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theses

This dissertation examines sensory experiences of large-scale urban renewal in the diverse port city of Marseille, France, based on fifteen months of fieldwork between 2006 and 2009. Using a range of traditional and sensory ethnographic methods, I conducted research with city planners, architects, activists, social workers, and other residents from throughout the urban geography. By examining the ways Marseillais people experience the varied “renewal” projects’ attempts to change the city’s image, physical landscape, economy, and status nationally and transnationally, I demonstrate that shifting sensory experiences are a primary locus through which urban change can be understood. The sorts of sensory encounters I examine here are, for example, when changes in the built landscape overwhelm a local resident, construction sounds from next door reconfigure one’s internal clock, gentrification and business turnover render familiar spaces unwelcoming, or an architectural model provokes particular bodily movements and a sense of the uncanny. By attending simultaneously to historical and cultural factors like the city’s immigration and port histories and phenomenological experiences, I show the embeddedness of the city within a sensually and materially conceived Mediterranean world and demonstrate that embodied, sensory encounters are a fundamental way through which people come to form the collectivities necessary for politics. In particular, I discuss the formation of a sensually based “Mediterranean Enchantment” and analyze its abilities to connect people in political projects across differences in ethnicity, class, and original national origin. Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material “objects” have on human “subjects,” and that therefore, it is important to move towards collapsing distinctions between “subjects” and “objects” and unidirectional conceptualizations of agency. I show that this process is facilitated by taking a mobile, sensory, ecological and experience-based approach that views people, time, space and the material world as in constant flux and recreation. I also demonstrate that a sensory approach to “renewal” is better able to capture projects’ everyday impacts on the broadest possible range of residents, including those who are not permanently displaced, and thereby show the large stakes involved in shifting the built environment.

ETD_4679

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mary Nell Quest

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000068942

doi:10.7282/T3SB44BB

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.