Madame Ruetabaga’s Prefigurative Politics at the Urban Fringes of Grenoble

Abstract

During its practice of critical social pedagogy in street workshops, Madame Ruetabaga has shown that it is able to create a space that is radically open, where groups form and dissolve over a period of two hours every week. The workshops lay the basis for a form of prefigurative politics in an area generally to be perceived as anomic and as a place of violence and tensions. During the street workshops, Madame Ruetabaga temporarily challenges power relations and suspends rules to replace them with new ones for the specific period of time and in a specific space of the square. The association provides a space for children to experiment with new kinds of freedom and limits that differ from those at home or in institutional spaces. This example provides an alternative view to both the pessimism of the death of public space and the utopian idea of mass movements challenging global capitalism à la Lefebvre and Harvey. The focus is on the everyday, the mundane, the micro and how they can sometimes produce extraordinary situations.