LA PRADELLE, Michèle de; LALLEMENT, Emmanuelle

Paris plage : "the city is ours" - Thousand Oaks : SAGE, September 2004

In 2003, for the second year running, the Paris municipality entrusted a young theater designer with the transformation of one stretch of the banks of the Seine River - normally congested with heavy traffic - into an open space evocative of the seaside. Paris in August is therefore Paris by the seaside. The objective of our study is to examine the entire operation, from the moment the political decision was taken by the municipality to the many and varied activities of all those who participated. Through this study, we attempt to higglight the different forms of material and symbolic (re)creation of Paris being undertaken today. We show that in a situation such as this, a refletion on the fieldwork undertaken and the production of ethnographic knowledge is in fact the key factor in the analysis