Difference

and the Common of the City

The Metamorphosis of the "Political" from the Urban Struggles of the 1970's
1
to the Contemporary Urban Order
Luca Pattaroni

in Martins A., Resende J. (ed.), 2015, The making of the common in social relations, Cambridge,
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 141-172.

In most of Europe’s cities, the 1970s were marked by the emergence of urban struggles that
radically questioned the prevailing modes of the production of the city, especially those that fell
under the category of “functionalist urbanism”. In fact, these struggles constituted a genuine
moment of democracy, in other words, a moment when – to paraphrase Jacques Rancière –
those who were hitherto voiceless were given a voice, and those previously unable to participate
began to take part (Rancière 1998: 233). A clear gap thus appeared between the ways of
expressing difference and reproducing the established order, revealing the importance of the
political task of inventing and establishing the common of the city.

In this chapter, we propose to follow over several decades the long, turbulent politics of
composing an urban order in both its social and material dimensions – a political task that
involves debates and confrontations to determine the city’s forms and, more fundamentally, who
could live there and how. At stake is a quest for emancipation and the art of governing difference,
a dialectic where the city reveals both its liberating and oppressive dimensions. Exploring this
dialectic will, in particular, enable us to follow the slow and ambiguous integration of 1970s’
critical ideals into the order of the contemporary city.

From an empirical standpoint, our investigation into the future of the city’s commonality focuses
on the evolution of urban conflicts from the 1970s to today, in a neighborhood in the center of
Geneva called “Les Grottes”. This small neighborhood of approximately 2,000 residents is
located just behind Geneva’s central station, and still has surprising statistical and urban
characteristics – a kind of enclave that sometimes has the feel of a village in the heart of one of
Europe’s most economically-dynamic cities. Its difference is the result of resistance that began in
the 1970s, under the auspices of the urban struggles that shook the whole of Europe in the wake
of the social movements of the 1960s. These struggles were in part victorious, the proof of which
can be seen in the survival of the district that was destined to be pulled down in 1975. Traces of

1 This chapter is a reworked and theoretically enhanced version of the Chapter 3, part 4, published in

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their success are not only found in this small district; the history of the Grottes tells a far larger
tale that can be seen in most of Europe’s cities. It is the history of an elaborate critique of the
political and urban forms of the modern city and capitalism, and the invention of alternative
ways of living together. It is also a tale of the gradual institutionalization of these struggles and
the social movements that bore them, which led to the invention of new procedures to create
commonality. Today, this tale can be seen as an archeology of contemporary ways of governing a
city, allowing us to more fully understand the different political constructions of commonality
that underlie urban conflicts and cut across the tasks of institutions.

To make sense of this archeology, we refer to the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière and
Laurent Thévenot. The latter, in particular, provides us with tools to consider the various
grammars of “commonality in the plural” inherent in the different political measures and forms
of mobilization that have been crossing paths from the 1970s to the present day. These various
grammars are all ways of resolving the fundamental tensions between the expression of
difference and the composition of commonality (Thévenot 2014, forth.). We argue that urban
struggles are arenas in which this tension is expressed in a particularly acute manner. The
history of urban struggles and their institutionalization in the renewed order of the city is thus
an ideal standpoint from which to consider the question of politics of difference and their
transformations.

To summarize the idea that runs through this chapter, it could be said that moving from the
turbulent struggles of the 1970s to the regulated framework of contemporary participative
politics is a radical transformation of the political conditions of the composition of difference on
a city-wide scale. This transformation affects both the modes of politics themselves, i.e. the
expression of emancipation processes and the critical forms that express them, and those of the
police (Rancière, 1998), i.e. institutional and symbolic ways of asserting and implementing urban
order. It would seem that in this evolution, critique progressively loses its power to disrupt
reality, and that the range of possibilities is therefore gradually reduced. We therefore must find
analytical tools to consider both the potential and the limitations of the ways of governing
difference that are developing in today’s cities. In the name of promoting diversity, are they
capable of accommodating substantial expressions of difference? Before we can attempt to
answer this question, we must come back to the urban struggles of the 1970s and the theoretical
tools that will give us a better grasp on their scope and the issues they raised.

The Political: between emancipation and the art of governing

To better grasp the unprecedented nature of what occurred in the 1970’s, we would like to come
back to the work of Jacques Rancière, and in particular on the distinction he makes between the

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notions of police (la police), politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). Each of these
terms refers to a specific process.

The first process – which he calls “police” – refers to the practice of governing that “consists in
organizing the group of men into a community and their consent depends upon the hierarchical
distribution of positions and functions” (Rancière 1988: 112).2 Police thus concerns all the
measures taken to give order to people’s everyday coexistence. This brings about a kind of
“partage du sensible”3 (Rancière, 1998, 2000), i.e., a practical division of the world that shows
and proposes the share and the place - and by extension, the possible exclusion - of everyone in
the world. With regard to police, there is no vacuum: each person and thing has a place and
function (Rancière 1988: 115).

In parallel, a second process – politics - takes on meaning relative to the first. For Rancière,
politics does not refer to the exercise of power but rather to practices of emancipation guided by
a principle of equality (“of anyone, with anyone”) (Rancière 1998: 112). Politics then is the
process by which the right to exist, to take one’s place and to partake manifests itself for those
once voiceless. In this sense, politics is what challenges the police order, i.e., the established
order. “It is a dissensual form of human action, an exception to the rules by which the
congregation and leadership of human groups operate” (Rancière 1998: 16). It is the questioning
of the partage du sensible, i.e. of the order - both material and symbolic - of society. It is precisely
this questioning relative to the disjunctive spatial order of the modern city that occurred in the
urban struggles of the 1970s. During this major disruption in the established order, a literal
“reconfiguration” of “space, what there was to do, see and name there” took place, giving rise to
the long task of the political.

The political (le politique) thus emerges at the precise point where the principles of politics and
police collide (Rancière1998: 16), i.e. the dual process of emancipating, asserting a difference
and running the community. The role of the political then consists either in denying and
repressing those whose opinions differ and who demand recognition, or in recognizing and
“accommodating”4 them by reconfiguring the architecture of the shared world, or “commonality
in plural,” as termed by Laurent Thévenot (Thévenot, 2014). In this last process, which begins
where Rancière’s analysis ends, the emergence of a new order, an entirely new police and
distribution of the sensible, occurs most of the time by transforming all the entities at stake.

2He thus re-establishes the former meaning of the notion of “police” as “the art of governing the lives and

wellbeing of the populations” (FOUCAULT 2004: 330).

3 It is difficult to translate the concept of “partage du sensible,” as it plays on the double meaning of the

French word “partage”: to divide and to share. It is somehow the idea of the shared perception – and
imposition - of the sensible division/distribution of the various entities composing our common world.
4On the task of accommodating differences, see STAVO-DEBAUGE, 2012

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Indeed, as we shall see through our example, over the years, both State institutions and forms of
activism gradually evolved to give birth to a new order. There then remains the question of what
this new order excludes, of which hopes and expressions of difference it denies.

To briefly summarize the main thrust of our theory before going further, our original idea is that
urban struggles have been the arena for a profound disruption of the established order. This
disruption concerns not only the order of discourse – where who dominates whom, or who is to
blame for social injustices is determined – but also its sensible order, i.e. its substance (its walls
and places wherein the involvement of each person is circumscribed). Here, the act of politics
should be understood as an act of critique that can call reality into question and give voice to
that which was previously voiceless (Boltanski: 2009)—a critique of both the intelligible order
and the sensible order, which opens up another world of possibilities

In order to observe the emergence of this other world of possibilities and its conflicting
incorporation into the order of the city, one needs to have followed the neighborhood’s
evolution over several decades: to what extent have these other possibilities managed to
resonate within the city and forge new places and forms of coexistence that nurture the plurality
of the urban order? Only by this historical yardstick is it possible to measure the scale of the
political task, both accommodating the critique – the expression of difference – and creating a
new common place. This process is not merely a muddle of hazy ideas, but rather takes place in
the multitude of material, conventional and institutional measures used to organize the city.

The political work therefore implies a wide variety of people and measures. What follows
involves capitalism, class struggles, residents’ associations, mobility, direct action, festivities,
conviviality, petitions, neighborhood contracts, squatters, drugs, workers, a School of
Architecture, major and minor renovations, walkways, vegetable gardens, quality of life, police,
repression and so on. More fundamentally, more than just a long list, this series of events
enables us to see the gradual intertwining of the various political devices aimed at appeasing the
structural tensions5 at the heart of democratic societies, between the expression of difference
and the construction of commonality, what Laurent Thévenot calls the grammars of
“commonality in the plural”:

“Our pragmatic approach to politics focuses on basic operations needed to practically

voice concerns and differ in conflict. I concentrated on these core operations to
distinguish a variety of grammars which have been historically and culturally elaborated
to deal with the same structural tension” (Thévenot 2014 : 16).

5 For a discussion of the “structural tensions” that cannot be resolved but lead to the invention of different

measures to appease them, thus contributing to the evolution of forms of society, see Boltanski 2004.

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The political grammars of the commonality in the plural

The interesting point about the model that Thévenot develops in his most recent work is that it
makes one aware that, in order to compose commonality, each political model relies on a specific
way of channeling differences:

“Yet the infinity of possible differences is channeled by the diverse grammars, each of
them selecting a relevant kind of difference and way of differing. Because of this
channeling, each construction offers a distinct mode of integrating differences—
composing difference in the old sense of settling a disagreement—and resulting in the
composition of a pluralist common ground for the community (Thévenot, 2014, 17)
In other words, each political model allows for the expression of certain differences between
people while silencing others, constituting a distinct landscape of the diversity at play. From
here on, if, like Rancière, we consider that the role of the political in a democratic context is to
combine the processes of emancipating and running the community, the grammars of the
“commonality in the plural” emerge as grammars of the political in democratic regimes. In this
regard, Thévenot’s work allows us to deepen and broaden Rancière’s perceptions so that it is no
longer a question of merely focusing on how certain excluded people make themselves heard,
but rather one of considering how people’s different forms of engagement and attachment
become part of the political task of composing commonality6.

He thus identifies a first “grammar of plural orders of worth,” in which differences between
people, situations and objects are expressed in terms of “competing orders of worth,” reflecting
the many conceptions of “the common good.” (Thévenot 2014 : 16-17)7 From this perspective,
people, situations and objects are not considered individually in relation to the general
attributes that qualify them. For example, the efficient worker is distinguished from the
committed trade unionist. Conflicts then arise then from the confrontation of the various orders
of worth. A measure taken for its effectiveness may be compared and criticized for its lack of
civicness (equality) or creativity (Boltanski and Thévenot 2009). Commonality is then created
through compromise (incorporated into conventional and material measures) between different
types of good, e.g. industrial quality and competitive prices, concern for equality and respect for
tradition, etc. In this grammar, the composition of differences is based on a strong process of
detachment of people and objects, but this detachment raises various problems in conflicts such
as urban struggles that are motivated specifically from inhabitants’ attachment to a specific
place.

6 For a critique of Rancière, see Thévenot, forthcoming b.

7The first model was constructed from work done with Luc Boltanski on the principles of justification

(Boltanski and Thévenot 2006),

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The grammar of the so-called “liberal” commonality is a completely different matter, where
differences are expressed in terms of diverging opinions or competing interests (Thévenot,
2014). In this second grammar, emerging, notably, from the desire to avoid religious wars
(Stavo-Debauge 2009), differences are expressed with less virulence than they are in the critical
confrontation of grand principles. Below, we shall see the forms of appeasement – often thought
to lead to “depoliticization” – that result from shifting to this grammar of the political. Creating
commonality then works based on processes of negotiation and the weighing of interests. To a
certain extent this grammar allows more room for individual attachment and singularity.
However, the fact they are expressed as “interests” already implies a certain transformation
(Thévenot 2014: 17).

Lastly, Thévenot identifies a third grammar, less often identified in studies of political processes,
which he calls the “grammar of commonality through affinity.” This third grammar is based on
the pooling of “personal affinities to a plurality of common places” (Thévenot 2014: 19). Thus, it
does not imply the type of detachment required by the two other grammars but, on the contrary,
pools shared attachments and references. The idea of “common places” should be understood in
its broadest meaning, as referring as much to physical places (parks, monuments, etc.) as to
more “intangible” things (songs, legends, literary characters, etc.). In this way, we share
experiences and emotions that bring us together while maintaining the possibility of a range of
uses. Such is the case, for instance, of a park that is enjoyed by its different users – wanderers,
sportspeople, biologists – who may rally together to save it (Koveneva, 2011). As we shall see,
this third mode of constructing commonality in the plural offers us a better grasp on the changes
in the political forms that occur during urban struggles. The hypothesis here is that it has
become particularly important with what could be called the expressive turning point of the
political that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. This period was marked by a rejection of the
major revolutionary movements that focused on “bright futures” in favor of forms of direct
action (e.g. occupation and self-management), coupled with the idea that it was possible to
change society by changing our way of organizing and experiencing everyday life. From this
perspective, common places - where experience is pooled - become essential for expressing
critiques and inventing new forms of commonality.

Consequently, although these three ways of creating commonality still coexist today, we believe
it is possible to sketch a historical movement that takes us from the political universe of the
1970s - still strongly marked by the “grammar of plural orders of worth,” where people fought
for equal access in cities, housing conditions for the working class, etc. – to that of the first
decade of the twenty-first century - increasingly marked by a liberal grammar of the common
that involves promoting participation for realistic objectives. The birth of the “Neighborhood

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Contract” in 2009 is a perfect example of how contemporary management of the conflict

inherent to the production of urban order has evolved. At the heart of this change we find,
somewhat paradoxically, the emergence of political movements based on the grammar of
commonality through affinity, i.e. the different forms of direct action and pooling of experience
(squats, occupations, self-managed places and institutions, etc.), characteristic of what has been
called the new left. From this standpoint, the birth of the “Neighborhood Contract” serves less to
arbitrate between classic political demands and efficient city management than between the risk
of overzealous appropriation of a neighborhood through militant takeovers and the desire to
establish it in the city’s new, post-urban struggle forms of government that strive for guaranteed,
regulated diversity. In order to understand the stakes in today’s politics of difference, one must
look back to the 1970s and the birth of urban struggles in the Grottes neighborhood.

Urban struggles of the 70s: a “democratic moment”

As Jacques Rancière suggests, a “democratic moment” occurs when a unique discourse that
challenges the order of the city itself suddenly emerges. This thus implies the emergence of a
“dissensual subject” that is capable of breaking the consensus and manifesting “difference in
society itself” (Rancière 1998: 251). In this respect, one can argue that urban struggles occur
precisely through the appearance of new dissensual subjects – such as neighborhood
associations and squatter groups – that question the police of the modern city and, through their
actions, constitute a new distribution of the sensitive.

In Geneva in the 1970s, the Grottes area became the "public arena" (Cefaï 2002) of a deeply
democratic movement that was part of a much broader questioning of prevailing frameworks of
political and social thought. To understand the basis of this democratic moment, one must go
back somewhat further and reconsider the important societal rupture that took place in the late
60s and early 70s.

Changes in society and the emergence of alternative culture

The 60s and early 70s were marked by a sharp decline in small business owners, like local
shopkeepers, artisans or independent farmers, in favor of wage labor (in 1970, 86% of workers
were employees) (Duvanel, Levy 1984z: 111). These employees, who were rapidly affected by
high inflation in the early 1970s and the oil crisis of 1974, formed the basis of what would be
called the “new middle classes” and the radical transformation of the political game that took
place during this period.

Effectively, it was from within the ranks of this new middle class - which notably included
contingents of professionals from the intellectual and social arena - that the critique of the
authoritarianism and established order that was at the heart of the events of May 1968 sounded.

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From an activist viewpoint, this critique translated into mistrust of established major political
parties, both left and right alike.

A few healthy refusals: that of imagining that our democracy is really a democracy, of
believing that any party can escape electoralism and demagogy, and that of hoping for
this “great darkness” that brings bright new days. Let us change that which is within our
power, and fight where we are (Collectif Genève alternative, cited in Gros 1987)

We read in this statement a kind of double movement: vis-à-vis democracy as it exists in

Switzerland and the party politics surrounding it on one hand, and vis-à-vis more traditional
revolutionary movements (notably communism) on the other. So it was indeed a challenging of
the entire political and policing framework as it has gradually been established since the late
19th century. The framework is that of “organized modernity,” founded (and this is the nature of
its police) on the development of mass political parties, the rationalization of the State and its
policy instruments (statistical, planning, etc.) and means of production (Fordism) (Wagner
1996). What was rejected were all the entities pertaining to this reality, whether in power or
playing the role of challenger (communist movements in particular fully shared the major
assumptions of this ordering of the world based on mass representation and the rationalization
of the productive State apparatus). By way of distribution of the sensible, this police order was
based in particular on a variety of spatial devices for managing the working masses
(standardized social housing, zoning, development of road infrastructures) (Marco, du Pasquier
2009). It is therefore not surprising, as we will see later, that this critique was extended to
include both the political arena and “living conditions” themselves,” all the more so considering
that the “standard of living” appeared to be a given (Donzelot, 1998).

In Switzerland, like elsewhere in Europe, this critique was brandied by the “new left,”
characterized by a multitude of small political groups with varying ideological tendencies and
multiple causes (the fight against nuclear power, women’s liberation, peace movements,
neighborhood associations, etc.) (Duvanel, Levy 1984: 118; Gros 1987). As we have seen, these
groups objected to classic political forms (parties, unions) in favor of associative forms – in other
words, the birth of what would become “civil society” (Donzelot1998). This new left navigated
between two major theoretical influences – that of Marxism (and its Trotskyist and Maoist
variants in particular) and that of “psycho-analytical approaches to the personality and human
relationships,” like those found in the writings of Marcuse (Duvanel, Levy 1984: 119). The
combination of these theoretical references and the practical political stances they involved was
not obvious, however, and two distinct movements emerged: the “leftists” and the “marginaux,”
as they were called in Geneva in the 70s. To better understand the differences between the two,
it is useful to consider how each understood the occupation of empty buildings in the

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neighborhood; squatting became one of the most characteristic political actions of the urban
struggles, used to claim an equal right to the city as well as to experiment with alternative ways
of living.

The leftists believed in political struggle but were wary of traditional left-wing parties and
unions with overly-“official” Marxist approaches (Gros 1987: 24). They drew inspiration from
liberation struggles around the world, from Maoism, Trotskyism and even the writing of Raoul
Vaneigem, and thus advocated for direct action and self-organization of workers and residents
in the hopes of organizing a veritable grassroots movement at the city-wide scale. In this
movement, we notably find activists from the Revolutionary Marxist League, who, in 1980,
founded a clandestine group known as the Front Rouge, which played a key role in the
organization and spread of the occupation movement in the Grottes.

For the leftists, the occupation of empty homes - “forced relocation,” in the words of the APAG
and neighborhood associations – provided an opportunity to voice their criticism of the
authoritarian government and the alienating mechanisms of capitalist society in general. It was
therefore necessary to support the working classes in their fight against the spread of the power
of capitalism on the city. For them, as expressed in a text published in Tout Va Bien, the flagship
journal of Geneva’s new left – the job of State planning, and the Grottes redevelopment project in
particular, was above all to serve capitalist interests:

This project embodies the mode of capitalist development of the city…the dismantling of
a working class neighborhood in the city center does not go without highlighting very
directly the classist nature of current urban policy (Tout Va Bien, July 75, 2-5).

The critical work of the political subject here takes the classic form – specific to the Marxist
tradition in particular – of the unveiling the mechanisms of domination underlying a given
situation. The project to rebuild the Grottes ceased to be a “simple” urban project, becoming
instead a project of domination of one class over another. This is more broadly a “meta-critique,”
which aims to challenge not only a given situation but “a social order as a whole” (Boltanski
2009: 22).

In terms of political grammar, even if the topic of self-management itself was gaining importance,
suggesting greater attention to experience, mobilization still largely occurred within the
framework of a grammar of orders of worth, where reference to a certain number of higher
principles inherited from the great struggles of the 19th century (solidarity, equality, etc.)
involving individuals typically characterized by their civic “greatness”- citizens or better workers
- prevailed.

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This dimension is particularly clear when we focus on how the occupation of empty buildings
was handled by the neighborhood residents’ association, backed by a faction of leftists that
wanted to organize their larger struggle more locally:

So initially, we were doing the sorting, i.e. there were people who came for the
occupations, there was a certain number of apartments available, on Monday night we
assigned them and then we opened the doors to house people immediately thereafter.
Once we’d collectively decided to do it and assign a family, our criteria were actually
quite specific. They had to have called or written the GIM8 here, they had to pay their rent
into an escrow account, to pay for electricity and gas…So, with these conditions, the
people, once they had met all these conditions and were a family in need, [they could
occupy]. (from an interview with a former APAG activist)

The occupations clearly appeared a way of fighting against injustice in the capitalist city by
providing access to housing to a population selected based on its social characteristics - i.e., need
- and unfairly marginalized by the system right in the heart of the city. Hence, activists
themselves were not required to occupy to achieve the meaning of their struggle.

Conversely, the so-called “marginal” were more skeptical about the possibility of changing
institutions and preferred to concentrate their efforts on changing their daily lives. To change
the world, one had first to free oneself of the moral and psychological shackles of bourgeois
society by experimenting with new ways of creating, consuming and cohabiting (sexual
liberation, community life, new forms of artistic expression). For these activists, the goal of
occupation was not necessarily to house working-class families in need, but rather to put into
practice the principles that fed social criticism (autonomy, hospitality, creativity)9– in other
words, to create new forms of daily life, creation and organization.

Of course, the tenants of 6 Six Pav’ (that’s what they renamed their house) didn’t
overthrow capitalism. They didn’t intend to. They continued going to work every day and
counting how much money they had left for the end of the month. They simply moved. But
by moving, they also changed their lives a bit. Now they know each other and see each
other. Every Monday they eat together. The young help the old take down their trash.
They buy oil together. It’s so simple, it’s stupid. Anybody can do it. And that’s why it’s
important (in Politique Hebdo, 1976, cited in Gros 1987: 128).

The critique of reality and of the established order took a completely different face here, based
less on discourse (where the chains of domination are revealed) than on reality and everyday
behavior. As an example and shared experience, occupation became “common place,” at once –

8 The Gérance Immobilière Municipale, the institution that manages the social housing made available by

the City of Geneva.

9 For the principles fuelling the occupation movement and alternative culture more broadly, see

BREVIGLIERI 2009, PATTARONI 2007.

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as we will see more in detail below - the “symbol” of an alternative, that it was possible to
communicate through discourse - and a physical place where people could actually share this
alternative directly. Squatting therefore became the focus of another path to building
commonality in the plural, based on the shared affinities emerging from the experience of
occupation and the transmission of these new ways of living together.

To a certain extent, this political model is part of a long tradition of resistance that Foucault
called “revolts of conduct,” and that he points to in particular in the acts of resistance that have
punctuated the entire history of Christianity (Foucault, 2004, 199). In this tradition, what is at
stake is not a struggle against domination or exploitation – which is specific to economic and
political revolts – but more precisely a struggle against that which subjugates individuals by
dictating their conduct (Foucault, 2004). Emancipation, and thus the critical act in this case takes
place through the adoption of new forms of daily behavior.

Of course, these two perspectives that structured the emergence of the new left were not
mutually exclusive. In fact, people and communities navigated and found a balance between
these two extremes. We will now consider in greater detail how these two worlds actually met,
particularly in the Grottes movement, giving birth to what came to be known as “alternative
culture.” It was this encounter and the tensions surrounding it that gave urban struggles their
strength and complexity, thus extending their critical impact while making their attribution to a
clear model of resistance impossible.

The birth of alternative culture and proliferation of activist groups

In his excellent book on the birth of Geneva’s “alternative scene,” Dominique Gros retraces the
first acts that brought the two forms of protest together (Gros 1987). More specifically, he shows
how the failure and repression of “marginalized” people’s demand for autonomous spaces of
culture in the early 1970s in Geneva led to the mobilization (in their favor) of more politicized
groups, who saw the opportunity to challenge capitalist order. This fight to change the social
order and find places of autonomous expression was also the core goal of various neighborhood
associations born throughout the city during this same period.

The Grottes’ urban struggles were one of the loci of crystallization of this militant network. In
fact, due to the magnitude and duration of the protests and variety of spaces created, the Grottes
neighborhood became one of the laboratories in which Geneva’s alternative culture was forged,
combining hopes of insurrection and new forms of living together. As with Lausanne’s
communitarian experience, recounted in Maocosmique (1973), marginal and leftists groups
were brought to live together during the occupations and gradually forged a common political
culture, though not without tension. We already mentioned the emergence of a “militant
grammar of living together” at the core of the squatter movement built around several key

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principles, such as hospitality, sharing and creativity. We must stress here that, at the heart of
this critical grammar was an ideal of autonomy, understood both as self-management of
everyday life and a call for individual and collective emancipation. In this respect, the history of
the re-composition of the order of the city under the influence of urban struggles – which will be
the topic of the last section of this chapter – can, among other things, be read as that of the
transformation of institutions inspired by the ideal of self-management, opening the way to its
“compromised” form: participation.

Returning to the question of democratic expression, the emergence of this alternative culture
was notably characterized by the development of a new militant order. This new order was
neither that of the austere, disciplined worker movements nor attempts at armed insurrection,
but rather had a playful, convivial dimension (Guye-Bernasconi&Valiquer1986: 500), as
illustrated when costumed activists organized pandemonium during an official information
session in the Grottes. More broadly, demonstrations usually became the stage for theatrical
events, mixing political demands and artistic expression. This new “contentious repertoire”
(Tilly 1993) was directly influenced by the revival of artistic forms, and in particular the desire
to break down the barriers between art and daily life. This was expressed in artistic-political
movements such as Situationism and Living Theater.

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In addition to these novel forms of action, the Grottes struggles were also the scene for a whole
range of more “classic” forms of expression, from illegal occupation rooted in the anarchist
tradition to petitions and even municipal referendums in the early 1980s.

It is the variety of critical discourses and forms of action that gave what we propose calling the
democratic moment of urban struggles its magnitude. This was a period of deep dissent relative
to both the conditions of intelligibility of the world and its sensitive order. We will now look at
what took place in these two orders in greater detail, in order to understand how they combined
to profoundly change the city government and thus of the play between the expression of
difference and the ordering of the common.

The sense and magnitude of the urban struggles

Because of the variety of actors and networks involved, interpreting the meaning of the urban
struggles soon became problematic, both for the authorities forced to juggle between
negotiations and the repression of illegality, and for existing political entities, who wavered
between a class interpretation of the struggle and demands in terms of quality of life.

More specifically, one of the key issues raised throughout the 1970s and 1980s by both
participants and outside observers was that of the relationship between urban struggles and
larger protest movements within society, particularly in the form of urban class struggles. In fact,
the main critical framework of the time was that of Marxism. Thus, it was only natural to want to
interpret these struggles in terms of class struggle, to both make sense of it and also to be able to
forge additional alliances for support. e.g. with unions.

In other words, was the Grottes movement a potentially revolutionary struggle against
capitalism, as the inhabitant association claimed in 1979?

Today, refusing the demolition of the Grottes is not refusing decent housing to workers.
Nor is it crying over a bunch of old stones. It’s saying no to the capitalist logic that
destroys, transforms and determines urban development for its own benefit (Collectif
d’auteurs 1979)

Or, rather, did it illustrate the rising power of what Touraine called the “new middle class” and
its reformist, “neo-petit bourgeois demands” (Gfeller 1980 ) ? Should the struggle waged in the
Grottes be seen as a form of local resistance with reformist goals, or did it reveal the premise (or
renewal) of a larger class struggle against the system?

Without attempting to settle this conflict of interpretation, our analysis suggests that these
divergent readings reflect the diversity of the critical actions and actors involved in the daily
battle in the Grottes. Uncertainty regarding the meaning of the struggle is the very expression of

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the political restructuring that was at stake. What was decisive in these struggles, as we
suggested earlier, was the emergence of a new practice and grammar of the common that upset
earlier political models, and would gradually find its own spokespeople and institutional
translations.

Thus, the issue raised by urban struggles is the more basic one of how an experience rooted in a
given place becomes a broader political issue (Thévenot 2006; Breviglieri, Trom, 2003; Cefaï,
Terzi 2012). In other words, struggles in the Grottes or in any localized urban conflict take on
meaning both in terms of what is experienced in the neighborhood and how it resonates in the
city. Hence, reading in terms of class struggle should be understood as one specific vector of
“politicization,” rooted in the grammar of the commonality of orders of worth. Without
exhausting the meaning of urban struggles, this vector of politicization is nevertheless involved
in a critical opening of possibilities and gives the “grammar of plural orders of worth” its
importance. At the same time, as we will now discuss in greater detail, this single political
grammar wasn't able to account for the differences rooted in the various attachments and
collective experiences at the core of those urban struggles,.

Experience as a basis for politics

By combining politics with the issue of the reorganization, i.e. renewed sharing of the sensitive
world, we can at the same time confirm the fact that its raw material is experience, that which
emerges from political acts. Indeed, politization can be seen as the creation and linking of a
shared “field of experience,” where a shared perception of a public issue is forged, and a “field of
action,” which provides “footing for the community to act on itself” (Cefaï, Terzi 2012: 37).
Politics thus appears primarily as “intervention on the visible and expressible” (Rancière 1998:
241) and, more broadly, all action taken10. It was precisely this type of shift in the perception of
the neighborhood that occurred in the Grottes in the mid-1970s.

The envisaged demolition was justified by a negative description of the living conditions there –
a “public problem” dating back to the 30s.

The development of the Grottes neighborhood was at a complete standstill…Most of the

neighborhood still has the dismal appearance of a web of alleys, mostly private and
narrow, badly set up, lined with ramshackle cottages – a relic from another era”
(ADMINISTRATIVE COUNCIL FOR THE CITY OF GENEVA 1929)

10 We must emphasize more strongly than Rancière does the fact that, if one considers the link between

the sensible and action, the sensible universe should be treated as the place where the body is engaged
through all its senses and where it finds the supports – the grip or hold – of its practical engagement in the
world. See, among others, Isaac Joseph’s analyses of the public space as the set design or “scénographie” of
the action (JOSEPH 1995).

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Faced with this reality, activists’ job consisted of giving the neighborhood a new image. To do
this, they had to start from what the daily experience of the neighborhood, and in particular its
built environment, looked and felt like, in order to go beyond the official discourse that decreed
the neighborhood’s dilapidated nature unlivable.

Experience and value of local attachment

It was thus to share their lived and critical experience of the neighborhood that the residents’
association decided to give elected officials a follow-up visit of the neighborhood in 1977.
Activists brought the officials to the occupied premises which, far from being dilapidated – as
they had claimed in the official visit – were meticulously maintained.11 Before entering the battle
of expert opinions to assess the technical state of the buildings that would rage for years, it was
necessary to show what, for residents, gave the neighborhood its qualities. These qualities were
not necessarily present from the outset, but rather stemmed from their efforts to reappropriate
the built environment, under the auspices of militant principles such as sharing and hospitality
(the creation of common rooms, spontaneous reorganization of the public space, etc.)

Grottes residents were also able to share their daily experience through the many narratives
written about the occupations that were diffused at the city-wide scale and beyond. The purpose
of these was to provide an account of the special tone and ambiance of daily life in the occupied
buildings and Grottes neighborhood in general to a larger audience. Gradually, the neighborhood
became an important common place, both in the discursive building of the new militant network
and as an actual open space where alternative experiences that brought together people from all
over the city could take place, such as the opening in the spring of 1976 of the first “Women’s
Center” in Geneva.

The semantic range of these public accounts is characteristic of what was later collected and
promoted under the term “conviviality. 12 It was about emotions (laugher, tears), sharing,
friendship, affection, and the proliferation of life (children, tomatoes in the middle of the city).
The following account, taken from an activist booklet lauding the resistance experience in the
Grottes, is one such example.

The judge asked me, “Why didn’t you stay in your housing project in Lignon. Why would
you rather live in the Grottes illegally?”
I would have liked to have told him about the lilacs in bloom the first time I saw the house.
The shared meal around the fire in the garden. So much friendship, so much affection. To
tell him about the vacant lot, the purple thistles…the fig tree [whose fruit] never ripens, the

11 We often find the procedure of organizing visits to develop mobilizations based on a grammar of the

common by affinity (Centemeri, 2011).

12 In French, the use of the term “convivialité” - now a major consideration in urban policies - to describe

open and tolerant social relations, only appeared in the 1970s (Le Petit Robert).

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blue of the wild chicory. The small gardens in the front and the back of the house, the pelted
bindweed, the hollyhocks, the tomatoes that really had no business being there in the middle
of the city, at the foot of triumphant buildings, their delicate occupant skin ready to burst.
The laughter and tears of children smeared with blackberries picked in the garden. The
bedrooms repainted, the choice of colors, the attribution of spaces. Finally, the music and
singing that blocked out the din of the traffic on Rue de la Servette, reached us muffled.
But there they were in front of me with their ties, all buttoned up, certain of their value
system, the Penal Code at their fingertips.
I simply said, I didn’t like my apartment in Lignon. I had too many problems with my
neighbors because of the children. I looked for another apartment for two years. I want to
stay in the Grottes because I feel good here.
So then the clerk typed: wants to live somewhere she likes. (An occupant cited in the
Collectif d’auteurs 1979: 100, our emphasis).

To begin, this passage compares the Grottes neighborhood model they were trying to develop to
that of the “Lignon.” The latter is a typical example of a “Housing Project” based on the principles
of functionalist planning, i.e. a set of very large collective buildings built outside the city center in
the 1960s. In this respect, it became Geneva’s symbol of the excesses of functionalist planning as
denounced by Henry Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1968). Beyond the contradictions between these two
planning models, the extract clearly indicates that the comparison is much deeper, and that it is
not simply a question of comparing them, as if one could somehow choose between the two
using one’s right to residential choice. On the contrary, what is at stake in the rejection of the
Lignon model is a denunciation of the negation it implied - both through its material forms and
its association with an entire rational system, represented here by the law – of the experiences
and forms of attachment central in the Grottes' alternative model. The resident therefore
considers that the account of her experience would be both inaudible and inappropriate in a
courtroom full of “men with ties” and the Penal Code. This critique is based on the idea that
there is something in the uniqueness of everyday experiences when we dwell in a place that is
diminished by the legal and administrative formalization processes that come with it. It was
therefore necessary to promote a different path to commonality than that of equal access to a
standardized habitat.

One finds in this requalification - from a "slum" into a lively, friendly neighborhood - one of the
most fundamental processes of the criticism — that of contradicting the institutional definition
of a given reality. As Luc Boltanski (2009) reminds us, institutions’ power stems precisely from
their ability to say what the reality is, thus putting an end to conflicts and guiding courses of
action. One could say that it is precisely here that the police’s ability to bring about a sharing of
the sensitive lies. To go against this instituting power, it is necessary to redefine what is at stake
by describing the reality in such a way that it reveals the other qualities and/or potential of a
given situation, i.e. the opening up of possibilities through criticism in action.

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The urban order being questioned here is one based on a strict division of private and public
functions, respect for private property and the clear assigning of citizens’ roles (versus those of
the State); in other words, the order of the modern city strengthened by functionalist urbanism.
The critique of the latter therefore occurs not only through the discursive unveiling of its
capitalist motivations, but also through the daily undermining of its very forms. Thus, it was no
longer a question of presenting a general discourse on higher alternative principles – for
instance, comparing equality of access to the city center to the rationalization of the production
of the territory - but rather of shifting towards the building of a commonality capable of
accepting local attachments, alternative lived experiences and the valorization of the existing
social and material fabric.

Thus, as we saw in the previous passage, the rising power of a new vocabulary and a larger
rhetoric of “conviviality” would make it possible to re-valorize experience and individuals’ local
attachments. There was indeed not only a need to say that residents would be affected in their
daily lives by the demolition of the neighborhood, but also to stress the importance of their
attachment to their environment without it seeming like a “reactionary” struggle.

“The commodification of all areas of life makes capital a vast material community. That
is why in urban struggles in general, and in this case the Grottes, residents’ attachment to
their old neighborhood is not reactionary. It expresses a human desire that radically
opposes the materialism of capital. Not taking this into account is to remain in the murky
water of productivist ideology and continue to have a hard on for capital, science and
techno-fascism.”(Tout Va Bien, July 1975, 9).

The link between the more general critique of capitalism and valorization of attachments is
already found in the comparison between use value and exchange value that Lefebvre borrows
from Marx. For the latter, the right to the city is first and foremost a right of use of the city as a
place for meeting and of enjoyment, rather than simply a place of gain and profit, where
economic exchange is paramount (Lefebvre, 1968). This applies to people’s ability to effectively
use their places of daily life, to turn them into works, as Lefebvre says. The valorization of this
use consequently enables attachment to a form of resistance to capitalism and, more specifically,
to the detachment entailed by the inclusion of people and places in the market exchange

These projects…destroy the built heritage, a social group [that is] truly attached to its
living environment, in favor of a sanitized, standardized world of international
business travelers. (Tout Va Bien, November 1975)

In this last passage, we see the co-constitution of the value of the built environment (the “built
heritage”) and that of use (a “social group [that is] truly attached”). Life forms and urban forms

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must be designed together and provide a basis for a critique of planning that does not make this
link.

However, our meander through the different models of the common (in the plural) suggests that
the link between the valorization of attachments and the generic struggle against capitalism is
not without tension. In fact, residents’ many attachments – both collective experiences and the
personal involvement of some old neighborhood residents – are quickly reduced to the generic
status of “social group” in discourse founded on the generality of orders of worth. Thus, some of
the people mobilized will quickly break free from the collective struggle - tinged with the
Marxist framework of interpretation and a greater desire to mobilize the proletariat, and which
they consider too restrictive with regard to daily experimentation - at the citywide scale.

Thus throughout the 1980s and 1990si13, as issue of the struggle against capitalism gradually
disappeared from the discourse of resident associations -and even that of part of the squatters’
movement - themes relating to daily life became more and more central. In fact, the issue of
proximity has become one of the main areas of change in public action in recent decades
(Breviglieri, Pattaroni, Stavo-Debauge 2004). We find it at work in all the policies aimed at
bringing the government closer to the people, which are implemented in a process that is linked
in part to the “institutionalization of urban struggles.” A process of institutionalization through
which both the demands and the critical practices used in the struggles gradually became
established forms, contributing to a new way of governing the city. It is against the backdrop of
this evolution that changes relative to conflict management and consideration of residents’
experience - which led to the "Neighborhood Contract" - should be understood.

The institutionalization of urban struggles

From repression to consultation

In the 1970s, the State was still relatively authoritarian, vigorously clamping down on
alternative forms of political action, especially illegal direct action. Confrontations between
militants and police forces were often brutal, as can be seen in a tract from 1979 denouncing
acts of police violence, such as a “young girl of 15” forcibly stripped and detained for a night for
having written a slogan on a boarded-up house in the Grottes neighborhood. In the same vein,
the various spontaneous occupations and initiatives were systematically crushed. For example,
the Women’s Center was evacuated in 1976, only four months after it opened. A few years later,

13 It was not until the 2000s that a more direct criticism of capitalism began to make a comeback,

especially in militant discourse defending degrowth.

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the market, set up directly by the neighborhood’s residents, was banned. It was 30 years before
it opened again, one of the measures taken by the “Neighborhood Contract.”

The harsh repression was linked to the fact that the authorities denied illegal actions any
legitimacy. Until 1979, they refused all dialogue with the APAG, due to its active support of the
illegal occupations that some councilors went as far as equating with “terrorism”:

The Administrative Council [the executive of the City of Geneva] has decided to continue
to systematically press charges in the event of unlawful trespass and property
infringement as it has been doing for a year every time groups or individuals […] forcibly
break into apartments and occupy them, in contravention of the law and contrary to the
interests of the people of Geneva, whom the authorities are duty-bound to take into
consideration and protect […] The Administrative Council has no intention of yielding to
pressure or threats and will not be forced by illegal occupants to grant them leases and
make premises available (City of Geneva, Administrative Council,1978).
The City Council is about to become trapped and admit its powerlessness with regard to
the troublemakers of every kind, leftists and provocateurs, leading the struggle in the
Grottes district, and whose methods are, in some respects, equatable, in my eyes, with the
most primitive kind of terrorism… (D. Ducret, Christian Democrat, City Council session of
December 21, 1977)
However, over the next few years, probably due to the intensification of the youth movements at
the beginning of the 1980s14 and increased political support for the squatters’ movement in
particular, a shift from refusing any dialogue to "negotiated modes of conflict” (Breviglieri 2009)
occurred in the authorities’ attitude, e.g. in the “Contracts of Confidence”15 signed with the
squatters from 1985 onwards. Although repression did not disappear – which came back with a
vengeance in the first decade of the 21st century with regard to squatters – the mid-80s saw a
somewhat more “tolerant” model concerning direct action, with greater emphasis on negotiation.

Thus, in the 90s, when residents built flower boxes to prevent cars from illegally parking by a
rotary, the authorities did not have them removed but merely asked that they not be “cemented
to the ground.”

We did that in the 90s. Because when they redesigned the rotary with speed humps and
all that, cars started parking on the sidewalk, so it turned into another parking lot even
worse than before. So we got annoyed about it for two or three years and then we made
these flower boxes to block them. Again, the City made a bit of a fuss about it [makes an
ironic face, shaking his head slightly, conveying the idea that the City became agitated for
nothing]. At the time, the Administrative Councilor was a lady who wasn’t that bright…

14 In the early 1980s we witnessed an intensification of confrontations in the context of the economic

crisis (DUVANEL, LEVY 1984: 187). In 1980, Zurich in particular - but also Lausanne – was the stage for
violent clashes between the youth movement “ZüriBrennt” and the police force. The influence at the time
was no longer the Living Theater and its naked happenings, but instead the punk movement and its call
for a “white riot”.
15 The “Contracts of Confidence” allowed squatters to remain in the building as long as it was not destined

for an authorized and financially-sound transformation (renovation or destruction) (Pattaroni, 2007,

2014).

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So eventually she agreed that they could stay… if they were detached because they were
cemented to the ground at first and they had to be movable…. So now, every so often
someone moves them (he laughs) so we put them back… from time to time someone
breaks them… so every year I have to stick a couple of them back together again, so now
they look more like something by Gaudi!16
This is an example of compromise between the demands of the standardized urban order
(especially with regard to safety) and the basic principles underlying the urban struggles (self-
management and conviviality). The same thing applied when, in the 2000s, residents closed the
Place des Grottes to traffic. Again, there was no repression and the residents’ action was not
thwarted. Instead, negotiations were held. In the end, after a few months (as had been officially
planned, but on a different schedule), the flower boxes were replaced by a standard device.

The militant order and the art of governing

This development was not simply due to a change of attitude among the councilors, but rather
the result of a more fundamental emergence of principles of consultation in public action’s legal
and administrative tools, starting at the end of the 70s. In 1979, the new Loi Fédérale sur
l’aménagement du territoire (LAT, federal law on planning policies) provided for resident
participation mechanisms, especially with regard to the Plans Localisés de Quartier (Local
Neighborhood Plans). On the heels of this, the Loi sur les Démolitions, les Transformations et les
Rénovations (LDTR, Law on Demolition, Transformation and Renovation), adopted in 1983,
provided not only for increased State control to counter possible market-driven excesses, but
also consultation mechanisms. In the same vein, the adoption in 1981 of the right to municipal
initiatives helped strengthen democratic mechanisms expressed on a more local level. It is
important to note that the first initiative launched within this framework was instigated by the
APAG (the Grottes’ residents’ association) to preserve the neighborhood’s boundaries under
threat from a tramway project.

The transformation of the legal framework for planning was only one facet of this evolution
towards forms of governance that were more considerate of the social and local fabric. In this
respect, perhaps the most notable development occurred in social policies and socio-cultural
activities, which, from the 70s onwards, multiplied local and community measures. We can, to a
certain extent, include in this movement measures such as outpatient psychiatric treatment, the
proliferation of socio-educational facilities, the setting up of a network of community centers,
the creation of outreach social workers and, more recently, Geneva’s Community Action Units,
which are responsible for developing neighborhood solidarity.

16El Viejo, resident and community activist, interview February 27th 2009

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These different actors are present in the Grottes (home to food distribution centers for the poor,
accommodation for the vulnerable (shelter for battered women), a community action unit, a
very active community center and a needle-exchange center, etc.). In addition,
institutionalization versions of a number of public events replaced the old self-managed
festivities and initiatives repressed in the 70s. As mentioned earlier, 2011 also saw the
reappearance of a market in the Grottes, a joint initiative by the Neighborhood Contract and
local authorities. Another example is “It’s Your Street,” an event inspired by the “Reclaim the
Streets" movement, where residents are invited to “take back” their streets, sell their personal
belongings, etc., but at the instigation and under the supervision of the City of Geneva17. From its
spontaneous beginnings in one neighborhood in the 1990’s, the formula has been legally
extended to most of the districts of the city and the institutional frame has become more and
more rigid. It is not surprising that in 2014 the inhabitant association of les Grottes decided, in a
critical move against the standardized dimension of the formula, to organize a two day
neighborhood party outside this institutional frame.

In a broader perspective, what happened with the institutionalization of urban struggles is the
development of an urban order where almost all sources of conflict and trouble today are
subject to state institutional attention, be it citizens’ social disengagement, disputes between
neighbors, drug problems, “spontaneous” festivities or integrating groups of youths. It is clear
that, in this context, urban issues arise in a different way. Many everyday difficulties are already
anticipated by institutions and thus do not constitute a “public problem” or create a new topic of
dissent. In other words, the city’s new police has filled the vacuum – the fallow lands of the
possible (Pattaroni, 2014) – and now incorporates demands for appropriation and community
life into the city’s institutional and sensible order. In response to criticism of the destructive and
alienating nature of functionalist urbanism, a “gentle” renovation policy has emerged, careful to
maintain as far as possible the historical qualities of the neighborhood and tolerating residents’
appropriation of public spaces. Concerned about the disappearance of vulnerable populations
from the city center, the authorities responded by maintaining a network of social housing, so
that is still one of the lowest-average-income neighborhoods. Lastly, in response to the criticism
that residents’ opinions were being ignored, one of the first “Neighborhood Contracts” was
established in Geneva 30 years later.

This institution – the Neighborhood Contract – seems particularly illustrative of the fact that
critique has become an integral part of the measures to arbitrate between expressions of
difference and the building of commonality. We therefore must examine in greater depth this

17

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very specific measure, which clearly differs from direct action or institutional mechanisms to
aggregate the common will (petitions and votes). In other words, the integration of the
differences expressed in the urban struggles and the “alternative Culture” in a new model of
urban order more broadly has led to a shift toward another grammar of the communality in the
plural — a liberal one. By looking more carefully at the Neighborhood Contract we can identify
some of the tensions caused by this third way of channeling differences. It was no longer the
conflict between the abstraction and the rigidity of general principles confronted by the
expression of situated attachments and libertarian experiences, but the more subtle oppression
caused by the transformation of convictions and attachments into deliberative “opinions” and
balanced “interests”.

The Neighborhood Contract and what it excludes

To a certain extent, the Neighborhood Contract completes the movement to smooth out the
differences that gradually occurred with the institutionalization of urban struggles. Through it,
the political task of building commonality does not stop, but rather adopts a contractual
structure that is both more measurable and more participative. Contracts of Confidence are a
perfect example of a new mode of politics that plays out against a backdrop of a renewed police,
that of the “guaranteed city” as described by Marc Breviglieri, where legitimate and carefully
delimited objectives aiming at the production of a sustainable city are monitored by experts and
well-framed participatory procedures (Breviglieri, 2013). In some ways, it is open to a dual
interpretation, which we will attempt to outline in a single stroke. A first, more pessimistic
interpretation above all sees a domestication of demands and reduction of possibilities. A
second, more optimistic interpretation invites us to read it as a compromise between the
hierarchy of the institution and the horizontal ideals of self-management. The Neighborhood
Contract thus draws inspiration from a liberal grammar to build the common and limit
differences as regards a set of interests. It is then a question of individual empowerment, i.e.
people’s capacity to respect the decreed rules and engage in achieving realistic goals.

This dual interpretation reflects what is illustrated by the development and evolution of the
Grottes’ Neighborhood Contract. It has indeed helped pacify certain conflicts, but was
nevertheless distinctly shaped from within, and often outflanked and exceeded by residents’
capacity to establish themselves as autonomous political subjects.

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The measurable and accountable art of composition

Firstly, if we consider the actual form of the Neighborhood Contract, it clearly makes
inventorying and measuring the focus of its procedures. It is designed as a space where
residents, in partnership with the authorities, can come to express their needs:

Yes, Neighborhood Contracts. Yes, it means that we are moving on from, we’ve moved on
from an authoritarian urbanization, which said, well, we’re the experts, the politicians,
the State of Geneva, the Municipality, we’re the owners, we’ll do it. Go to bed and we’ll
look after you. We’ll make you happy. We’ve went [from] accompanying residents’
demands to a real partnership between the residents and us. That means, for example, for
the Grottes, well, how would you like the square to be developed? We come to an
agreement, as we did for this square, and then we do it. We sign, and we do it. Together.
What sort of developments would you like in the southern part of the Grottes? We come
to an agreement and we do it. And so on. What would you like in the Rue de l’Industrie?
What kind of social center would you like? Where is your social structure for teenagers?
For old people? For nurseries? How many nurseries do you need? How many schools do
you need? And then we create a real partnership.

The “coordination commissions” governing Neighborhood Contracts formalize objectives to

“establish a diagnostic specific to the neighborhood, then create working groups for each theme”
to “draw up a roadmap for the neighborhood that will list objectives and projects based on the
proposals formulated by the working groups” (Geneva Neighborhood Contracts official website,
http://www.ville-geneve.ch/quartiers-geneve/contrats-quartier/). The roadmap then has to be
approved by the Neighborhood Conference, which is open to all the district’s residents and
traders, before being transferred to the authorities who transfer it to the City Council to approve
the budget. Here, semantics clearly contribute to the new management forms of “government by
objective,” which focus more on measuring objectives than on the common good that underlies
them (Thévenot 2009). At the heart this lies the project (and its objectives), which must define
the problems and provide “functional” responses.

Each themed group sets about measuring and defining the neighborhood’s different
requirements and uses. Thus do we find in the session’s proceedings a list of the neighborhood’s
musical groups and requests for rehearsal spaces, a systematic review of the use of public
benches, etc. The chain between neighborhood experiences, their pooling and its political
translation - often used by associations such as the APAG, but multiplying the arenas and the
battles - is therefore drastically reduced. The advantage is undeniably increased efficiency and
the possibility of truly adapted measures, as residents’ local knowledge of the neighborhood is
taken into consideration.

Nevertheless, there is a price to pay for increased efficiency – in this case, the loss of certain
forms of critique – meta-critiques – that call into question the very framework of the production

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of experience. In other words, in this first critical interpretation, contracts of confidence seem to
limit possibilities by incorporating critiques - and more fundamentally, politics as a means of
emancipation - into measures to manage the community (its ‘police’). The conceptual frame of
the grammars of commonality in the plural model help us refine this critique.

The reduction of possibilities

We have identified three mechanisms by which the Neighborhood Contract reduces the political
scope of debates and, more specifically, the politicization of the expression of differences.

To begin, from an institutional point of view, it is clear that even if a desire for partnership exists,
there is very little real transfer of decision-making power; ultimately, the City Council still “holds
the purse strings.” This is a common and relatively superficial criticism of participative
procedures that should be qualified here by the fact that the authorities - because they control
the land - have genuine power over the neighborhood, unlike most of Geneva’s other districts
where it is also necessary to convince private stakeholders.

The second mechanism concerns the reduction of topics on which residents can concentrate.
Indeed, the sphere of action almost solely concerns problems regarding public spaces and how
they are developed. We can see here, once again, a characteristic of the debates of the 90s that
were de facto increasingly limited to public-space problems (restricting traffic, managing
neighbors’ disputes, etc.). Crucial questions such as housing or economic development policies
completely elude the Neighborhood Contract’s jurisdiction and are therefore not raised. Thus,
when the Municipal Management assigned the archways to a trader who left them badly-lit, to
the great displeasure of the residents (see II.5), it occurred in the framework of private contract
and not an assignment policy supervised by the Neighborhood Contract.

Lastly and more fundamentally, the Neighborhood Contract reduces forms of politicizing
experience by demarcating the sphere of political questioning and reducing the expression of
attachments and convictions. In State participative and management mechanisms, the scope of
the political extension falls short of the questions that used to be raised regarding the theoretical
and practical scope to give to urban struggles (i.e. to control one’s immediate environment, or
spark a social revolution) and the social entities involved in them (working-class struggle,
community experiments, the right to housing, anti-capitalist resistance, etc.). Here, the
framework is set: the task consists of improving the daily environment with defined and realistic
projects, drawn up exclusively by “members” of the neighborhood. In other words, the problems
and troubles reported in the form of needs within the framework of the Neighborhood Contract
are rarely linked to the district’s economic policy, and even less so to the broader issues of
capitalism. We have left behind the dilemma between class war and urban struggles that offered
multiple ways of politicizing the experiences of 70s’ struggles and of voicing a critique capable of

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calling into question the very reality in which the task of managing takes place. In other words,
there is no question here of a federation of Neighborhood Contracts as was envisaged for the
federation of residents’ associations in the hopes of radically changing the city’s forms of
production and regulation.

In other words, this is a departure from a grammar of both the orders of worth and affinities.
With regard to the latter, it is important to see that what the Neighborhood Contract builds is
not a commonality of “common places,” where experiences and attachments are shared, but a
contractual commonality where the neighborhood is the focus of negotiated management.
Residents’ familiarity 18 with the neighborhood – their intimate knowledge of it rooted in
everyday experience - is not valued in relation with the intensity of an attachment but in relation
with the functional knowledge it can bring to process of the delimitation of the contractual
objectives and the negotiation of interests allowing to hierarchize the established objectives.

However, this more pessimistic interpretation only partially takes into consideration what is
going on with regard to the Grottes’ Neighborhood Contract. If we look more closely at the
debates underway, we notice that they, too, are affected by the Grottes’ militant history and the
cohabitation of various grammars of the common.

Self-management within the institution

From the very first public meetings, residents’ participation – in particular that of the most
militant residents – was considerable in terms of numbers. Many, some of whom were already
involved in the neighborhood’s various associations, attended with a certain degree of mistrust,
fearing “repossession” of their militant work. Nevertheless, they made the effort to attend
because they had been involved in consultation processes with the authorities regarding other
topics for many years. Therefore, the Neighborhood Contract was not merely a new
neighborhood public, but had to merge with existing associative and militant networks.

A first act of resistance emerged from the outset, regarding the designation of “representatives.”
Although the procedure provides for the designation of one representative per “interest group,”
participants made the case for an increased number of spokespeople, demanding two
representatives per category (residents, young people, associations and traders). This increase,
though partially stemming from the desire not to overload representatives – seemed to indicate
a mistrust of overly-hierarchical organizations in which power is concentrated. This mistrust
doubtlessly originated in the ideals of self-management, which encourage doing away with
representatives or, in any case, power-sharing.

18 On the notion of familiarity as a way of relating to others and the world, see Thévenot, 2001.

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Later, in the same spirit of critical participation, residents categorically refused to create a
hierarchy (in terms of priority) between the different projects studied by the various
Neighborhood Contract committees. For the residents, the projects were all equally important,
as each had received the residents’ commitment. In this way, they once again refused, in a
gesture typical of the militant grammar of self-management, to put themselves in the position of
governance. This move can be also interpreted as a way of resisting the changing of their
attachments and convictions into mere interests and opinions that can be legitimately sorted
given an appropriate deliberation. Such a hierarchization process is required and facilitated
both by the liberal grammar and that of orders of worth. However, it is on the contrary not
required by the grammar of affinities to common places that was at the core of the self-
management militant tradition of the neighborhood.

The Neighborhood Contract thus lies at the crossroads of the various grammars of the common.
As we will now see, its broader challenge, which largely exceeds its restrictive frame, is the
invention of the renewed political initiatives, allowing for a balance between self-managed
emancipation and the art of governing.

The return of politics: dissensual subjects going beyond the contractual framework
The neighborhood’s militancy and tradition of self-management is above all visible in the way it
continually oversteps the framework of the Neighborhood Contract. Since its establishment,
several major conflicts as well as various development actions have taken place outside of its
control.

For instance, this was the case for the opposition to the construction of a 10-storey apartment
block in the form of ad hoc association, “La Tour Prend Garde,” which was totally independent of
the Neighborhood Contract. An initial meeting between its founders and the Neighborhood
Contract committee led to a dispute because committee members did not agree with this
opposition. We thus see how a more radical political act – simultaneously contesting an infill
project during the height of a housing crisis and the results of a competition – disrupts the
power of the Neighborhood Contract’s composition.

The same is true of another recent major mobilization against the extension of the Central
Station, with its plans to demolish the entire southern part of the district. Once again, highly
political and economic issues went well beyond the narrow framework of the Neighborhood
Contract. We thus see how strictly political incidents, i.e. which cause new entities to emerge and
oblige a rethinking of the scales and foundations of the common of the city, soon exceed the
artificial framework of the Neighborhood Contract.

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In a different vein, the neighborhood’s militant tradition is also expressed in various initiatives
and forms of direct action that also occur outside of the Neighborhood Contract’s framework.
This was the case when, having “twiddled our thumbs” – in the words of a member of the
Neighborhood Contract – for almost two years in Neighborhood Contract meetings, a group of
young people, tired of waiting for solutions that did not materialize, decided to illegally occupy
an archway in the Rue des Grottes. This direct action enabled them to negotiate directly with the
Municipal Property Management to obtain a space that they could manage themselves.

Similarly, when some local residents decided to build a “henhouse” and a children’s play area to
reclaim the abandoned Corderie square, frequented by drug users, they did not refer to the
Neighborhood Contract but, once again, negotiated directly with the city’s administration. As we
can observe, the political scope simultaneously extends both above and below the contract’s
framework.

These examples again indicate the complex role of convictions and their acceptance in
consultation procedures. Indeed, as we suggested above, participation in the Neighborhood
Contract implies the reduction of convictions into debatable opinions, a central operation of
liberalism (Stavo-Debauge 2009). This reduction is seen as the condition for a sound
composition of interests. However, a portion of the Grottes’ population does not correspond to
the mobile, disengaged city-dweller of the guaranteed city (Breviglieri 2013). These people are
committed and attached. Compromise is then more demanding, and the strength of convictions
leads them to act outside of legal frameworks or, more precisely, outside a liberal grammar of
the common. By occupying new places and resorting to direct action, but also repeatedly
recalling the militant history of the neighborhood, they maintain and create the new common
places that nurture shared attachment to the neighborhood beyond the different ways of
experiencing it on a daily basis.

Exploring what the Neighborhood contract cannot be does not imply that it should not exist. On
the contrary, it offers original approaches for co-creating local plans. However, like any
government measure – and more fundamentally, any police of commonality – it contains the
oppressive potential of the world it constructs and fences off. The political issues at stake lie in
the possibility of renewing a critique of the established order, both in discourse and in action.

Conclusion

To conclude, consultation measures like Neighborhood Contracts demonstrate the ambivalence

of current forms of governing the guaranteed city as well as their power, which is both
emancipating and oppressive. They undeniably represent a far more open and participative
form of government than that which existed in the 1970s, where the absence of dialogue with

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the authorities and heavy-handed response to citizens’ initiatives outside the legal framework
were rightly criticized.

However, the contractual and regulated dimension of participatory procedures also contributes
to decreased possibilities with regard to what one may demand, or even consider19. From this
perspective, the Neighborhood Contract comes with a new form of oppression — a complex one,
typical of “government by the objective,” which does not directly oppress people, but hems them
into a network of norms and objectives, leaving little room for strong personal attachments to be
expressed on the one hand, and for debate about the principles of organizing commonality on
the other (Thévenot, 2009). Here, the liberal construction of commonality, at the center of
governing by objectives, works against the other forms of political composition, thus reducing
the forms of difference taken into consideration. More specifically, it reduces two ways of
expressing difference that proved to be central to the history of urban struggles. On the one
hand, it proves reluctant to accommodate the expression of strong convictions, and by extension,
the expression of a meta-critique that calls into question the principles for organizing society.
This construction of commonality, specific to a grammar of orders of worth, was at the center of
processes to politicize the urban struggles, in particular in the formulation of a critique of a
capitalist order and the demand for rights to the city. On the other hand, the liberal
accommodation of difference also involves a certain reduction of residents’ familiar attachments
as they must now be expressed in the form of interests that can be negotiated in the drawing up
and prioritization of targets in neighborhood management. On the contrary, in their experiential
aspect, the urban struggles saw the assertion of forms of pooling and mobilization that involved
strong attachments to the neighborhood’s common places (places of shared experience as well
as sites of militant memory).

The Neighborhood Contract therefore fails to take into account genuinely dissensual subjects, in
other words, the manifestation of differences – partly immeasurable or incommensurable20 -
that has disrupted the very order of the city and its distribution of the sensible. Therefore it is
partly outside of these consultation measures that the outline of a substantially plural city is
being drawn up, i.e. where forms of living with strong convictions and attachments are
expressed and occur.

We retain here the notion of dissensual subjects, borrowed from Rancière. However, the analysis
in terms of grammars of commonality in the plural has led us to expand its conceptualization.
The issue does not “merely” lie in the possibility of an egalitarian voice attempts to include those

19 For refined analysis of the shorcoming of participatory procedures, see Berger, $, Charles, $.

20 On the question of incommensurable, see Centemeri 2011; Breviglieri, 2013.

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who have been excluded, but rather in understanding how any system of inclusion that channels
and composes difference opens up its own oppressive perspectives and risks reducing the
differences that matter.

In this respect, the political game continues, and the Grottes neighborhood still accommodates
the stings of a renewed critique. By inventing a new link to the State – through controlling land,
inventing institutional forms in which hover the ideals of self-management (associative leasing,
Neighborhood Contracts, etc.), or by multiplying negotiations and simultaneously maintaining
genuine spaces for experimentation on the fringes of legality, the neighborhood continues to
differ in the larger order of the city. At a time when market logics increasingly tend to reduce
places of freedom wherein marginality can be accommodated, this difference resounds not only
as a discursive critique of today’s capitalist cities, but also as a critique in action in how it
genuinely maintains and opens up “fallow lands of the possible” (Pattaroni, 2014). It is from
these spaces and the links and engagements they weave that the new political subjects of the
future may emerge, those capable of manifesting “society’s difference from itself” (Rancière
1988: 251). The building of the common thus appears as an ongoing process that combines
various grammars of the commonality in plural, each playing the role of a critical opening so that,
in turn, attachments do not imprison, convictions do not crush and interests do not neutralize
the possibility of the political.

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