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microcosm and further the ongoing interplay among residual parts and emergent whole. Chemetoff’s Plan-Guide has become a model throughout France for flexible, diverse urban redevelopment. In 2000, before its implementation, it won him the Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme, awarded annually Resurfacing 143 by the French Ministry for Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development, and Planning. The Plan-Guide exemplifies what sociologist Laurent Devisme, borrowing from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, has dubbed the ‘new spirit of urbanism.’16 For Devisme, Chemetoff’s Plan-Guide is
fables, which are also modes of transmission of memory [mémoire].’12 The distinction between mémoire and souvenir resurfaces in both the reception of PlayRec and the French scholarly literature on urban redevelopment and industrial heritage. La mémoire (as opposed to the masculine indefinite un mémoire, a memoir) refers to memory in the abstract – I have a good memory – or the unquantifiable totality of individual memories, souvenirs. Mémoire is always singular, whereas one might speak of a single souvenir or a collection of specific souvenirs. My mémoire is the sum
changes still Recuperation 187 occurring in the areas under consideration: the Carré de Soie and Ile de Nantes described in this book, for instance, are not quite the sites one would find on a return visit. The work continues. Contemporary, ongoing processes such as urban redevelopment outpace our efforts to analyse them in writing, especially when one writes as slowly as I do. Thus the dates at the start of each chapter serve as reminders that this is a book of history, however recent that history might be. They locate the reader and myself, offering us both a set