Street workshops for children at the urban marges of Grenoble: creating a space for prefigurative politics
Résumé
The central question of the call for proposals was how young people negotiate their access to public space. What we’re interested in is the political function of the creation of public space in a social housing neighborhood in Grenoble, France. During its practice of social pedagogy in street workshops, the association Mme Rue Tabaga is able to create a space that is radically open, where groups form and unform over a period of two hours every week. The workshops lay the basis for a form of prefigurative politics (Ince, 2012, Springer 2013) in an area generally to be perceived as anomic (Dubet, 2008). This example provides an alternative view to both the pessimism of the death of public space and the utopian idea of mass movements challenging global capitalism à la Lefebvre and Harvey. The focus is on the everyday, the mundane, the micro and how they can sometimes produce extraordinary situations. The first part of the presentation will discuss the dynamics at play in public space in Villeneuve, a neighborhood just across from the geography faculty. The second will discuss the enabling dynamics put in place by Mme Ruetabaga to increase the publicness of public space over the time of the workshops. At last we will argue in what way this space is political. The work presented here is a form of action-research. All authors are volunteers at Mme Ruetabaga and respectively working or living in the neighborhood.