Paris. Paris/Aubervilliers. In Situ Art Festival: Urban Art as Transitional Form for Urban Development

Chapter 4 investigates a suburb of Paris, Aubvervilliers (Bruce). This chapter discusses how nine years after many of the uprisings in the banlieues north of Paris In Situ figured street art as an anticipatory aesthetic mechanism for urban transition. The chapter offers the idea of urban art as a “transitional form” wherein the foundational ephemerality of the art form was seized upon as an argument for creative destruction to later build a mixed-use eco-quarter. The “transitional form” of urban art in a festival setting served as an aesthetic resource for imagining a multicultural future, in particular by drawing on loaded images for dissent—the burned-out car and van—as well as images of women and children as references to a different future. In Situ used the language of creativity and implied multiculturalism to transform a seemingly forgotten space into a favored target for urban development.