Rebordering the banlieue: Saint-Denis, Paris Olympics and the politics of place

This article sheds light on contested place-making practices in Saint-Denis, a marginalized banlieue in northern Paris, at a conjuncture when the commune was positioned as the epicenter of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games. It conceptualizes the reconfiguration of a racialized urban margin into the epicenter of a mega-event as urban rebordering—that is, the reconfiguration of techniques of distancing that render the banlieue selectively incorporable while fragmenting it across spatial, temporal, and discursive registers. The analysis relies on a topological understanding of urban politics and borders, whereby proximity is understood as relational rather than territorially fixed, pointing to the profound social distances within conditions of geographical proximity, such as those emerging in Saint-Denis in the context of hosting the Games. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research, it traces rebordering across multiple dimensions of urban life in the banlieue, situating the emerging ruptures in relation to longer histories of marginalization.