Rythmes événementiels et aménagement des espaces publics à Paris, Bruxelles et Montréal

La prise en compte des usages et de leurs temporalités dans l’aménagement des places publiques d’Alger : analyses et propositions

“…L'événementiel et le temporaire gagnent de plus en plus l'intérêt des urbanistes, qui l'introduisent comme une stratégie de développement de la ville assurant l'animation de la vie urbaine collective (Pradel, 2013). De ce fait, l'événementiel sous ses différentes formes est organisé dans les places publiques (Pradel, 2013). La ville d'Alger ne fait pas exception : ses places Grande Poste et Martyrs accueillent les fêtes nationales et religieuses (Bentifour, 2009 ;Abada, 2017).…”

Events in the affective city: Affect, attention and alignment in two ordinary urban events

“…Celebrated over the summer of 2013, these festivities have provided the department with an opportunity to experiment with an evental approach to urban greening. This approach was to be applied systematically from the following year on through the launch of an annual urban greening programme-confirming the role of events as testers of longer-term policies (Pradel, 2013). Both the 150th celebrations and the subsequent event-based approach to urban greening fell within the term of office of an elected official who has regularly used bodily performances in green spaces to advertise his actions, including giving a press conference in a tracksuit for the inauguration of an urban outdoor gym.…”

“…Indeed, understood as spectacles and stories, events generate images and contribute to the engineering of local urban identities (Gravari-Barbas, 2009). They work as symbols—of coming together (Pradel, 2013: 79), of the jubilant city (Gravari-Barbas and Jacquot, 2007: 5)—that contribute to the (re)production of the mythology of urbanity. In the paradigm of evaluation and benchmarking, events are also indicators of an area’s vitality (Pradel, 2013: 123) and of the acceptability of an urban transformation tested prior to implementation (Pradel, 2013: 90).…”

“…Whilst the representational quality of events testifies to their embeddedness in an economy of signs, the affective regime of urban events speaks more to the emergence of an economy of attention (Davenport and Beck, 2001), of experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), or of affect (Hardt, 1999). Bringing together bodies at sites whose image urbanists seek to transform, urban events are understood within this emerging framework to produce certain habits that make urbanistic interventions more readily acceptable (Pradel, 2013: 88). Indeed, being corporeally accustomed to using a site in a certain way during an event, citizens are expected to be more willing to accept a permanent conversion of the site for that same purpose.…”

“…They invite passers-by to stretch out for a moment. Illustrative of the “folding and unfolding city” (Pradel, 2013: 87), they were initially recycled from an event which, a few years earlier, had celebrated the arrival of public Wi-Fi. Contrary to the “law-and-order” approach to public space furniture that makes it impossible to assume any kind of horizontal position on most recently designed benches, the public bench is transformed into a couch moved out of the living room and into the street, with joyous transgression of the boundary between public and private.…”