Paris, midday. I was biting into an apple, sitting on a bench, when I was pulled away from the small scenes unfolding around me: parents half-heartedly watching their children spinning about; at the far end, a municipal worker emptying an overflowing bin. Nearby, black rubbish bags were piled up against a fence. The silhouette of a rat briefly slipped into my field of vision. The scene seemed fully absorbed into the landscape.
For several weeks now, Rachida Dati has been running a frenzied campaign on social media, denouncing what she presents as the failures of Anne Hidalgo's urban policies. She, Rachida, would break with the codes of Parisian politics; she would not "garden" the city as her rival supposedly has for too many years; she would avoid mawkishness and worn-out demagogic tricks. She would be blunt, straight-talking, uncompromising on cleanliness and security in a city that is, let's face it, rather filthy. "With me, Paris will be clean!" she chants from the back of a cleverly disguised refuse truck, all wrapped in a veneer of poisonous hypocrisy. In her speeches, the declared candidate for the mayoralty turns cleanliness into both a sanitary and symbolic battleground against a left portrayed as ever more lax.
Still sitting on the bench, I gnaw at the core of my apple; there are a few bites left to savour. What would Rachida think if I left this sweet carcass lying in the middle of the park? After all, it's biodegradable — I could even contribute to the flourishing of neighbourhood vegetable gardens, which seem to be sprouting everywhere these days.
But let us move on. The gap between political slogans reveals itself differently on the ground. Dirt does not appear as a spectacular phenomenon, but as an ordinary organisation of urban clutter: overflowing bins, scattered rubbish, worn-out street furniture. This constant, quietly dramatizing presence feeds the sense of a persistent problem, one that never truly disappears. The rat, so often invoked in political discourse as the symptom of urban neglect, crystallises the stakes of the upcoming municipal elections — which, in truth, should be fought at pavement level. A recent study relayed by Le Parisien even ranked Paris as the world's fifth "dirtiest" tourist city. And so, in order to satisfy the general order and the aseptic obsession sold by the great prophets of liberalism, anti-rat bins — encased in welded metal with a post-modern flair — have been blossoming across the city since 2020.
Yet the question of cleanliness cannot be reduced to the management of public space alone. In its 2025 report, the Fondation pour le Logement (formerly Abbé Pierre) revealed alarming figures: 126,000 people without personal housing, more than 4,000 of whom are homeless in Paris. Access to decent housing remains severely obstructed, particularly for the most vulnerable. Lacking a dignified place to live, some have no choice but to occupy public space over extended periods. Behaviours, too, have changed. In this small capital of extreme density, life increasingly takes place outdoors following the 2008 ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces. This legislation pushed social life out onto pavements, in front of cafés, into parks. In this context, cleanliness appears less as an isolated issue than as one of the visible indicators of deeper tensions linked to housing and the organisation of the city.
As for security, Rachida has thought of everything: 8,000 surveillance cameras. These infrastructures claim to remedy symptoms without ever questioning their causes, nor reintegrating inhabitants as active participants in the life of the city. Data circulates, objects are modernised, but collective intelligence remains suspended — if not eroded.
Rachida, too, dreams of her "smart city": cities once again conceptualised by the great Anglo-Saxon machine, increasingly safeguarded against passion, intoxication and delirium, driven by the warm currents of realism. This is what smart cities imply: an imagining imagination in pursuit of a perfect image of security. For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the "smart city" as promoted by political and industrial discourse amounts less to collective intelligence than to the automation of decisions, delegated to algorithms rather than to inhabitants themselves. To this data-governed city, he opposes the idea of an urban and collective intelligence, in which digital tools would support civic deliberation instead of replacing it.
For in the twenty-first century, nothing must disturb our senses anymore — not even the urban constellation itself, that surprising, sometimes putrid cosmos. This ultra-order, ultra-security placed at the service of a "realism of ambience" shatters the living world. Cracks slowly close, and like a retreating glacier, we humans fold back in on ourselves. We are no longer invited to be surprised, repulsed, seized. We shelter behind the illusion of a protection that grows ever more porous. Ultra-vulnerability then imposes itself; we are placed under tutelage, just as Tocqueville so astutely foresaw. The thirst for celebration and irresponsibility dries up, out of fear of the unforeseen — of that which escapes us. Freedom has become expensive, and we will only flirt with it again once we accept to overcome the unsettling, the unfamiliar — for instance, a piece of abandoned street furniture, freshly tagged after a boozy night.
Perhaps we have thrown in the towel; each of us tries to get by on our own. Yet no one will be saved that way. Not even Rachida. The apple has been eaten, but the worm is still there, now writhing at my feet.