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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2016

The tourist economy of Parisian streets: the variety of informal practices

Ulysse Lassaube
Sandrine Berroir
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 840505
Antoine Fleury

Résumé

In 2015, Paris stays the world’s top touristic destination with 32.4 millions tourists, mainly centred on four touristic sites : Notre-Dame cathedral, the Eiffel tower, the Louvre museum and Montmartre. With 17 billions of euros of « touristic consumption» in Paris in 2014, the economic benefits of the touristic economy are considerable. The touristic flows on the aforementioned sites, generally distant from the stores during the visit, become attractive for another type of operators (artists, street hawkers, guides, rickshaws or tricycles), proposing goods and services which participate in an intense informal touristy economy. Through the significance of these activities and the transactions which follow on from them, those spaces embody places of many interactions between two types of great travelers : migrants and tourists. Besides, the informal nature of these operators’ activities involved in the touristic street economy generate space conflicts and ratios of power which regularly bring the enforcement officers into play, who seek to regulate those interactions on the touristic sites. These sites suffer from additional surveillance due to their touristy dimension and the “over-visiting” aspect of these places. This makes them promoted in watching and control by the authorities, especially in a “state of emergecy” period, making the relationships between operators more complex. So then, this paper aims to analyse these interactions between this triptych of operators (operators of the touristic economy, tourists, enforcement officers) inasmuch as they confer a major role to the touristy street economy in the parisian touristic public spaces. How the operators of this economy organise to be as closely as possible to the main touristic flows and adapt their way of trade to the enforcement officers’ law ? This paper is based on fieldwork1 conducted on the four aforementioned sites, mainly relied upon numerous observations in situ, a series of 29 interviews with the migrants involved in this economy, and transects filmed in those public spaces. On the one hand, these tools enabled to characterise the heterogeneous and complex spatialities of these informal activities, and on the other hand to appreciate the practicing of the different operators present in the sites according to pluralist temporalities. In this way, the collected materials gave rise to an analyze of the power games among operators, and between operators and the law enforcement officials. Firstly, the communication gives some details about the nature of these informal economic activities which can be divided into three subclasses : the illegal selling of products, the transportation of tourists, and the leisure and entertainment activities. Each of these activities presents distinguishing features, especially in terms of space uses, profile of operators and selling strategies. The paper then presents the territorial integration in each of the four studied sites, as well as their spatial dynamics, especially in that which they pertain to an appropriating of the public spaces and to a specific fabrication of the metropolitan area. Finally, the paper focuses on the negociating games and arrangements between the different operators involved in this informal touristic economy. Removal from the sites, harassment and seizing of the goods by the authorities are the daily reality for the street peddlers. We see that their presence can be permited under certain conditions on the four sites. This tolerance gives them some flexibility in the monitoring of these places.
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Dates et versions

hal-03799865 , version 1 (06-10-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03799865 , version 1

Citer

Ulysse Lassaube, Sandrine Berroir, Antoine Fleury. The tourist economy of Parisian streets: the variety of informal practices. Urbanization and Street Vendors conference, Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique, Nov 2016, Nairobi, Kenya. ⟨hal-03799865⟩
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