Cohabitation Strategies was invited by Michelangelo Pistoletto – the artistic director of the Bordeaux Biennale Evento 2011– to produce an urban research on the city of Bordeaux. The research was meant as a tool to conceive a conceptual framework for artistic interventions in the city. CohStra proposed to address Bordeaux’s urban development and transformation through two neighborhoods, Grand-Parc and Saint Michel. It would assist the artists invited to contribute to the event to have a better understanding of Bordeaux and therefore to have a more precise socio-spatial impact on the city.
The research project is orientated towards the possibilities to understand and address parallel economies, alternative cohabitation models and social relations in Saint Michel and Grand Parc, both vulnerable and segregated neighborhoods in the left bank of Bordeaux, that are exemplary urban case studies that reflect the socio-spatial casualties of the French neoliberal trend of urbanization. The overall aim of this research is to unite a critique of political economy with critical meta-disciplinary analyses towards interventions into the contemporary spatial dynamics of Bordeaux.