On green localities and local freedoms: returning to one of Europe’s “Green Capitals”
In 2020 my family and I moved back to France, to the city of Nantes, after ten years in Cambridge, MA. As a French transfuge and admirer of Democracy in America (even when things go south in the US of A), I had mixed feelings about returning home.
“Home” in any case had never been very accommodating of my cosmopolitan ethos, whether ideal or real (we are a multinational family). And this time it proved to be even less so: it was the middle of COVID, and French bureaucracy, always a cold and unfeeling monster, gave us a hard time, obliging us to retrieve papers and refusing to recognize our rights, to the point where we needed the help of a lawyer. Coming back from the Land of the Free, there was thus no reason why my passion for “taking rights seriously” should abate: having been born French, I had the traditional French antagonism toward the state in my genes. Following my return, I sued the French Leviathan in court twice, and won both times.
Being French, if you ask me, involves a complex, passive-aggressive submission to the State. This is what makes us French people so civilized, in Norbert Elias’s sense, bringing us courtly taste, good roads and, supposedly good public education (for the happy few, anyway: l’élitisme républicain oblige, while the others peuvent aller se rhabiller). L’Education Nationale has lost not only its budget but also its soul: it is degradingly poor and has become the saddest depression-cauldron I have ever seen: administrators mistreat the teachers, who mistreat the kids, who bully one another.[1] There is also a certain form of arrogance, which enables weak personalities to hide behind institutional authority while insisting on conformity.; And then, too, there is a cliquish tendency, acquired in childhood, to exclude, rank, and classify while calling it “meritocracy”, which just means that we count some people as being more equal than others; we like equality, mais pas trop, because we love distinction even more.
Despite the grim national scene currently prevailing in France, I was happy to return to a place of local freedom–and one dear to my heart: Nantes. This creative city had been the longtime political stronghold of an affable, socialist mayor, Jean-Marc Ayrault (nicknamed the “Duc de Bretagne”), who later became Prime Minister, which proved to be a good reason for me, together with some colleagues, to invite him to Harvard back in 2017. Under his leadership, Nantes had become famous for its cultural dynamism, which transformed a place of industrial decline associated with failing shipyards into a flourishing cultural and touristic center, symbolized by two remarkable achievements.
The first of these is the big “Elephant-Machine,” a gigantic automaton built by a local artists’ group, Les Machines de L’ile. This machine “walks” through the city’s shipyards and splashes you for free or takes you on its back for a fee. This endearing animal brings joy to locals and tourists alike, and while it was designed as a cultural attraction to generate revenue from the re-purposed shipyards, the beloved giant figure has also triggered a true emotional attachment among locals, who attend its regular outings, and it has become a visual symbol of the city.
The second project, known as the Voyage à Nantes, is a cultural event run by the city and its (former) dynamic cultural director, Jean Blaise, which brings contemporary artists’ work to various parts of the city every summer, touching on a variety of themes. This, too, has become dear to the population: each new theme becomes a good conversational topic for summer chats on café terraces. I remember fondly the splendid 2023 edition, dedicated to “sculpture,” which scattered striking statues in quirky places across the city: a giant naked Eve right next to the cathedral; local generals who commanded troops in the French Revolution casually sitting at a café terrace or leaning on a fence at a municipal staircase in the commercial city-center; and an incredible multiple-figured ode to la statuaire grecque by a Chinese artist—to name a few of that summer’s themes. Not surprisingly, the Elephant and the Voyage à Nantes have become sources of pride and identity among the Nantais—a tribute to the city’s mastery of the cultural supports of democracy.
But what I really liked about Nantes was that it had become, thanks to an EU award recognizing the ecological commitment of various European cities, a “Green Capital of Europe”, in 2013. Since then, it has further bolstered its reputation under Ayrault’s successor, Johanna Rolland, a socialist woman who takes pride in “la bifurcation écologique” (that is, an ecological transition that begins by focusing on less affluent parts of the city) and on leading the first “non-sexist” city in France. Her plan to turn Nantes into a “ville du quart-d’heure[2]”, relies on a friendly neighborhoods policy, promoting urban spaces and municipal public services aimed at improving life for local citizens. The city won further ecological laurels in 2024, when it was named the first biodiverse city in France[3].
So, when we moved in, I expected the Green Spirit of eco-socialism to blow a wind of civic-mindedness toward our neighborhood, starting with the lowliest, but most important issue, the reeking refuse of our teeming shore…: COMPOST. Indeed, in Cambridge, we had acquired the commendable habit of putting our organic garbage out for city-sponsored composting, a program first launched in 2018.
Alas, the Green Spirit was sound asleep in that oppressive summer, and no public compost option presented itself. After much research, I subscribed to a private service, very annoyed at the idea that this common “evil” had to be handled privately when our taxes should have paid for it. I had to go once a week to empty my compost pail in a complicated pit protected by a lock that often refused to open. And, indeed, this private option proved unsustainable: after a year, the small civic-minded company behind the operation went bankrupt.
A frantic new quest then brought me closer to the Green Grail. Hidden in plain sight in the small city stadium, between la Maison de quartier and the municipal artist-studios in a charming little park, stood a massive, beautiful, wooden box with three bins, but behind bars. How could I access this coveted garbage dump?
The answer to this question involved a complex (and very French) bureaucratic journey, which eventually led to a simple discovery., The recycling center was managed by an association, Compostri, but in order to connect with it, you first had to “know the person who knows the person who ….,” but that person couldn’t do anything, until you finally contacted “the person himself,” only to discover that, since he worked for free, he had no time but might be able to see you in three weeks, etc. During this protracted process, I found time to yell, Karen-style, at the poor guy in charge because things did not move fast enough, and heard a friend of mine, an elected official of the city of Nantes, extol the virtues of “compost parties,” where neighbors and friends would hang-out with drinks around the trash. Imagine that! Apéro in the trash? Très peu pour moi… But all I wanted was a neat, municipal, straightforward and utilitarian right to compost, Cambridge-style….
But that was BEFORE…
United Waste of Ecotopia
The “compost affair” opened up a whole new world to me: I was fast turned into an active and proficient local, green citizen, sharing a sectoral but overflowing form of philia[4] with an inter-generational crowd about which I had previously known nothing. Maintaining the compost heap served as an exercise in team-building, and in no-time people half my age were tutoying me in the mud, a drastic change from my ordinary work and habits. [5]
Together we turned over dirt, tracked worms, chased rats, fixed planks, and lent tools to one another, donating time, effort and collective brainpower to our common cause. The reward (getting proper compost for our plants once the maturing process was done), receded in importance compared to the process, which allowed for a certain héroïsme du quotidien (getting up ‘early’ on week-ends, doing something for the common good) and expanded our social horizons. I met all sorts of people very different from me: a female train-driver from the SNCF, a student-engineer, a medical student, a young man on his way to Sweden, who sold me some furniture at a good price, a dancer, an urban architect, a modern family of two-fathers-and-a mother, a young restaurant owner (a shrew), three locals who had lived in Nantes for decades–and they in turn met a political science professor. It was fun! And yes, we ended-up throwing PARTIES AROUND THE COMPOST, and I LIKED IT (pics on demand).
This magic box had infinite spiraling social benefits: one person leading to another, I ended-up knowing more or less who was who in the neighborhood, from the familiar faces of the little old man who worked odd jobs to the mother of 4 who lived in my building and the local artist in the municipal studio who wrote a play about cocoa. The local homeless people and the poor students queuing for free food every week in Le Grand Bain building were familiar to me, and I became more aware of the problem of student poverty in my own university.
Because I was often hanging out by the Maison de quartier, I made all sorts of cultural discoveries, from French Caribbean resistance during WWII (flanked by boudins antillais) to Irish dancing and flash-mobs, which led me to become a dancer myself.
We were a village; we knew and helped each other, we had agency and saw the results of our actions, and it felt good: when a neighborhood problem arose involving a disruptive night-club, collective action was easy to organize; we bravely called out the municipality. The same was true of la fête des voisins[6], which filled the neighborhood with joy, nice flags, music, and shared food. Our voice was heard when urban consultants came to re-design the Quartier des Olivettes, and I was particularly vocal in insisting on more trees to protect inhabitants of this exposed area from heat waves… We were unstoppable! We took ownership of our neighborhood and gained competence and confidence as ‘the collective’ gave each of us a sense of purpose and possibility. It was the good life.
We ended-up greening the whole neighborhood, thanks to a workshop of perennial planter techniques, offered by an urban agriculture association (Bio-T-Full[7]) sponsored by a social entrepreneurship municipal incubator, l’Ouvre-boîte[8], and the Local Tiers-Lieu[9], located in a near-by repurposed old public baths building, Le Grand Bain.
In one training session and half-a-day of collective work, all participants became experts in educational sessions on how to grow plants in “no-watering” planters with reservoirs, recycling old materials, and beautifying our surroundings, streets (and later private homes since we knew the ropes!). My garage served as a storage facility for the bags of soil and gigantic mushrooms[10] to enrich them, and we pulled the hose from L’Ouvre-boîte to fill the planters’ tanks, once a month. Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so happy since pre-school, or the famous strikes of 1995 winter in Paris. We were a local, festive, sober but non-austere version of Ecotopia[11].
I could go on and on about the virtuous effects of this social mixer, telling you how a personal friendship grew out of joint action around the plants; how generations mingled without taboos or stigmas; how we all slightly changed as we learned from each other in a benign, almost invisible way, which led us to be, if only briefly, full citizens of a place we learned to love and make better. By now, you understand that there was much more than dirt in the compost — actually, there was gold.
Lessons learned: Equality-Policy, People, Time
What made this possible? You may think, if you’re American, that all these things come naturally to any community. But to French people pressured by an omnipotent State, which entitles them to equal rights (I won’t complain about that) but, on the other hand (“La main droite de l’Etat”, as sociologist Bourdieu would say), contemptuously leads from the top down and disempowers individuals as proactive agents of civil society, this is more complex. Tocqueville famously argued that the spirit of freedom blows at the local level and through associations, the best antidote to the kind of soft, centralized despotism that grows in democracies.
To be sure, Nantes cultivated this liberating spirit, thanks to clever municipal leadership and policies that empowered its inhabitants. Environmental (green) and social (red) policies go hand in hand, in Johanna Rolland’s municipal socialism [12], offering a range of public services and goods accessible to all regardless of class and income, and a proactively inclusive approach to public space (examples include the tram, free on week-ends, the pedestrianization and animation of streets and neighborhoods, or the growing of free produce for those in need in the city-gardens). This combination tends to reduce the impact of economic inequalities and fosters a sense of equality, which in turn, fuels the pro-democratic philia within the city: as Rousseau pointed-out, equality is a requisite of democracy, since there is no (civic) friendship between un-equals.
However, friendship, no matter how civic it is, cannot be decreed from the top. It has to grow, somewhat organically, from a fertile soil.
What is that fertile soil? Call it civil society, associations or “social capital”, all those social connections that make democracy work (Putnam) are well-known to Tocquevillians. Associations, it turns out, are the hidden gem of French democracy: while trust towards political institutions, overall, runs low in France[13], as people hate political parties or abstain from voting, French people’s public mindedness and civism find an outlet in an impressive number of associations, earning the title of “France associative”[14]. This dynamic is even stronger in Nantes, for historical reasons[15], and a skillful leadership has tapped into this political resource, entrusting the implementation of many of their policies to active and connected associations of citizens. Hence the co-“production” of municipal citizens, through municipal calls for tenders to animate designated spaces, the Tiers-Lieux, where local talents can be put to work towards municipal goals.
This was very much the case around the compost, which stood between an associative network of laid-back young people clearly not into metro-boulot-dodo lifestyles (the ‘associative dudes’– who were, actually, quite often, dudettes), the locals (older people, with full-time jobs, like myself, or retired) and a more managerial team, comprising the social-business incubator L’Ouvre-Boîte and le Grand Bain association, which had jointly won the municipal contract to animate the quartier des Olivettes in 2018[16]. Their headquarters were the old public-baths building, re-purposed by the city towards “Economie Sociale et Solidaire”[17].
People
L, … the young women in charge of the compost when I joined, was the contact-person with Compostri. Definitely an associative dudette, she seemed to have a lot of time on her hands, as well as extensive knowledge of urban agriculture and other green networks and a very good command of all municipal opportunities. She managed the contact group, dispatched shifts, collected contributions and shared events and resources. Her leadership was discreet and gentle, soberly festive, yet remarkably effective, as, under her guidance, duties became pleasures: more often than not, we solved unpleasant problems around a bottle of organic cider and veggie dips. As a political theorist, I rejoiced, Rousseau-style, at small-scale republican victories around our compost, where ‘l’amour des lois’ vertes, prompted by innocent games (our compost parties, which really were ‘opening hours’ for the compost) allowed nice ‘habits of the heart’ (Robert Bellah) to anchor ecological principles, as we learned and perfected them collectively, sometimes instructed by Compostri, but most of the time by ourselves, since we had, collectively, a very wide and varied set of experience and skills.
I particularly enjoyed the discussions with students, for whom this basic civic duty of composting, and more generally, the ecological transition, were very natural, since they were born after the discovery of climate change, and had contracted good green habits early-on. So they were very regular at our weekly shifts, and easily made time for them, which always amazed me, as I juggled an increasingly intense work schedule at the (understaffed) university with family duties involving my two teenagers, while the ‘modern family’ would, on their end, use the compost as a playground and experimental learning center for their toddlers. But I still made time for our inter-generational conversations, which I found exhilarating —I am a professor for a reason, after all, although sometimes, I wonder who is teaching whom.
Time
Time, indeed, is abundant among the young but a whimsical companion for the rest of us. Around our compost, it took its toll, as students soon eventually left the neighborhood to follow their paths elsewhere, while busy professionals struggled with schedules. With winter, the enchanted parenthesis of the sunny days came to a close, all the more since L. had moved away, too, and we all seemed to be hibernating. As M…., a young engineering student observed, in ancient civilizations, citizenship was seasonal. And that’s very much how green citizenship around the compost felt. Was it such a big problem though? Who decreed that citizenship must be a full-time, all year-long, 24/7 occupation: the Ancients? District committees in the USSR? Life goes on, ça va ça vient…
The next spring brought a new wave of volunteers at Le Grand Bain, eager to try their hand as baristas for the new associative café meant to bring in additional revenue. They also organized concerts on the public square just below my windows. I looked and listened, benignly indifferent to this new citizenship-project. “Huh…Working as a maid for free? Très peu pour moi…”
Maybe I would have loved it, who knows? But I was already packing to leave the neighborhood, and the country, with lots of good memories, a new friend, met around the planters, and confidence in the young generation’s ability to navigate the dark ecological times to come, and with, in mind, a few verses of a song by Charles Aznavour:
Le temps qui vient, jamais ne s’arrête
Et je sais bien, que la vie est faite
Du temps des uns et du temps des autres,
Le tien le mien, celui qu’on veut nôtre,
Le tien, le mien peut devenir nôtre, le temps, le temps….
[1] On the sad state of French Education Nationale, other than my subjective and possibly biased opinion, cf. Bernard Lahire, Savoir ou périr, éditions Seuil, coll. Libelle, 96 pages
[2] A city where everything you need is no further than 15 minutes away from you, which includes green spaces, public services, public transports -all ecological : tram, buses and electric busway, which are free on week-ends
[3] https://metropole.nantes.fr/actualites/nantes-elue-meilleure-commune-pour-la-biodiversite-2024
[4] Philia is, according to Aristotle, a form of civic friendship which makes the good life possible in the city, the polis.
[5] The “TU/VOUS” PROBLEM is not only a headache for foreign French learners, it is also sometimes a problem for French people, when the limit between formal relations and more relaxed contexts is not quite clear. Tu is either a sign of relative intimacy, of American management or…democratic Revolution, when the Noble “Vouvoiement” was abolished to signify equality between citizens. But this didn’t stick, and, social, polite interactions in general start with “Vous”.
[6] https://theconversation.com/ce-que-la-fete-des-voisins-nous-revele-sur-les-relations-sociales-117699
[7] https://www.facebook.com/BioTFull
[8] https://www.ouest-france.fr/pays-de-la-loire/nantes-44000/avec-une-place-vegetalisee-et-un-cafe-cantine-les-bains-douches-vont-se-refaire-une-sante-a-nantes-04497268-9aac-11ee-99a8-c8cd0c676f82
[9] Tiers-Lieux (Third Places) —note the semantic reference to Tiers-Etat—, are “social hubs” , in general located in old buildings allocated by the city for community use, often time for a transitional period. See the substack contribution here: https://karenchristensen.substack.com/p/third-places-tiers-lieux-in-france
[10] It turns out there was an urban farm at the other side of the city, who grew them and gave away some for free each month. My green bildung also took me there.
[11] The green utopia described by Ernst Callenbach in his 1977 novel sounds much more radical than our gentle experience.
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_socialism
[13] Cf. for instance, the Sciences-Po (Cevipof) -Opinionway Trust barometer, février 2025, p. 27 :
[14] 74 430 nouvelles associations sur la période pour un total estimé à 1,6 million d’associations
aujourd’hui, cf. Bazin, et al. La France Associative en Mouvement, Recherches et Solidarités, (public report) octobre 2025,
[15] Contrary to the classic electoral sociology of France, where Catholics have long remained opposed to the Republic and subsequently voted conservative after the Church ralliement to the Republic (1892), Nantes has become a hotbed of “catholicisme de gauche” after the war, accruing the civic engagement of both Catholics and secular people.
[16] https://metropole.nantes.fr/actualites/le-grand-bain-un-nouveau-tiers-lieu-pour-entrepreneurs-solidaires
[17] ESS (Economie Sociale et Solidaire), a socially responsible form of business, is a vibrant sector of the French economy, representing about 10% of its NDP. Unsurprisingly, because Nantes has a high social capital, it also has one of the highest rate of ESS in France, cf. Direction du Trésor, L’Economie Sociale et Solidaire click here (consulted January 12, 2026) and INSEE, L’Economie Sociale et Solidaire dans les pays de la Loire, 2005: click here