandemic city.