Inhabiting through interstitial opacity. Protective negotiations of suspended existence across Paris’ liminalities.

Abstract

The paper investigates the relationship between liminal, interstitial spaces with displacement and makeshift inhabitation from people on the move across the outskirts of Paris’ municipality. By providing the example of the camps settled along the interstices of the Boulevard Phériphérique, we aim to shed light on the paradoxically relational nature of voids and liminalities, testified by the multifaceted urban fragments that they generate, as well as the resistive strategies employed by marginalised populations to navigate the exclusive mechanisms of neoliberal power and negligence. The case of Delphine Seyrig serves to highlight the tensions that emerge from a space in which dynamics of exclusion and inclusion converge, where resistance and vulnerability, “us and them”, coexist, yet are made visibly distant. By framing the interstitial opacity that characterizes both the materiality of liminal lands and the condition of the migrant, we have called them “spaces of holding”, where people on the move’s inhabitation remains a perpetual negotiation of suspended existence. Based on participant observation in Greater Paris between September 2021 and August 2022, we draw on interstices’ ambivalent nature of in-between, no-longer-there-but-not-there-yet empty spaces that allow the ongoing reproducibility of a variety of forms, functions, and identities. Despite taking a distance from considering such spaces as “solutions” or countermeasures of reception, we look at these fragments as topographical constructs for scrutinizing spatial tensions and conceptual proposals and building a renewed politics of visibility in architecture and urban planning.