For the second cycle in 2024, LINA fellows Margarida Waco and Ewa Effiom spent a week exploring the infrastructural transformations being driven by the Grand Paris Express and the 2024 Paris Olympics, through a curriculum of walks, interviews, and site visits.
They hiked a section of the Sentier du Grand Paris, a metropolitan footpath, connecting the centre of Saint Denis to the Fort d’Aubervilliers, as line 15 of the GPE promises to do by train. They heard contrasting perspectives on the new metro system: Magda Maaoui’s reading of its connectionto the Périphérique; citizen monitoring of the impact of the Olympic Games by geographer Cécile Gintrac and members of the Comité vigilance JOP 2024; struggles to protect housing and common spaces led by the Alliance citoyenne Aubervilliers, and documented by journalist Jade Lingaard. Alongside these critical perspectives, they met representatives of Grand Parisian institutions to understand how the future of the metropole is being imagined around infrastructural megaprojects: Marion Waller, director of the city’s Pavillon de l’Arsenal architecture exhibition centre presented the municipality’s vision, while Carmen Atias, a mediator for the Grand Paris Express project, led a visit to the building site of the Le Bourget station.
Neo-futuristic Walks were invited to Paris for a mini residency to develop a walking workshop for the students of the Master ArTeC. After three days hiking along Paris’ canals in April 2025, and digging into their connections with the histories and futures of other urban infrastructures, they proposed a dramaturgical experiment engaging role play and walking, staged with the students the following month.
