France is not Norway, and French history is different from ours. However, some common features of the use of urban space are consistent. Urban spaces – and the public buildings associated with them – are the facility of society.
Since the Middle Ages, city walls have protected residents from enemy attacks. The poorest and most undesirable were kept out. As in Oslo, when the walled city was built by resourceful people while the poor lived in small wooden housing projects outside the city center. Many areas outside the center of Paris have a similar character today.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the use of the automobile as an expression of identity became common in public spaces. In the United States, young people drove around in dilapidated, but aesthetically powerful, wrecked cars. The 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story showed the competition for control of urban spaces between different ethnic groups.
Bø in Telemark eventually became known as Norway’s robber city, where a tug-of-war between adult and youth culture played out on the asphalt of the main roads. The two-year-old series “Rådebank” on NRK shows the outsider’s role in this culture, as well as the common humanity of life, regardless of group affiliation. Life is often a struggle.
Back in Paris, which has a long history of revolutions, demonstrations and fighting. The “yellow vest” protest movement emerged six years ago in protest against President Macron’s reform policies. On May 1, 2019, NRK showed how rising fuel prices and the cost of living have given protesters an unfair politics where the upper class gets more and the poor get less.
After the government decided to rebuild the burned spire of Notre Dame, the protesters' slogan was: “Open your checkbooks like Notre Dame.” Since then, the yellow vests have demonstrated every Saturday in Paris and other cities, often with violence and arson, and with a heavy-handed police response.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has long worked to make Paris less car-dominated and more people-friendly. One strategy has been to turn the main streets along the Seine into tree-lined open spaces for walking, cycling, swimming and city life. First as a temporary measure and then as a permanent solution. Before the Olympics opened, she swam in the Seine to show that the river was clean enough to swim in.
The urban life initiatives were very popular among the city’s residents, but not everyone was equally satisfied. The French car industry made several threats to the mayor, and lawsuits ensued over the legality of the measures. For a while, it seemed as if the city’s life strategy was hanging in the balance. In the end, it was heritage legislation that saved the strategy: it was necessary to lighten the constructions to avoid unacceptable deterioration of the historic walls along the river banks.
City walls have also long been the battleground for opinions and politics. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, changed the religious map of Europe. Today, physical and digital wall newspapers are common. Street art, which can be graffiti, temporary stencils on houses or pavement drawings, is described on Wikipedia as a postmodern art movement.
In the past, street art was seen as vandalism of buildings, and performers were punished by authorities for such visual expressions. In the early 2000s, the anonymous artists AFK and Dolk, inspired by the American street artist Banksy, became well-known in Norway. Among other things, AFK installed a drawing of Sylvia Listhaug on a cross on a wall in Bergen. Street art is now an established branch of art, but it is still often critical of the regime. For example, stencils were painted on the construction fence around the new government quarter by activists protesting the demolition of the Y building.
After the campaign, Statsbygg ran a separate street art project based on the principles of street art. The social critical dimension was absent.
The Paris Olympics themselves have only just begun. NRK had a number of inaccurate comments during the opening ceremony, and this does not only apply to sports topics. Among other things, Kristin Oekrust stated that the spectacular glass pyramid in the forecourt of the Louvre, designed by architect I.M. Pei, “contradicts the original pyramid a lot.” This statement seems superficial. Pei’s pyramid was the subject of much controversy in the 1980s, but today it is considered a very successful architectural move to make the Louvre suitable as a museum and a place for people to meet.
With its simple geometric shapes, symmetrically placed in relation to the Louvre building's layout, and a size that does not overwhelm the surrounding historic buildings, the pyramid has become the museum's symbol.
Like all great French presidents, François Mitterrand wanted to leave behind a national monument, and the major renovation of the Louvre was Mitterrand’s flagship social project in Paris in the 1980s. Emmanuel Macron is not always lucky with his policies – or with the right timing to call an election. Expelling homeless and illegal immigrants from Paris before the Olympics does not seem socially just. The vandalism of the TGV train lines shows that France still lacks full liberty, equality and fraternity.
The Olympics opening ceremony leaves no great monument behind, but perhaps our shared visual and virtual memory of Paris on this rainy evening is Macron’s great legacy. In any case, the force is palpable.
“Explorer. Unapologetic entrepreneur. Alcohol fanatic. Certified writer. Wannabe tv evangelist. Twitter fanatic. Student. Web scholar. Travel buff.”
