Peripheral centralities in Val d'Europe, east of Paris: the logics of assemblage between Disneyland Paris and New Town principles of planning

Résumé En

This paper wishes to take the opportunity of the 30th anniversary of the Disneyland Paris Resort to underline its current role in the advent of suburban centralities in the Eastern Greater Paris area, in combination with the foundational “Ville Nouvelle de Marne-la-Vallée” dynamics that presided over its negotiated arri- val in the late 1980s. As such, far from Paris, but still within an area where planning is negotiated between the central state and local authorities, and between private (the Walt Disney Company) and public sectors, the Val-d’Europe area stands out as a leisure-based type of centrality that supports housing development, commercial development, and a major transportation hub (inter alia). While the originality of basing the production of peripheric centralities on such a leisure/tourism piece of infrastructure asDisneyland is self-evident in the Eastern Paris case, its combina-tion with French planning tradition opens up new interpretations. for the variegated local effects that these types of infrastruc-tures can provoke. The photographic essay will underline both the strong influence of the resort’s centrality on the area, but just as well the variedways in which local authorities respond to this influence in their strategic exercises, according to distance metrics but also to their wishes to develop original positionings with regards this influence.