'Pick up your shit!’: waste, civic activism, and the moral bordering of public space.

For years, neighbourhood associations and city officials in Paris have attempted to police behaviour to reduce discourteous uses of public spaces. Among these everyday nuisances, fast-food litter, dog waste, public urination, fly-tipping, loud groups of young people, and ‘abusive’ occupations of public spaces are considered ‘incivilities’ that contribute to a sense of insecurity among residents. City officials have reacted to these incivilities with securitised responses—even creating uniformed Anti-Incivility Brigades that have the power to issue citations for public infractions. However, not all residents are content with the efficacy of this approach. In particular, middle- and upper-middle class residents’ associations that seek to defend their neighbourhood against a perceived neglect from the city argue that these measures do not go far enough, preferring instead to ‘educate’ their neighbours about proper behaviour while also lobbying for increased police intervention to expel the ‘uncivil’ perpetrators. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with local activists, and archival research in the Paris city and police archives, I analyse the discourse that surrounds ‘incivility’ and depicts it as a security issue. I argue that in combatting incivility and bad behaviour, local associations attempt to establish a spatial and moral community that legitimises their vision of appropriate consumption and use of public space and excludes already marginalised publics.

About the speaker: Carrie Benjamin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from SOAS (2017) and has previously worked a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2018-2021). Her research investigates the role of public space in the production of ‘race’, difference, and belonging in cities. Currently, she is part of the ESRC/Open Research Area (ORA) project 'Atmospheres of (counter)terrorism in European cities'.