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Adventures in Infrastructure: Making an African Hub in Paris

Winner of the SUNTA 2013 Best Graduate Student Paper Prize

JULIE KLEINMAN
Oberlin College

Abstract
Based on ethnographic research at one of the largest transit hubs in the worldPariss
Gare du Nord railway stationthis article examines how the practices of West African
migrants transform the French urban environment. I argue that migrants create social
ties outside of kin and village networks by rerouting and combining the channels of two
types of infrastructures: French transportation systems and West African systems of
exchange and obligation. While this infrastructural practice relies on a shared cultural
repertoire, it also helps create new channels that circumvent the pathways for social
becoming prescribed by either the French state or their home communities. The Gare
du Nord as a social environment shapes these practices but is also reshaped by them, a
process I illuminate by examining how the station becomes an African hub: not an
enclave of Little Africa but rather a node of communication and exchange. This
process sheds light on how strategies for creating relations across difference and through
infrastructure form transnational communities in urban spaces. [West Africa, Paris,
migration, railway, transnationalism]

H
afidou, so the story went, was a young man who immigrated to
France from Mali. Like fellow migrants from West Africa, he
spent many difficult years on the margins of urban life, struggling
to get by undocumented and underemployed. When he first arrived,
cousins helped him find temporary work on night shifts throughout the
citycleaning, making pastries, and working security. He slept a few
hours each day in a crowded room in an immigrant workers dormitory
outside of Paris, before having to give up his spot to a senior inhabitant.
He would then wander the streets around the periphery of the city before
heading back to work in the evening. It was a long commute. He
switched lines each day at the Gare du Nord railway station, a hub for
metro, commuter, national, and international rail lines. His coworker
from a short stint in a bakery, a Senegalese man with whom he shared a
maternal language, introduced him to some West Africans who met at
the station each day on their way to or from work.
After several years of living in undocumented galre (struggle,
difficult times) Hafidou had yet to find his bonheur (success and hap-
piness). His cousins connected him with precarious jobs in which he
made barely enough to get by, and often had to borrow money from
friends, leading his family in Mali to berate him for not sending enough
home to support them. He turned toward his uncles at the immigrant
City & Society, Vol. 26, Issue 3, pp. 286307, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. 2014 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12044.
 Adventures in
Infrastructure
dormitory, but they scoffed at his inability to find work given his youth
and strength and instead insisted that he start paying for his bedroll or
find another place to live. During lengthy periods in which he was out of
work, Hafidou started taking the commuter rail to the Gare du Nord at
midday to spend the afternoon and evenings with other West African
men, some of whom had been living undocumented in France for over a
decade. They would spend their time at the entrance of the station,
passing on information about potential jobs, greeting old friends, and
chatting up women who took the trains in from the regions north of
Paris. As Muslims who did not drink alcohol, they preferred this ambi-
ance to the nightclub scene they thought frivolous. They were looking
for something more durable. When someone had a little money, he would
invite the others for coffee in a nearby caf. After a few months, Hafidou
met an older man who was passing through the station and they started
talking. He told the man, referred to in the story as the old Jew, about
his suffering, the difficulty of finding a stable job and living under con-
stant threat of being sent back to Mali. The old Jew was sympathetic, and
offered Hafidou lodging at an investment apartment he owned in Paris, as
well as pocket money. He did not have to work for the old Jew, but the
old Jew told him that he should not have guests in the apartment. One
evening, Hafidous cousin needed a place to stay for the night. He left the
next morning, but later that day, the old Jew summoned Hafidou and
when he arrived the old Jew was very angry with him. He told him that
if he ever had anyone over again, he would kick him out of the apartment
and stop giving him pocket money. Hafidou returned to the station a few
times after that to take his friends out for coffee and demonstrate his
largesse by lending them money.
This story was frequently told among West Africans who socialized at
the Gare du Nord while I was doing my dissertation fieldwork there
between 2009 and 2012. I never met Hafidou, but his story served both
as cautionary and as inspirational tale on how to be a good guest and
client for potential patrons at the station. Boubacar and Amadou, two
Malians in their late 20s who met five years previous at the Gare du
Nord, liked to tell the story of Hafidou to anyone who doubted the
advisability of spending so much time at the station, as well as to new-
comers discouraged because they had not yet found happiness there.
Hafidous encounter with the classic figure of the outsider allowed him to
get out of his galre by getting a house and an income. He did so by
forging a particular type of relationship across perceived difference and
hierarchyessentially, by becoming the client of a patron, toward whom
his responsibilities remained nebulous. The tale was cautionary because
despite the success of such an encounter, Amadou and Boubacar warned
against following the Old Jews rule limiting Hafidous interactions by
not allowing him to have people at his apartment. Adhering to this
attempt at possession and exclusivity of ties would temper ones bonheur
by limiting the possibility of making new connections.
This story encapsulates the elements of West African sociality that
transform the Gare du Nord. From a seedy train station for criminals,
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marginals, and the practical activity of getting from point A to point B,

they make it into a hub of creating encounters across difference, and a
site where social interaction can occur that could not happen elsewhere
in the French capital. The station harbors the possibility of finding
happiness because it is suffused with movement, a coming together of
various trajectories from various places: here you encounter people who
do not belong to the closed world of Parisian sociability or to the world
of the immigrant dormitory, but those who are on the move, like the
West Africans themselves. In order to harness this potential, the mar-
ginalized immigrant must know how to reconfigure himselfas Hafidou
didinto a heroic adventurer and cultural translator with the inter-
This set of actional know-how to create relationships. This set of incorporated
knowledge and practices emphasizing the potential of encounter across
incorporated difference is what Boubacar, Amadou, and their peers called the Gare du
Nord method.1
knowledge and
The story highlights the central aspects of this method, which
practices involves the mastery of a complex transportation hub and a set of dis-
positions they call being an homme de laventure (a man of adventure)
emphasizing the that permit them to find new opportunities for forward movement by
building relationships outside of their kin and village networks in the
potential of
capital. The story provides a template for the kind of adventurer subjec-
encounter across tivity through which these men orient their actions in France. The
adventurer subject finds its genealogy in the tradition of African
difference is trading and migrant communities (see Bredeloup 2008; Hopkins 1973;
MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000; Manchuelle 1997). Unlike
what Boubacar, West African traders in New York (Stoller 2002) and other studies of
Amadou, and diasporas in which likeness and kinship provide the grounds for trust, the
adventurers focus here is on creating ties outside of their kin and ethnic
their peers called community (cf. Ho 2006; Silverstein 2004).
The adventurer emerges in the context of the Gare du Nord through
the Gare du a set of improvisational practices that engage with the social and eco-
Nord method nomic world of a transportation hub. The story of Hafidou highlights the
types of relationships that the method seeks; they are premised on the
principles of exchange and affinity across difference over those of likeness
and identity. Hafidous story inscribes these relations within a trajectory
that takes the migrant from galre to bonheur, while highlighting the
potential pitfalls and ambivalent outcomes of this pathway. The story of
Hafidou and its frequent repetition to newcomers also points to the
central role that storytelling occupies in the Gare du Nord method, as it
allows for the transmission and translation of adventurer strategies and
dispositions.
In this article, I examine how West Africans at the Gare du Nord
transform the communication channels that exist in a space of mass
public transit. By using the material infrastructure of public transporta-
tion in new ways and grafting it onto their social relations, these men
circumvent the systems of exchange proposed by either the French state
or their home communities. Instead, they use the space of a railway
station to construct alternative pathways that they hope will enable their
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Infrastructure
social becoming and economic flourishing. While these new paths may
have ambivalent outcomes for individual migrants success, I argue that
they create a durable social infrastructure that partially transforms this
space of transportation, dictated by Parisian planners and state security
regimes, into a hub of encounter that translates the social infrastructure
of African migrants into a French public space.
The Gare du Nord method is informal but not quite illegal like
le biz-ness that also goes down at the stationthat is, activities like the
drug trade, writing false checks, or selling stolen cell phones. Both
require similar skills, social relations, know-how, and charisma. The
emblematic practices of the Gare du Nord method include money trans-
fer and saving practices that bypass both official and kin systems,
the cultivation of infrastructural knowledge of the transit system and
the ability and charisma to communicate that knowledge to meet new
people, especially women, and finally, the capacity to combine material
and social infrastructure, finding gaps within formal infrastructure and
applying their knowledge and social relationships to fill those gaps (see
Figure 1). I will explore each of these aspects of the method, which
illustrate how these men re-channel the semiotic and material environ-
ment of the station. As in Kinshasa and Johannesburg, social aspects like
the particularities of an individuals family and ethnic background, their
personal character and style, and their location in particular arrange-
ments of residence and circulation with others are key to effective
infrastructural interventions (Simone 2009:125).

Figure 1. Two Malian men observe the station from their usual spot at a caf inside the Gare du
Nord, September 2010. Photo by the author.
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The result of the Gare du Nord method, I argue, does not only re-make
the station for them, but transforms this public space by making it into a
node of African networks. Like the Hausa traders in New York who draw
on the resources and idioms of their Nigerien merchant background and
experiences as they create networks as immigrants to Africanize New
York City (Stoller 2002), so the West Africans at the Gare du Nord
redefine complex economic, cultural, and social processes that converge
upon the station. Accumulated over the last decades, these practices carve
out a space in a marginalizing urban environment, creating not a corner of
Africa but a hub that is full of potential precisely because of the multiple
trajectories it brings together. Leaving the suburbs where both the French
state and sometimes scholars tend to ghettoize these immigrants, they
make their mark on a central site of French capital circulation, not by
resisting it but by using its potential as a node in both public transportation
and immigrant trajectories. Their practice points to new meanings for
oft-discussed issue of the integration of immigrants into French society,
a point to which I return in the conclusion.
This article is primarily based on informal interviews and
participant-observation with a loosely formed group of 23 West African
men, aged 24 to 33, who spend time together in the front square of the
Gare du Nord and in cafs around the station. They were a group of
regulars who had almost all met at the station; none of them came from
the same village. They would meet there at the end of the workday at five
oclock and remain until eight or nine at night before they returned
home to shared apartments in the northern suburbs of the city. Most were
bachelors and had older brothers who had made the journey to Europe
before they did. For 18 months between 2009 and 2011, I spent time
hanging out with them and talking in cafs, accompanying them on visits
to immigrant dormitories and other trips within Paris, and in some cases
met and talked to their siblings, extended family, and girlfriends who
lived in the Paris region. Most of these men had been in France between
three and twelve years, and approximately 40 percent of them had
recently obtained resident permits after spending several years as undocu-
mented workers, while the rest were still undocumented. The over-
whelming majority came from the Kayes region of western Mali and the
area just across the border in Senegal. They spoke a mix of French,
Pulaar, and several Mande languages (Soninke, Diola, Bamanakan, and
Khassonke) among themselves; French often served as a lingua franca
and all interviews were carried out in that language. I also accompanied
three migrants on return trips to their home villages and to Bamako, in
Mali, where I conducted informal interviews with family members and
other village inhabitants who had migrated.
In some ways, these men fit the profile of the typical West African
immigrant: they come from villages in the Senegal River Valley area
straddling the Mali-Senegal-Mauritania border, they arrived in France
through a short-term visa after several years on the road in West and
Central Africa, they lived first in immigrant dormitories that dot the
Parisian periphery, they learned to read and write after their arrival, they
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send money home each month, and they work in construction, cleaning,
and food preparation (Barou 2002; Timera 1996). While they do not
share maternal languages, ethnic groups, or family ties, they do share
a common cultural repertoire in which migration is conceived of as
an adventure, a coming of age ritual for men who must enter the
wilderness of foreign lands before returning home as marriageable
adults (Dougnon 2013).
Despite their adherence to the ideal of the adventure, however, they
and their peers occupy a marginal position in relation to West African
immigrant communities, and their family in France and at home are
critical of their time spent at a place known for petty crime, errant youth,
and drug dealing. They no longer lived with relatives. Several abandoned
the shaved head and conservative dress of elder brothers and adopted
instead the cultural styles of American hip-hop. Boubacar got his
hair braided in a Caribbean salon, to the dismay of his family. Most of
all, their elders expressed concern that the world of the station may
carry them away from kin obligation and exchange, but their continued
engagement in remittance suggests otherwise. Before examining how the
Gare du Nord method creates new connections that offer possibilities for
alternative routes of social becoming (see Vigh 2006) for a group young
men from West African villages, I will first discuss how transnational
communities in urban spaces can be examined from the perspective of
material and social infrastructures.

Studying migration at a train station

T
he Gare du Nord is Europes busiest train hub and a border zone
between England and France through the Eurostar train. Its users
include European elites taking the Eurostar to London, commuters
from the region surrounding Paris, and immigrant groups from the Pari-
sian periphery who meet and socialize in and around the station. The
station is situated in the northern part of the city, roughly in the middle
of Pariss right bank, and acts as a border zone between poorer northeast
and wealthier northwest neighborhoods. In 2007, it made front-page
news during the presidential elections when a confrontation between
suburban teenagers who hang out at the station (many of them African-
French) and police forces erupted into a riot following the violent
arrest of a Congolese man (see Negroni 2007). The Gare du Nord is both
a node is several train networks and a landmark in Pariss immigrant
history (e.g., Djema 2003; Mehta 1997). The station lies at the cross-
roads of several neighborhoods with high immigrant populations, and the
streets surrounding it have hosted successive waves of migrants, from
North Africans in the 1960s and 1970s, to the largely South Asian
community that lives and works there today.
Many other sites in Paris are both incorporated into major urban
planning initiatives and heavily used by immigrants. The station stands
apart because it is also a node in local, national, and international
transportation networks. Such a node differs in key ways from sites like
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peripheral suburbs and ethnic neighborhoods that are spatially circum-

scribed even as they are sites of exchange (e.g., Lallement 2010). Unlike
such spaces that have an emblematic cultural identity (such as Little
Mali in Paris, as one travel agency markets their tour of the Chteau
Rouge market and neighborhood just north of the station), the Gare du
Nord carries no such identification or branding: it is a border zone in the
middle of the capital (Mauger 2007).
The West Africans who meet at the station are part of recent waves
of immigration to France from sub-Saharan Africa, which has acceler-
ated since the 1980s and 1990s despite increasing restrictions placed on
migration over that period (Barou 2002:6; Fassin 2005). Practical, his-
torical, and aesthetic factors conspire to bring these men to use the Gare
du Nord as their primary social environment. It was no coincidence,
Boubacar told me, that he ended up at Europes busiest train station.
Cest une gare internationale ici [Its an international railway station
here], he would repeat often when I seemed surprised about his desire to
spend so much time at the Gare du Nord. The potentiality for movement
suffused this social space, with trains constantly coming and going and
humans pouring in and out of the stations doors.
Beyond the exigencies of immigrant life, beyond its convenient
location between home and work, beyond instrumental strategies, this
aesthetic experience was part of why these men spent so much time at
the Gare. It offered them potential and fodder for imagining futures
outside of the enclaves created for them in the form of immigrant dor-
mitories, family networks, and housing project neighborhoods where
their kin and village friends tended to congregate (see Timera 1996). Yet
they did not depart from all obligations or norms; rather, many claimed
that the station was a truer wilderness for their adventure precisely
because it was outside of kin networks. Many West Africans at the
station told me that their reason for being there was not only to find work
and meet women or potential patrons but to learn how to be a successful
adventurer by listening to the cautionary tales and advice of others at
the station.
Studies of migration in anthropology have long been mired in
methodological nationalism that has led scholars to treat the objects
of research as ethnically or nationally defined communities (see Glick
Schiller and Caglar 2011:6568). Urban sites of interconnectivity
have provided useful arenas through which to think beyond models of
ethnically bounded diasporas (see Smith 2005). Geography and urban
studies have examined these places through the lenses of scale-making
(Brenner 2001) and assemblages (Farias and Bender 2010). These
inroads have led many anthropologists of transnational phenomena to
modify their assumptions about pre-existing social categories of commu-
nity by shifting their focus to place-making and actor-networks. As Glick
Schiller and Caglar (2011:63) emphasize, however, the focus on inter-
connection and the celebration of urban and translocal networks can
obscure how cities are also part of nation- state governance projects and
global power hierarchies.
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In this article, I build on these insights by focusing on
infrastructurethat is, channels that maintain and create relationships
between and among places, persons, and things. Anthropological inves-
tigations into the social and political side of infrastructure (see Larkin
2013) have illustrated how, in places where the state fails to provide it or
where infrastructure is not available to everyone, people often act as the
conduits of services and information (Simone 2004), taking the place of
missing infrastructure and providing social ties that enable its effective
delivery (Anand 2011). Jennifer Cole (2014) illustrates how communi-
cation infrastructure may act as both a metonym for migrant commu-
nities and as a technology that produces those communities (277).
Building on these approaches, I examine how transportation infrastruc-
ture provides a useful model and focus to examine how migrants engage
with urban interconnectivity from multiple social positions: as mobile
adventurers, as transnational kin, as the objects of immigration regula-
tion, and as players in formal and informal economic markets.
Unlike many of the places studied by anthropologists of infrastruc-
ture, Paris suffers from a surfeit of infrastructure and state interventions
in planning and urban space. Underground projects tend to go over
budget as they are met with the obstructions of existing circuits,
a crisscross of electricity wiring, catacombs, sewage and subway tunnels,
built up over centuries. At the same time, there are not enough channels
that work against the logic of capital circulation and population control West Africans
built into the system since the early nineteenth century (Kleinman 2012;
Soppelsa 2011). For example, there are few intra-suburban connections are creating
and many suburban residents complain about the Paris-centric design.
Even the Grand Paris plan meant to create a region out of the capital alternative
minimizes suburban connections in favor of lines that link business communication
centers to airports (Desjardins 2010). In the space between a surfeit of
transportation infrastructure fitting the logic of accumulation and a lack channels not
of transit lines that do not correspond to this logic, West Africans at the
station are operating. They are creating alternative communication because the state
channels not because the state has failed to do so, but because state has failed to do
infrastructure is embedded in the types of circuits and logics (such as
security and surveillance) that they want to avoid or use for other so, but because
purposes.
In doing so, they are translating the techniques they mastered in state infrastructure
African metropolises like Abidjan, Dakar, and Bamako to the French
is embedded in the
capital. Since Paris already has so much infrastructure, they do this by
hacking the existent infrastructures and re-channeling them through the types of circuits
social world they weave at the Gare du Nord. Thus, their success is based
on their capacity to conjugate material and social infrastructure; that is, and logics that
to use existent infrastructure in new ways in order to make it generate
they want to avoid
various kinds of capital (symbolic, social, material). In order to become
capital, these channels cannot be, as Pierre Bourdieu (1977) puts it, like or use for other
a beaten path but rather they must beor at least, be perceived
asnovel modes of communication that enable relationships and thus, purposes
as Boubacar says, happiness.
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This process relies on what Julia Elyachar (2010) calls phatic

labor. Elyachar draws on Malinowskis description of phatic commu-
nication in which language such as gossip and chatting can be a
means of establishing ties for their own sake, rather than for the
purpose of conveying any information in particular (ibid.:453). The
resulting communication channels transmit not only [referential] lan-
guage but also all kinds of semiotic meaning and economic value
(ibid.). This type of communicative action provides another mode of
value creation, in addition to the labor process or informal markets.
The channels themselves are the outcomes of practices of sociality
that can become a collective resource resulting in a durable social
infrastructure that does not depend on the interaction that initiated
the channel, but outlives that interaction and may be mobilized by
other actors for political, social, and economic means (ibid.:455; see
also Sopranzetti 2014).
At the Gare du Nord, social infrastructure is not only a metaphor
for the shape of networked social relations that exist at the station.
Rather, I use it to refer to how social connections make new conduits
through old channels. The practice of hacking provides a useful way to
understand how this process works. Hacking involves knowledge and
mastery of system codes, as well as the ability to improvise within that
system in order to divert existing channels and create new ones. Similar
to the bricoleur, the hacker takes a playful tinkerers approach to systems
and machines. Like the archetypal hacker selves of the digital world
(Coleman 2013:7), West African adventurers employing the Gare du
Nord method have playfully defiant attitudes, which they apply to
almost any system in order to repurpose it (ibid.). The effects of this
tinkering, bricoleur-like practice does not only employ tactics of getting
by for individual migrants, but creates an alternative system of relations
than the one in which the infrastructure was initially designed. From a
The Gare du hub of metropolitan transport, the Gare du Nord method makes the
station into a hub for West African networks of value creation, whether
Nord method through money transfer systems, micro-saving networks, providing
services where there are infrastructural gaps, or by creating relations with
makes the station
people outside West African communities. To put this method into
into a hub for practice, these men need to master the formal infrastructure and then
re-channel it.
West African
networks of The Gare du Nord method: Knowing the panneau

T
value creation he Gare du Nord is an enormous station: 40,000 square meters across
five levels, with over 500,000 people who set foot into the station
each day. Over 500 trains arrive and depart from the early morning
to the last train around midnight, in addition to the metro and commer-
cial rail. Every meeting I had with Boubacar or Amadou was a new lesson
in how to efficiently navigate the station. They illustrated how well they
knew itunlike myselfby taking shortcuts and watching me scramble.
They knew where the police would be at various times of the day, and
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which corners remained uncontrolled and unoccupied. One day as we
took a series of escalators from the basement commuter rail platforms to
the international Eurostar terminal on the second floor, Boubacar
pointed out newly installed surveillance cameras (there are over 500 in
and around the station) between greeting dozens of people he knew.
While he occasionally would see friends and kin from his village on their
way to catch the metro, most of these people were other young West
Africans whom he had met through the Gare du Nord networks. He had
a precise social map of the station space, and knew where different groups
hung out. He incorporated the rhythms of the station so that he could
walk through immensely crowded spaces with ease. When I lost my
metro ticket to exit the station, he helpfully took me to the turnstile that
was always broken, where I could pass through without a ticket. His
display of this local knowledge is part of a competitive performance that
forms the adventure man.
Many of the young West Africans I spoke to about their activities at
the Gare du Nord told stories that implied that this knowledge was the
basis for successful interactions. They knew that travelers were likely to
get lost and ask for directions. For instance, on a cold evening in 2010,
a young woman who had arrived from the airport to take the TGV to a
town in northern France, asked a newcomer called Abdou if he knew
when the next train was leaving. He blinked and stumbled over his
words, to the pleasure of his comrades standing nearby, who started Knowing the
laughing. By the time he turned back to the woman, another young man
was whisking her away, pointing at the departure board and the line that panneau was
would go to that town. Abdou shook his head in frustration and his new not only about
friends laughed, telling him that in order to be successful here he needed
to know the panneau (the departure board) by heart before trying to meet mastering
women or anyone else at the station.
The departure board is an exalted form of knowledge for these adven- the French
ture men because it represents the official infrastructure of the French transportation
long-distance and high-speed train system. The people they sought to
meet the most came from farther afield than the left bank, making systemand thus
the metro and commuter rail an important but lesser form of performed
infrastructural knowledge. For other station users, the old-fashioned French ways
departure board with its manual click and shuffle seems to embody
of classifying
the time-space of railway journeys and the nostalgia of nineteenth
century modernity signified by this sensory experience (Schivelbusch spaces and
1987). Knowing the panneau was not only about mastering the French
transportation systemand thus French ways of classifying spaces and relationshipsbut
relationshipsbut about knowing how to mobilize that knowledge in
about knowing
social interactions.
The moment of Abdous embarrassment did not only give his friends how to mobilize
an opportunity to denigrate a potential rival; it was an important teach-
ing moment. Abdou went to work memorizing the departure board. It that knowledge in
was a moment of cultural transmission, which helps assure the continuity
of the station community of West African migrants and the infrastruc- social interactions
ture produced through the Gare du Nord method. The panneau and the
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metro maps became the emblem of this networked knowledge; Boubacar

would quiz me on which train lines went to which northern towns just to
display how much better he knew the panneau. In doing so,
he displaces the emblematic Paris and its fancy neighborhoods that
often take the center of immigrant representation of the French capital
(see Mabanckou 2013; Newell 2012). He replaces it with a vision that
attaches value to a place not because of its own characteristics but
because of the connections that meet there. Being a non-place in
Marc Augs formulation (1995) was the condition for it to become
meaningfulnot as a lieu de memoire rooted in memories and identities
(as in Augs metro [2002]), but instead as a hub of communication
channels; that is, as a set of relations.

Money and the station as work placement

agency, bank, and Western Union

I
n mid-2013, Boubacar was laid off from a long-term work contract as
a skilled construction worker. His kin at the immigrant dormitory
had been little help, as the only connections they had were for
underpaid unskilled labor. He saw that as going backward, and thus as
an interruption in his forward-moving trajectory. He approached old
friends at the station, other West African immigrants who had their
own networks beyond his village and kin community, which widened
his chances of finding a suitable position. In addition, he said, they
knew the Gare du Nord method and so would be more able to help. In
part thanks to his reputation as a generous friend and good worker, in
three weeks he found a decently paid temporary position on a job
laying the groundwork for a new high-speed rail line in the southwest
of France.
Such robust networks and a central place to enact them have
replaced the role of official temporary work agencies concentrated in
the stations neighborhood. As Boubacars new job suggests, however,
these networks do not create parallel markets on the margins but
engage with emblematic state infrastructure building.2 The West Afri-
cans value-generating activities around the Gare du Nord rely on the
ability to mediate between the sectors known as informal (that is, not
officially regulated by the French state) and formal (state-regulated)
that coalesce around the station.3 In particular, the station acts as
a hub where West African immigrants, in the aftermath of an inter-
national economic crisis, use the social tools at their disposal as
adventurers to meld French temporary work regimes with their own
labor networks, transnational banking with informal microfinance,
and kin-based money transfer and accounting with transfer systems
that bypassed kin networks (no one used official money transfer for
remittances).
The transformation of the station into a lateral work agency provides
a paradigmatic example of how the Gare du Nord becomes a hub
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for value creation through the combination of social and material
infrastructures, regulated temporary work, and railway development.
Despite the fact that few West Africans live, work, or shop in the
immediate neighborhood, the station became a central meeting place for
West African men. While the design of the railway and especially com-
muter lines into a centralized model that unite at this transport hub
accounted for part of this phenomenon, it was developed thanks to the
large number of temporary work agencies specializing in construction and
located in the few blocks surrounding the station. Amadou, who fre-
quented the station for over ten years, recalls a time when temporary
work agencies would come to the front square in the early morning to
recruit West Africans as day laborers. He met some of his friends at the
station, and says that for a period in the 1990s and 2000s, the station
became known as an easy place to find jobs that the French dont want.
If day laborer recruiters once accepted unskilled workers who spoke little
French, today the penury of work and continued influx of new migrants
has made it so that they no longer come to the station, and have much
more stringent requirements. Now, said Boubacar, Its become like
everything else. You have to go in with your big applicant file (dossier),
and your CV, and your diplomas or they wont take you. These new The non-
requirements, even when jobs are available, have dissuaded many of the
men I spoke to at the Gare du Nord from bothering with the temporary hierarchical social
work agencies. Yet the station remains a node in migrant labor networks, infrastructure at
as over the years a lateral network has been built up based on the other
principal way to find a position: through recommendations, in which the station
trusted workers suggest their family members and friends to current
bosses. combines these
Boubacars return to the Gare du Nord method even after getting
two ways of
papers and a long-term work contract points to the way that the chan-
nels of this social infrastructure work through reciprocity and media- getting work
tion. Men did not only need to be able to go there to find jobs, they
also had to be good mediatorsbetween formal and informal sectors of and becomes
work, as well as between their kin and their friends at the station. In
surprisingly
a way, this crossroads operates as its own lateral temporary work agency,
uniting two hierarchical strategies for finding work: quasi-formal efficient at a
(temporary work) and traditionally informal (patronage and family)
networks. The non-hierarchical social infrastructure at the station moment of
combines these two ways of getting work and becomes surprisingly
efficient at a moment of economic crisis, when the formal economic crisis,
labor market in France is increasingly unreliable. In addition to work when the formal
agencies, the community also allows these precarious migrants to set
up solidarity banks similar to the widespread practices among village labor market
associations in France (see Daum 1998). Fourteen of the men I spoke
to at the Gare du Nord participated in some kind of independent in France is
micro-savings system that offered an alternative to the official banking increasingly
system and to the system that operated among members of a single
village or ethnic group. Instead, their affiliation and trust were based unreliable
on the networks they established at the Gare du Nord. Unlike most
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 City & Society

caisse communes (community banking) of West African men, micro-

saving here was premised on the right amount of social distance.
Unlike
Many studies of African immigrant transnational ties and trading net-
most caisse works illustrate how they are organized according to hierarchies of
affiliationkin, village, ethnicity, religion, nation (MacGaffey and
communes Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000; Stoller 2002; Whitehouse 2012) The adven-
turers, however, purposefully sought ties with those outside of their
(community
immediate families, towns, and ethnic groups while basing a common
banking) of West understanding and trust on West African cultural repertoires of belong-
ing, migration, and obligation.4
African men, While the Gare du Nord method provides alternative models of
solidarity and reciprocity through the caisses communes, participants still
microsaving here relied on ethnic idioms and thus a degree of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld
was premised on 2005) as well as social distance. One such group was comprised of four
regulars at the station: Boubacar, Amadou, Diallo, and Bakarythree
the right amount Malian men and one Senegalese of differing mother tongues and
ethnicities. They had no common relatives, and their home villages were
of social distance all several hundred kilometers apart. Their respective families disap-
proved of such ties, a disapproval often expressed through ethnic stereo-
types. For example, Boubacars Soninke family said they would forbid
their daughters to marry non-Soninke men because those men would not
work; Peul communities (like Diallos) insisted that Khassonke men
(Amadou) were feticheurs, that is, animists and thus not true Muslims;
while Bamana elders (Bakarys fathers family) said Soninke men were
too obsessed with money and thus bad marriage partners. While the
adventurers found the key to their belonging in the community of Gare
du Nord and in many ways transcended these boundaries, ethnic stereo-
types nonetheless found their way into many boundary-making jokes
and discussions at the station. These regulars used them to interpret the
behavior of their fellows, especially when someone deviated from the
values of solidarity and reciprocity. This was true, for example, when
Amadou reneged on his responsibility to the caisse commune, dropping
out before he had repaid what he had taken and moving to the country-
side with a young woman he met at the station. Thats so Khassonke!
(Cest du Khassonke, a!), exclaimed Diallo, and Boubacar added,
Theyre all sweet talkers, but they dont speak the truth.
Despite the potential problems due to unaccountability, these initia-
tives provided common pools of money that helped immigrants gain
autonomy both from French migrant networks and from family back
home, which often both acted as negative social capital draining
migrants resources (see Whitehouse 2012). As a kind of investment
diversification, it allowed them to envision projects outside of the
monthly village collection, to which they also contributed. In addition,
more than half of the young men (17) I got to know at the station were
younger brothers (often of their fathers second wives), who did not yet
have enough sway in their respective family structures to define how the
money they contributed would be spent. Finally, the circle of redistribu-
tion created by the caisses communes enabled them to operate as patrons
298
 Adventures in
Infrastructure
back home. For example, Diallo used the money collected during one
cycle to help his cousin come to France. His cousin became part of
relations of obligation, and in a wider sense Diallos family became linked
to the men at the Gare du Nord. Boubacar even ended up visiting
Diallos dying mother in Bamako before her own son was able to make
the return trip. Insofar as the stations solidarity banks depended on their
detachment from kin and village networks, the types of obligation they
built helped to forge new social relations and a category of belonging
based on the moral attributes of the adventurer and his capacity to switch
between reciprocity systems.
Migrant remittances help the station networks enter into circuits of
credit, obligation, and exchange in villages. As studies of such remittance
and migrant development practices illustrate (Cliggett 2005; Cohen
2011; Trager 2005) , they carry with them a host of moral connotations
that necessitate translation between multiple circuits of exchange (Bloch
and Parry 1989; Groes-Green 2014). Remittance that provides prestige
and greater resources may also transform the workings of social repro-
duction. Money transferred through migration has been shown to alter
village hierarchies and create generational conflict (Quiminal 1991) and
inequality (kesson 2013) as migrants used remittance and development
projects (such as house building) not only to maintain relationships from
afar but to maintain distance (Freeman 2013). In addition to these effects
on villages and family ties, inventing remittance strategies allows the
adventurer to show his worth and creates new relationships outside of the
kin-to-kin networks in which remittance is usually analyzed.
For most immigrants in France, there are three options for transferring
euros to their families: via foreign banks with French locations, through
companies like Western Union, or through friends and family. For
West Africans, most money gets transferred through a highly developed
version of what one person, astutely observing its formality, called Malian
Western Union, which operates through immigrant dormitories. None
of the men I spoke to at the station had ever used Western Union or
similar companies. African banks played an important part in accumu-
lation of individual migrants and were reserved for saving larger
amounts that would eventually be transferred back to purchase land,
buy a house, or retire. Migrants rarely talked about such bank accounts,
but for the eight (of 23) who had such accounts, they were crucial
because they enabled them to make purchases and transfer money
without having to go through their family. They combined such poten-
tially asocial strategies focused on accumulation with excessive gift
giving when they returned in person, which as Sasha Newell (2012)
illustrates performs both largesse and the migrants successful accession
to European modernity.
For the monthly transfers (like fellow West Africans in France, most
of these men reported sending back between 100 and 150 euros per
month while employed), even the Malian Western Union was seen as
a potential sponge on their resources (cf. Whitehouse 2012). Although
Bakary claims he would have given the same amount each month
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 City & Society

anyway, he preferred to avoid the immigrant dormitories of his family by

trying to find other people through the station who would transfer money
for him because he could better manage how the money would be spent
without bothering with kin intermediaries and their taxing obligations.
While he and Boubacar admitted that this was risky, he added that it
sufficed to know people well enough to distinguish those who were
trustworthy from those who would cheat you. Boubacar said he learned
that discernment ability from his grandparents in the village. That
capacity, part of what he called knowing how to be a real adventurer,
allowed him to skirt those kinship networks that articulate the transfer
through Malian Western Union. In fact, I became part of this transfer
infrastructure when Boubacars cultivation of a working relationship
with me served this purpose for him. When I went to Mali, he gave me
500 euros to convert into CFA (West African francs) and bring to his
family. Through his involvement with my research, he created a channel
to transfer money without going through official serviceswhether of
the formal marketplace or of the kinship ties in immigrant dormitories.
Furthermore, the act of transferring money and ones diverse abilities in
that domain did not only serve functional ends related to social repro-
duction or transformation, but became a central marker of the adventurer
subject able to deploy the Gare du Nord method.

Exploiting Infrastructural Gaps

A
s a central hub, the Gare du Nord now connects northern Europe
and France with the Parisian landscape. Hundreds of trains each
day must not only find their way into the station, but passengers
must find their way out and be connected to the surrounding landscape
(see Figure 2). While there are several formal methods for achieving this
transfer, most of them are cumbersome and slow. This is the gap where
many of the adventure men are operating, creating connections that

Figure 2. Boubacar (left) in front of the Gare du Nords new entrance, June 2011. Photo by the
author.
300
 Adventures in
Infrastructure
allow exactly for those transfers. Getting a taxi at the Gare du Nord can
be a pain. As at train stations around the world, there are informal
economies that offer tourist services, such as off-the-books porters and
taxi drivers. Driss, an older Senegalese man without French working
papers noticed that being a porter was a good strategy, especially because
the station offers almost no porter service and has only a few luggage
carriers despite its high long-distance train and airport passenger traffic.
He requisitioned one of the few SNCF (national railway) luggage carriers
and offered his services to people coming off the Eurostar, Thalys, and
TGV trains. He then asked for whatever his client wanted to give
himsometimes two euros, sometimes twenty. Although the luggage
carrier was meant for people to use themselves, he was able to spot a gap
in the channel that transferred people from train, to station, to the larger
city and find a solution. The SNCF badge on the trolleys offered an added
layer of trust for potential clients, and Driss was able to carve out a space
to survive in the city, integrating with the transportation infrastructure
and exploiting its insufficiencies.
His evaluation and exploitation of the systems lacks, however, were
not enough to make him successful at it. He had to be adept at building
the social ties that would allow him to operate without being harassed by
anyone for taking over territory, and to be protected against anyone who
would try to take the trolley and do the same. Furthermore, he had to be
able to escape the notice of station workers and railway police, who
bothered him for using SNCF property, which involved enlisting
others to warn him. A customer service employee at the SNCF called
Driss a cheater for using the luggage carts, echoing the way Sarkozy
described the instigator of the station riot in 2007. Despite this, Driss
operated continually and successfully. The need for creating such social
connections is thrown into relief by the situation of an older Algerian
woman who did the same thing. Driss was able to convince the others
that she was cheating customers and asking for exorbitant amounts of
money, threatening to run away with their bags if they did not pay up.5
The woman was perceived as crazy and socially isolated. She was more
apt to be stopped by the police than was Driss, and often saw her work
halted by other station regulars. Although she also used the SNCF trolley
and tried to exploit the same gap, her social isolation made her work
much more difficult and precarious.
In addition to being socially adept and making the connections that
would allow Driss to build necessary social capital to continue his
operations, he had to know the station and its exits by heart. In order to
bring material and social infrastructure together to create value, then,
certain types of skills and attributes are needed, including charisma,
spatial knowledge, social capital, and the cleverness to see potentially
novel channels in the well-worn routes made by official conduits. This
ensemble of skills comprise the Gare du Nord method, and illustrate
that phatic labor often must be coupled with charisma and networks of
the adventurer to be successful and maintain the channels opened up by
people like Driss.
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 City & Society

Conclusion

I
n the wake of the 2007 riot at the Gare du Nord in which Africans
were perceived as being the main participants, one station shop
employee accused Africans of transforming the station into their
country. I heard this common sense understanding of the station as a
social scene from station users on several occasions during my fieldwork.
The difference between this notion and the African hub illustrates the
divide between authoritative ways of configuring how channels ought to
be built (and between whom), on the one hand, and model that emerges
at the Gare du Nord, on the other. At a lunch in Chantilly, a small town
north of Paris whose train lines come into the Gare du Nord, a retired
white Frenchman asked me about my research. When I told him about
the Gare du Nord, he chortled and replied, Ohla! La Gare du Nord!
Plutt la Gare des Noirs, nest-ce pas? (Oh my, the Gare du Nord! More
like the Gare of Blacks, isnt it?). When I told Boubacar about what the
man had said, he told me that of course, as everyone knew, French people
were racist, but that more importantly the man was wrong and that his
statement proved how little he knew the station. He said that it would be
worthless to spend so much time in the station if it were really about
Africans or blacks only. Its potentiality came rather from its central
location within transportation networks and the large amount of diverse
circulation that went through it each day. But in order to use that
potential, they had to master this complex arena and its social world
enough to intervene into it.
Acquiring knowledge about French traditions, learning interactional
norms, and gaining the ability to communicate in French are often seen
as part of the integration process in which foreigners become citizens.
Implicitly assumed within this integration model is that Africans must
For West Africans leave their own community and values. For West Africans at the station,
French linguistic skills and social knowledge are not about a linear path
at the station, to identity or citizenship, but about expanding channels and relations.
Infrastructural know-how thus overturns presumed hierarchies based on
French linguistic
assimilation, which define Africans as marginal actors who need to
skills and social assimilate French ways of acting and knowing. Instead, as Boubacar said
to me several times, For us, the Africans, we know the Gare du Nord by
knowledge are heart and its not complicated. For you and for the police, its compli-
cated, but not for us. The Africans know all of this, everyone has his
not about a linear
place, we understand that. His claim here involves remaking the hier-
path to identity archy based on expressly African forms of knowledge and mastery. The
Gare du Nord method illustrates, however, that these African forms are
or citizenship, but more about the emphasis on multiple types of knowledge and the ability
to enable encounters and be good cultural translators than on any tra-
about expanding ditional values imported from the village.
channels and The Gare du Nord method requires infrastructural know-how, and
its not an easy site to master. To be successful at building channels from
relations the station by cultivating encounters with people outside of their com-
munities, West Africans like Amadou, Driss, Boubacar, and Diallo had to
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Infrastructure
know the space and to put that knowledge into practice. There were
many moments in which successful social interaction at the station, a key
part of the Gare du Nord method, necessitated infrastructural mastery
that did not only include knowing the networks that converged upon the
station, but also understanding the social make-up of the station popu-
lation, how people moved through the station, and what interactions had
potential. Being a good adventurer also included embodied performance
and linguistic ability that made some men smooth-talkers (beau-
parleurs). Language ability in French had nothing to do with assimilation
but was part of the adventurers capacity to act as the merchants of
infrastructuremiddlemen, translators, and cultural brokerswho
could put to use visible, state-centric infrastructure while also involving
new actors in the informal lateral connections that they were in the
business of making.
Through this process, they transform the space into an Africanas
well as a French and Europeannode. Concretely, they do this by
creating channels that connect the networks of African life in Paris,
from the many immigrant dormitories to the West African banks, to the
hairdressers of Chteau dEau metro station, to the housing projects of
the suburbs. Beyond Paris, their phatic labor connects the community
of the Gare du Nord to the villages of the Senegal River Valley. In the
face of political and legal marginalization, migrant groups create social
worlds through infrastructural practice. They do so not principally by
claiming a place as their own and transforming that space, but through
the management of its connection to other sites and social relationships.
The method of the Gare du Nord makes this train station into a stop
along a route, significant and productive because of the channels that
meet there and those that can be creatively formed through state infra-
structure and its gaps.

Notes
Acknowledgements. The Social Science Research Council, Oberlin Col-
leges H.H. Powers Travel Grant, and the Harvard University Center for
African Studies supported this research. I am indebted to the many
people who shared their time and stories with me during my fieldwork in
France and Mali, for whom pseudonyms have been used throughout.
Baha Niakate provided invaluable research assistance and support
throughout the project. I would like to thank Sasha Newell, Louisa
Lombard, Jatin Dua, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, and the anonymous reviewers
for City and Society for useful feedback on drafts.
1
This method has some parallels to the standard French notion of a
Systme Da generalized set of tactics used to get by in France (the D
is for se dbrouiller, to get by or take care of things) and to circumvent
bureaucratic and other societal rules (see Reed-Danahay 1993:225).
Unlike that system, however, the method here is based more on the
capacity to build social ties while on the move than on an individuals
capacity for rule bending.
303
 City & Society
2
The reliance on temporary labor to build the types of foundational
infrastructure that has long symbolized French modernity, however, also
suggests an overall flexibilization or informalization of the state sector,
in which employment in state services is more and more flexible, pre-
carious, and privately managed (for more on how this change has devel-
oped in France, see Appay 2010).
3
See Elyachar 2003:576 for an ethnographically -grounded critique of
separation between informal and formal sectors.
4
The migrants shared Muslim religious commitment was part of
these cultural repertoires, though it was not codified or explicitly stated
in the way in which Stoller (2002) reports for Hausa and Songhay traders
in New York City.
5
On at least two occasions I was able to verify this claim when I saw
disgruntled clients angry that she had requested 20 euros for taking their
bags from the inside of the station.

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