Progressive Paris has many weapons to fight the far right, but the best? Spaces where you can simply hang out | Alexander Hurst
www.theguardian.com
Drop into any of the French capital’s ‘third places’ and you’ll find food, culture, community – and an antidote to the disaffection extremists feed on, says Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/10861849

We are seeing similar trends across borders and local contexts: third places have been progressively lost and the far right has sprouted up in their absence, capitalising on atomisation, disaffection and a sense of being left behind. In the US, the decline of true third places has been so drastic that (in perhaps typical American fashion) Starbucks – very much a for-profit megachain – publicly claimed that it could fill the void. The UK has lost 37% of its pubs since 1992, depriving rural areas of vital social focal points.

France has experienced much of the same, with 18,000 bars-tabac closing their doors from 2002 to 2022, taking the"public living room" with them and, as one study found, contributing to an increase in vote share for the National Rally (RN) in the (largely rural) areas left behind by their closures. In the first round of France’s municipal elections, the RN made further inroads; but it also performed less well than feared in key cities such as Marseille, Lyon and Paris, all of which were retained by the left in Sunday’s second round of municipal elections.

  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    12·
    17 hours ago

    The closing of public places is a real trend, and not just with the closing of ‘bistro’. Many places people could freely gather publicly are vanishing. As mentioned in another comment already, and I agree: this weakens society dramatically.

    I live in Paris and have been for decades, I’ve seen how the city has changed making it always harder to be outside in the city (it’s also harder to ‘be inside’, to own a place to live in Paris, but that’s not the point).

    I mean, in a city we can go to many places, obviously. Say, we can to work and back to home, do errands, go to art gallery or to a doctor, and so on. As for Paris, It’s also as touristic as it ever was, with many places to go visit and to take pictures of. But there is less and less places where people can just be together. Even public benches are less and less usable, making it less an option to use them to meet and/or to start chatting with other people. The street is turning into a mere mean of communication, to move from point A to point B, and quickly stops being the place where people used to live. It’s even more obvious in Paris, which used to not be like that much.