Since the last decade, the city of Paris underwent through an important urban renovation related to the process of metropolization called Greater Paris. This operation relies on two elements: (i) the redefinition of the relation between the central municipality and its periphery and (ii) the increase of the city's international competitiveness by creating new economic clusters and public transports. The northern east part of the city is one of the most emblematic areas of this political and spatial intervention, in the frame of a typical process of deindustrialization of historical popular districts. This area is today one of the largest metropolitan building sites in which all the temporalities of this long transformation process can be observed. This article proposes a comparison among different kinds of "historicity systems" (Hartog, 2003) coexisting in this portion of the city. The meantime of the planning process will be considered as the fertile uncertain temporal space that creates new forms of power negotiations between the institutions and the civic society. Which is the role of the inhabitants in the large scale development planning? Which are the new forms of urban conflict and negotiation? Through the analysis of the "non-formal political actors" (Sassen, 2008) in the Parisian context, this paper will address the role of temporality in the planning process and the creation of new forms of urban engagement. From squats to community gardens, from participatory design processes to urban walks, the aim will be to describe which are the bottom-up practices and strategies that react or participate to the top-down projects. Those collective actions open the issue of the inhabitants' empowerment in the social and physical management of the public space and highlight the non-hierarchic relations between local actors and global politics at different scales. Through the analysis of conflictive discourses on the right to the city (Lefebvre 1968, Harvey 2008) in the French context, I aim to understand the new forms of urban development that are proposed by those new processes of negotiation. Which is the role played by the image of a future project in the transformation of the city? Which is the temporality of the civic resilience?
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