‘It’s a beautiful thing’: how one Paris district rediscovered conviviality

It started with an organised ‘bonjour’. Now the ‘republic of good neighbours’ say they want to reclaim the streets

It was a distinctly un-Parisian revolution although it began on an inner city street. No barricades were assembled to block the nearby boulevards and no radical students hurled cobblestones ripped from the pavement. Not a single monarch had their head chopped off.

Instead, a 215-metre-long banquet table, lined with 648 chairs and laden with a home cooked produce, was set up along the Rue de l’Aude and those in attendance were urged to openly utter the most subversive of words: bonjour.

For some, that greeting led to the first meaningful exchange between neighbours. “I’d never seen anything like it before,” says Benjamin Zhong who runs a cafe in the area. “It felt like the street belonged to me, to all of us.”

The revolutionaries pledged their allegiance that September day in 2017 to the self-styled République des Hyper Voisins, or Republic of Super Neighbours, a stretch of the 14th arrondissement on the Left Bank, encompassing roughly 50 streets and 15,000 residents. In the five years since, the republic – a “laboratory for social experimentation” – has attempted to address the shortcomings of modern city living, which can be transactional, fast-paced, and lonely.

Read the full article on The Guardian

Author: Peter Yeung

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