“In Lieu of Industry: The Lieu Unique and Nantes‘s Turn toward Sustainable Development”
20th- and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium
March 26th-28th, 2020
Lincoln, Nebraska
That Nantes would be named European Green Capital for 2013 would have been nearly unimaginable twenty-five years prior. The closure of the city’s port in the 1980s left in its wake an abundance of defunct infrastructure, including an icon of Nantes’s manufacturing economy, the LU cookie factory. In the 1990s, however, the festival Les Allumées gave new life to the site, which the city subsequently transformed into the Lieu Unique, a premier cultural center. Yet the role the Lieu Unique played in heralding the city’s twenty-first-century dynamism—most evident today in its Quartier de la création—remains underexamined in French cultural studies.
Drawing on spatial-turn theories rooted in phenomenology and semiotics, I argue that the Lieu Unique paved the way for subsequent urban development by fostering local identity while reworking Nantes’s relationship to its geography, industrial heritage, and sordid historical participation in the slave trade. The design of the center’s edifice valorized in its semiotics the Canal Saint-Félix, challenging Nantes’s centuries-old resistance to its waterways. The Lieu Unique’s industrial interior aesthetics and restored emblematic tower highlighted the city’s retooling of industry as patrimony. That the center showcased contemporary Malian art and hosted exhibitions dedicated to African artistic production furthered Nantes’s efforts to cultivate a relationship rooted in mutual respect and exchange with countries France had colonized or subjected to its odious triangular trade.
I conclude by positing that this three-pronged rethinking of local identity was an ecological gesture (following Michel Serres’ thinking) that spurred Nantes’s turn toward sustainable development.