Creativity as a tool for social integration - Case study on Les Grands Voisins, Paris

Creativity is a notion that has been addressed in academic literature as the formulation of a novel and useful idea. It is an individual capacity that can be more or less fostered by its collective environment: it is context-dependent. Following the industrial crisis of the early 1980s, and the rise of a service-based economy, creativity has been extensively used in policy making as a strategy for economic urban regeneration. This has led to the development of creative cities, in which creative-workers benefit from creativity’s economic potential, and non-creative workers are marginalized, relegated to the state of second-class citizens. In that sense, the creative city has brought new forms of social exclusion. More recently, the academic discourse on creative cities started acknowledging this problem and addressed creativity’s potential for social integration. In particular, creativity has been described as a tool for developing initiatives of social innovation. Cases of creative placemaking has been studied as using creativity to empower marginalized local communities: creativity became a way to develop resilient strategy for addressing a social change. The case of Les Grands Voisins, a creative place that combines shelter housing and creative industries, addresses the problem of social exclusion. In this context, my research aims at understanding the way that Les Grands Voisins’ creative workers perceive creativity as supporting the sheltered residents’ social integration. Hence, this research addresses the change of discourse amongst the creative class, by looking at how specific creative workers perceive creativity as a social tool. I lead a qualitative exploratory case-study and use triangulation of data collection methods, combining semi-guided interviews, on-site observations, and content analysis. The analysis of the data shows that Les Grands Voisins is a case of social innovation, in which creative workers give creativity a double dimension: collective, seeing the space as experimental and supportive of the residents’ participation in governance, and individual, as the development of creative practices with residents fosters their self-expression and empowers them. Meaning, creativity when used to answer a social need, supports the development of social dialog between segregated communities and allows social diversity. In that sense, creativity is perceived by creative workers at Les Grands Voisins as integrating the residents: it allows them to participate in the life of the community. Creative workers explain that this approach on social participation is not reflected in a broader urban context: in that sense, this research shows that creativity can represent a resilient tool for social integration, not anymore being the reason of social exclusion, but the solution to more social dialog between local communities.