Habrih, Khalil2025-06-102025-06-102025-06-10http://hdl.handle.net/10393/50554https://doi.org/10.20381/ruor-31175This research inquires into contemporary urban regeneration (renouvellement urbain) in the majority immigrant and working-class 18th district of Paris. Drawing from black geographies, anthropologies of infrastructural space, queer and feminist analytics, this work propose an anthropology of western power that locates coloniality and colonial governmentality within (rather than outside) the French capital. Based on two years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in urban expertise, urban informality, and local queer and immigrant spatiality, it examines how urban experts practice urban renewal as a project of topographical as well as sociocultural engineering. Experts develop a particular urban desire for abject space insofar as it allows them to deploy technologies of diagnostics, experimentation, and remediation. They consider queer cultural programming as crucial to this process of remediation and, namely, to transforming local Muslim social fabric and fostering social mixing. This discursive framing and the technologies of socio-spatial engineering it relies on, such as third place (tiers-lieux) start-ups and tactical urbanism (urbanisme de préfiguration), facilitate a local normalization of the question of sexual and cultural tolerance, while simultaneously reconfiguring, rather than remediating, urban stigma that surrounds both queer and Muslim communities. I track this ambivalence within departmental and municipal archives of hygiene and sanitary policy, as well as prefectural archives of sex work surveillance, to show that the co-constitutive dynamic of urban abjection and desire is a key feature of modern planning power’s relationship to urban margins. The dissertation is structured in five chapters that serve as varying entry-points into the field. Chapter 1 focuses on urban expertise, recasting the production of infrastructures of urban social mixing (mixité) in light of the colonial and urban management of difference in France and empire. Chapter 2 looks to the social promise of community gardens (jardins partagés) and showcases the moral and political tensions that course through the vegetal regeneration of interstices. Chapter 3 focuses on third places (tiers-lieux) as sites of mixité engineering wherein abject and desirable forms are potentially hybridized. Chapter 4 focuses on queer affects and shifts the inquiry toward street space and semi-public places, putting into relief how the 18th arrondissement’s immigrant neighbourhoods already constitute resources for queer ethical poiesis. Chapter 5 turns to archives of sex work réglementarisme to engage a queer idiom of memory.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Anthropology of EuropeAffective TopographyColonialityQueer AssemblagePrefigurative UrbanismCultures of ExpertiseInformalityMixité socialeThesis