Acceleration in the Urban Margins : Paris Olympics, Urban Entrepreneurial Interventions and Precarious Inhabitations in Saint-Denis

“In Seine-Saint-Denis, Olympic and Paralympic Games of Paris 2024 are the accelerators of history(s)” read the official signboards advertised by the Olympic Committe. This paper explores the implications of this acceleration on inhabitability in Saint-Denis for the marginalized residents of the banlieue. The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, located in northern Paris, has the highest poverty rates in mainland France and its youngest population. The commune Saint-Denis, which also harbours the Stade de France, is the city’s most stigmatised territory to this day, whilst the official discourses vary at this conjuncture, referring to it with carefully chosen adjectives such as ‘dynamic quartier’ or ‘territory in motion’. The discursive reb/ordering of the place is accompanied by concrete material investments such as the demolition of the infamous social housing estates (cités), simultaneous construction works, and urban regeneration projects that will either bring Saint-Denis closer to the metropolitan core or to social, democratic, and environmental degradation, depending on whom you speak to. Amid this whirlwind, the inhabitants of Saint-Denis, Dionysiens, grapple with questions of belonging and temporal ruptures, caught in the profoundly accelerating rhythms of their previously neglected commune as it rushes towards to synchronize with the metropolitan Paris. The accelerated socio-spatial interventions in the commune are often perceived as erasing the 'histories' that make up this place without ‘repair’ and the communal mechanisms and infrastructures that have evolved to address longstanding neglect – in ways that are profoundly heterogenous across everyday and militant spheres. Based on twelve months of intensive ethnographic work and participant observation in Saint-Denis, walk-with practices, staged talks and interviews with Dionysiens and grassroot militants, this paper analyses urban entrepreneurial techniques of extracting value from urban margins, spatio-temporal precarities they produce and the emerging tensions and fragmentations in making and remaking Saint-Denis.