In the heart of the 11th arrondissement, a new façade has appeared. It is striking with its new orange and yellow frontage, in pastel tones that correspond to current trends. “Frappe” is precisely the name of this bakery which has just been renovated, at the corner of rue Sedaine and rue Saint-Sabin. Even more striking, on the trade, we can read this inscription “urban bakery”.
The urban is now essential as a fashion not to be missed in the streets of Paris. Grocery stores, florists, cafes and restaurants and now bakeries are taking it over. “Signs are places where people like to display buzzwords. A business is modern when the sign is modern,” notes linguist Brigitte Rasoloniaina, lecturer at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco).
Urban and proud of it
But what should we understand behind this term as broad as it is trendy? For the founders of Frappe, this term corresponds to “what belongs to the city, to the people of the neighborhood”. The goal? Make local trade more pleasant, “as if it were a bit like home”. “It’s clear that it’s a brand name”, slice linguist Sandrine Reboul-Touré, lecturer at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle.
But if this name reflects a commercial aspect, the term used makes sense according to the language specialist. “It’s a relational adjective, it is constrained to where it is, in the city. But here, the urban still has a very positive connotation, which contrasts with the rural. For Sandrine Reboul-Touré, traders say to themselves “if everyone praises rurality, we will praise everything that is urban to show the positive sides of the city, removing the negative sides, such as overdensity or pollution”. Through its use, the new players in the trade will therefore reclaim the city, claiming their affiliations.
Its positive connotation can be found in the urban grocery store Sous les fraises, known for implementing urban agriculture – we’ll come back to this – on the rooftops of Paris. For its creator, Yohann Hubert, the interest of the urban comes first of all from the proximity with the place in which one finds oneself. “Our goal was to make a more beautiful living environment, by creating a place to meet and share with city dwellers, while helping the climate,” explains the general manager of Sous les fraises. So when we talk to him about this fashion for the city, Yohann Hubert agrees: “It is sure that there is a revival, an effervescence. We are all trying to relocate our responsibilities, no doubt. »
A word with 1,000 faces
Further on, in the heights of Belleville, there is another business which has also bet on the urban. But when Xavier Capodano opened the Le genre urbain bookstore in 2002, he was far from thinking that he was entering into a marketing logic, which would become trendy 20 years later. In fact, the name comes to him one day while whistling on his bike The international, “I have a passion for this music”, he admits. “There is a passage that mentions ‘the future of mankind’. And I said to myself: “Well no, the future is the urban genre, not the human genre”. Because that’s good, Xavier Capodano is passionate about urban issues. Since its inception, it has organized “talks” three times a month on these major themes related to the city and has reserved a small section for specialized literature on the question.
So, of course, this new urban trend makes him cringe a little. “The reality of commerce has changed, the reality of life and our relationships with people too. We have emptied the meaning of the words”, regrets the bookseller, who compares it to the term “resilient”, now used all the time in cities. However, the founder of Urban Genre admits: “I have marketing techniques like the others, otherwise I wouldn’t sell. »
The difficulty of the term urban actually lies in the multitude of definitions that can be given to it. Displayed loud and clear on storefronts, no one will find the same definition. According to the linguist Brigitte Rasoloniaina, this is explained above all by its origin from a term primarily English “urban”. “It has become common because with the current evolution of spaces, there are many questions about the urbanized environment which is visibly the future, with constructions, mobility and meeting spaces for individuals who leave spaces that are not very “urbanized “, underlines the lecturer at Inalco. She adds: “The term ‘city’ poses certain nuances – it is opposed to the countryside – and limits which do not cover the meaning of ‘urban’, which I always explain as a space in the process of urbanization. »