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Mapping aims

The Saturday Walks mapping (fig.1) aims to investigate the course of The Yellow Vest (fr. Gilets Jaunes) movement’s manifestations which have been taking place in Paris from 17th of November 2018 weekly, on each Saturday. The route of the first 70 walks is being treated by the hereunder mapping. The research expects, by mapping and interposing the routes of the walks, to reveal the potential of Paris urban spaces considering protesting, from the perspective of the analyzed movement. In the usual perception, the understanding of the most susceptible public spaces for protesting does not reach beyond the typical urban conditions such as the main boulevard (ex. Champs-Élysées) or square in front of the significant public premise (Place de la Bastille, Place de l'Opéra etc.). However, taking advantage of the Gilets Jaunes protest series as a presumably coherent research input material, the scrupulous superposition of spatial data is expected to allow to reperceive significance of these. More importantly, the mapping is expected to encounter another, less emblematic yet crucial locations that turn out to possess a significant potential for protesting in Paris.

Gilets Jaunes – background context

The initial trigger of the protests and, eventually, emerging the movement, was induced in the result of the carbon tax reform, imposed by the French government as an element of the national CO2 reducing policy. ¹ Further, the movement’s objections have broadened its scope to contesting, overall, the state’s entire neo-liberal turn initiated by president Emmanuel Macron and his political milieu. Eventually, the anti-globalist and anti-bourgeoisie narration has been soon incorporated into the Gilets-Jaunes political agenda.² Regarding the above analogies, the movement has been compared to the May ’68 social unrest.³

For architects and urban planners, the phenomenon of the Gilets Jaunes may be perceived as particularly relevant to their interests, when regarding its territorial genesis. The Yellow Vests movement has emerged from the working-class living on the French peripheries. As Christophe Guilluy explains, the rapid rise of that societal profile resulted from the progressing gentrification of the French city centers that eventually rendered the class populaire unable to inhabit them. ⁴ This, paired with the gradual deterioration of the local job market in smaller towns (due to the decay of state engagement in the development of public institutions and investments in rural areas) resulted in the prevalence of everyday long-distance necessity of commuting to the largest cities. In his book, “Twilight of the Elites”, released two years before the first Gilets Jaunes’ protest, Guilluy prophetically argues that the ruling socio-political order may at some point be contested as the result of the “slow process of social and cultural disaffiliation on the part of the working class”. ⁵

Apart from the territorial aspect, the peripherical quality of the Gilets Jaunes is also reflected in the means of communication that is used among its members. The movement can be perceived as perfect proof embodying the statement that the internet, and more recently social media, has generated a great potential for unitizing people dispersed in remote areas. Effectively, the Yellow Vests’ basic communication, as well as an exchange of “self-propaganda” content from video-streaming portals, and announcements concerning gatherings and protests have been dispersed there. ⁶ The first protest gathering, induced as a response to the carbon tax, namely the “national blockage against fuel price rises” has been called on Facebook over a month before the first act and eventually took place on the 10th October 2018. ⁷

The territorial dispersion and its resultant means of communication effectively reflect the Yellow Vest’s decentralized organizational structure. Declaring itself as a leaderless movement, they, however, do not reject having its major represents who edit official papers or regularly post video pitches on internal Facebook groups. ⁸ The spatial de-concentration of the movement and its virtual corporative presence is recognized by sociologists as one of the major factors of the Gilets Jaunes success understood in terms of its relatively long perseverance over time. ⁹ Moreover, the lack of a clear, top-down organization system effectively renders itself “invisible” and therefore hinders potential attempts to neutralize the movement by capturing or stirring its leaders. Ultimately, the characteristics of the Gilets Jaunes’s dispersed structure also symbolically contradicts the highly centralized organization of the French state, in which the political focus is set majorly on the capital city, where all crucial decisions are being made. ¹⁰ “Paris n'est plus la France” (“Paris is not France”),¹¹ seems to be repeated by the representants of peripherical class Populaire, many of whom live at socially disintegrated and infrastructurally alienated Parisian banlieues. ¹²

Research significance

The severe 2018 Paris riots accompanying Gilets Jaunes’ beginnings very quickly evoked a multitude of various publications and analyses, also including ones dealing with the visual representation of spatial data. The elaborated in December 2018, by Le Monde Diplomatique, map of the “Places of power in Paris"¹³ (fig.2) committed the first – as it appears - attempt to map the routes of two early Gilets Jaunes manifestations (of 24th November and 1th December 2018) within the context of selected most prominent cultural, commercial, political, or financial institutions. The graphic, however, due to the fact of being elaborated on the very early stage of Gilets Jaunes walks, and dealing with only two of them, do not allow yet to exercise far-reaching spatial comparisons or conclusions. Interestingly, the publishing of the work has been recognized as controversial, attracting the massive critic of some journalists interpreting the map as a potential tool for aggressive protestants and encouragement to initiate further riots. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, despite pursuing a distinctly different focus, the work appears to be the most closely related to the main outcome of the research presented in this paper. Besides, due to the peripheral nature of the Gilets Jaunes’ origins, there has been already elaborated substantial amount of mappings related to the movement’s activity on the national scale.¹⁵These mappings juxtapose the state’s departments comparing them in the number of gatherings, the intensity of social media activity of the group members etc. However, The Saturday Walks mapping, contrary to the already evoked works, concerns exclusively the weekly protests held in Paris, that has created most of the movement’s publicity. Moreover, it operates on a considerably greater set of data, taking into account as much as 70 first protest routes. Ultimately, due to the specific strict way of processing the data, the mapping process aspired to be resistant to any experiences or (subconscious) suggestions resultant from the author’s familiarity with the city.

Disciplinary Approach

The presented work may position itself in the scope of urban, political, and sociological sciences. More specifically, dealing with the walking protests, the research naturally relates itself to the “science of walking” which is the main preoccupation of B&T’s research-by-mapping series. Concerning the main outcome of the research - mapping, it additionally derives from technology-oriented domains, using an algorithm allowing to relatively facilitate the analysis of the interposed walking routes. Ultimately, it is being inputted with the data gathered from the sources stated below.

Bibliography

The bibliography introducing the theme of the Gilets Jaunes included both sociological literature as well as the digital channels that have framed the movement’s consciousness, such as social media, video streaming sites, or official websites. Specifically, the walk routes published in advance of each walk were gathered from the official yellow vests’ weekly online announcements. ¹⁶ These eventually acted as the primary source of the mapping, serving as the input data for the previously described algorithm. Moreover, the additional set of information, such as the numbers of participants noted during each day of the protests, was gathered both from the police and media reports. These constituted for supportive input data allowing to nuance the presented overview of the walks drew by the mapping. The sociological literature, in particular researches conducted by Institut des Politiques Publiques or Sciences Po, as well as Stephen R. Turley’s book “Uprising: How the Yellow Vest Protests are Changing France and Overturning the World Order”¹⁷ , served as a general introduction to the topic as well delivered knowledge nuances indispensable for proper design of the actual mapping-research.

Mapping description

In principle, the mapping (fig.1) has emerged as a result of superposing the first 70 Gilet Jaunes walks routes. Each walk was represented with different color and line weight corresponding to the protestants’ attendance at manifestations in entire France on a particular day – the warmest color tones paired with thickest line weights renders the protests consisting of the greatest number of protesters. Inversely, the coolest color tone and thinnest line weight represent walks that attracted the least significant number of participants. Additionally, each protest route is accompanied by its corresponding distance expressed in kilometers. Concerning the already mentioned territorial quality of protestants’ peripherical provenance, public transport facilities as adjacent metro and RER stations, as well as railway stations and track traces penetrating the city were marked on the map. The core idea of the mapping however lies in the act of comparing the intersection number in the locations where the routes cross each other. In each routes’ crossing, the number of intersections was automatically counted within the distance range represented by a dashed circle. Eventually, having based on the intersection numbers, the resulting ‘heatmap’ visualizing the most important urban locations for Gilet Jaunes protests was generated.

Conclusions

Interestingly, the final mapping result indicates that most of the protests were conducted far from the establishment premises, which would be presumably the supposed destinations of the protests. On the other hand – the areas where such premises are situated turned out to host a relatively insignificant number of protests, gathering however the highest number of attendants. Therefore, the mapping may draw rather dichotomic conclusions. Overall, if considering longer-term deduction, it is the northern, right-bank part of the city, that definitely appears to be statistically more favored by the protestants. When linking the most frequented intersections in a single “mega-route”, the mapping would draw the following path: starting at Avenue de Villiers, continuing to subsequently - Boulevard de Batignolles, Boulevard de Clichy, Boulevard de Rochechouart, Boulevard de Magenta, Boulevard Voltaire - finally hitting its culmination at Place de la Bastille. As the mapping indicates, the crucial location on this hypothetical route would be encountered at the very heart of the 10^th arrondissement, in direct proximity of two important railway terminals: Gare de l’Est and Gare de Nord, where as many as 19 different walks occurred. Despite that, the biggest manifestations were aggregated at the traditional districts of 1^st, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th arrondissements, which are punctuated withthe most prestigious university faculties, administration units, and luxurious stores. Allowing oneself to extrapolate the above ambiguous conclusions and speculate on the origins of such importance of the previously listed right-bank areas, it appears relevant to note the territorial correlation to the distribution of revenues in Greater Paris, which axis has been positioned from the south-west (‘high-income banlieues’) to the north-east (‘low-income banlieues’) (fig.3). Taking into account the peripheral nature of Gilets Jaunes’ socio-economical portrait, (in a sense of the provenance of its supporters) it could be therefore inferred that the proximity and convenient railway connection (including RER lines) to and from the lowest income, east-northern banlieues (such as Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, Creil, or emblematic La Courneuve) may explain the fact of positioning the northern terminals in the center of protestant’s proper topography of Paris.