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“Today's cities are inhabited by residents who are willing consumers of public spaces and services, but who are not very sensitive to the notion of common goods. Re-enchanting their living environment, by investing in the creation of links between residents, could be likely to reverse the trend.”

Telos: The Parisian is associated with the râleur, those who are always grumbling because they are angry - in turn or at the same time - with everything and everyone. Yet, in 2017 you began to think about how to stimulate a return to personal relationships in an often-difficult metropolis. Can you tell us about the beginning of your bonjours in the café down the street?

Patrick Bernard: It's true that asking a Parisian to stop grumbling is a bit like ripping off his arm, and this universal image of the hostile Parisian paradoxically helped our approach a lot. But to initiate our project, it was essential not to take ourselves too seriously, and to propose a kind of game, resolutely innocent, that my neighbours could integrate easily and confidently, without fear of being manipulated or embroiled in a commercial or politically-motivated project.
The sole purpose of the first meeting we held in the back room of a café-restaurant was to answer the question: how do you transform a neighbour who says hello five times a day into a Hyper Neighbour who says hello 50 times a day?
To meet this challenge, we had to show our credentials and start by relying on trusted third parties. The first to play this role was Nassim, the fruit and vegetable vendor whose store adjoined the café that was to become our headquarters.
Our project didn't start on social networks, it started in real life, via a very effective word-of-mouth, thanks to the recommendation of Nassim, who sent us his customers every day. The rest is the story of every contamination: you need active viruses and favourable breeding grounds. The only difference is that our virus doesn't make people sick, but helps them feel better about the area where they live.

Soon after, the République des Hyper Voisins was set up, which has been called a social engineering experiment. What does it mean?

Talking about social engineering is not trivial. Describing the creation of links in this manner is a way of decentralising the subject of social links, too often confined to the realm of ‘good feeling’, to the economic arena, that of the production of collective wealth.
It's also a way of recognising that, in a dense urban environment like Paris, forging links between neighbours is not easy to achieve. In a nutshell, promiscuity has killed off proximity and severely curtailed the advantages it once enjoyed.
To counterbalance this inversion of the norm, we need a proactive approach. In concrete terms, this social engineering is a compilation of everyday events and processes, of small facts linked to everyday life, but which, when repeated, ritualised and well-organised, end up forming a framework on which to build a real policy of social ties.
There are three necessary conditions for the success of the approach: maximum availability of a ‘friend of the neighbourhood’ (the facilitator of the approach), circumscribing the storytelling to the territory of daily life (where my children go to school, where I drop them off at nursery school, where I do my shopping...) and anchoring benevolence as an obligatory value in all exchanges between residents.

From an experiment to a full-fledged social street movement. How has it evolved over the years?
The project has evolved in successive stages. Right from the start, we had the intuition that conviviality was a neighbourhood asset that could be revitalised to add value to our way of ‘living together’. The strong desire to take ownership of public spaces and become regular players defined the conditions of our field experiment, but the first few years were marked first and foremost by the need to gain the trust of residents.
We set up very long tables in the middle of the street, installed a cinema at the end of a cul-de-sac, transformed a car junction into a village square, organised carnivals and garden parties, installed plant boxes the streets of the district, set up a bio-waste system, and so on. In short, we occupied the space, literally and figuratively by involving as many residents as possible, and making as many people as possible want to join us.
The next phase focused on consolidating around a digital tool, an extremely active WhatsApp community, now 2,000 people strong and divided into some fifty themed groups covering the whole field of daily life. It's essential that our community was first built around our events and ritual gatherings. Thanks to this, our digital tool has remained where it belongs: at the service of real encounters, and not an end in itself, as the various digital neighbourhood platforms have unfortunately become. Our values of respect and benevolence, the rules of the game shared by all hyper-neighbours, are as much respected there as they are on the street.
On the strength of the success felt by residents and elected officials alike, and its media coverage, the current phase naturally raises questions about the conditions for replication, and could potentially lead to a new way of looking at the dense city, from the angle of the relational city as so aptly defined by anthropologist Sonia Lavadinho.“Making villages in the city” is to question the proper meshing of social life, the one in which the investment of residents can truly find its own echo and prosper in the long term. That's what's at stake: finding the right place to tell good stories!  Today's cities are inhabited by residents who are willing consumers of public spaces and services, but who are not very sensitive to the notion of common goods, and who are demanding in terms of the quality of the service they receive because they pay taxes that they suspect are always being misused. Re-enchanting their living environment, by investing in the creation of links between residents, could be likely to reverse the trend and put residents back in a position to play an active role in their own daily lives in their own neighbourhoods.

Did the République des Hyper Voisins create a ripple effect? Was it emulated in Paris and outside of Paris?

The ‘Paris Convivial’ project, which involves reproducing 150 villages over a 15-year period, is still on the table. But to date, the experiment we're conducting remains fairly unique in its conception and implementation. Its appeal is clear, and the desire to imitate is real, but the action lacks a general framework for scaling up to a systemic level. Duplicating our experiment without integrating it into a global strategy would make no real sense. For this reason, we are now focusing our efforts on the European dimension of the project.
At this level, we are currently exchanging ideas with partners with whom we hope to build a strong case for the emergence of a new ‘local economy’... the stem cells of which could be villages run in the same way as Hyper Voisins.

Marco Sonsini