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 spacesin 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, occupiesvacant lots awaiting the construction of new-build social housing. The continued existence of the GoutteVerte is placed in opposition to much-needed housing in the city, with poor, unemployed, and middle-classgardeners alike caught between a desire for green space and a demand for comfortable housing. Drawingon participant observation and interviews conducted in 2013–14 and 2019, I demonstrate how communitygardens act as a material alternative to urban planning and governance that often fail to account for a rightto a “place to breathe” in the city – a situation that is increasingly fraught as city planners treat newconstruction as the primary solution for affordable housing in Paris.