Will Paris ever change? - Part 11

Illustration: Evie Heathcock

Part 1 of this article can be found here: https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/politics-and-society/will-paris-ever-change-part-1

Paris’ incapacity to grow upwards and outwards has meant that affordable housing is scarce in the city centre. Over time, Paris has therefore increasingly become a ‘ghetto’ for the rich: as poorer families are expelled under the strain of extortionately rising rent prices, it is only the very wealthy who remain, though obliged as they are to reside in small apartments and studios, such is the density of the city centre: in Paris there are 24,000 inhabitants per 1 km2; in Madrid there are 8,000 per 1 km2; in London there are 5000.

Of course, these statistics don’t account for the conurbation of Paris, known as Île-de-France (island of France), where some 9.6 million people reside. In fact, as of 1 January 2016, Paris was administratively amalgamated with its banlieues, or suburbs, and the city went from the relatively small size of 22 square miles to 314 square miles, officially named the Métropole du Grand Paris. Nevertheless, a stark distinction remains between ‘Paris’, and the banlieues (suburbs). While London has no solid boundary and as such merges seamlessly into the suburban sprawl of Bromley, Dagenham and Redbridge, Paris’ 20 arrondissements are delineated by the stringent parameters of Périphérique, the vast ring road that surrounds the city. Beyond this lies the banlieues.

Though banlieue linguistically refers to both the rich and poor neighbourhoods that lie beyond the Périphérique, it has culturally become a pejorative euphemism for those neighbourhoods with low-income housing projects, high proportions of immigrant families, and which are often characterised by poverty, unemployment, and violence. For all their vitality – and there is without doubt much good to come out of the banlieues, and we must not fall into an easy denigration of the banlieues that toes the line of France’s pervasive stigmatisation – the characterisations are overwhelmingly close to the truth. Etymologically, banlieue represents the symbiosis of two early modern French words: mettre au ban (to forbid or banish) and lieue (league, or around four kilometres), thereby designating this hinterland as the ‘place of the forbidden’, a physical manifestation of a stigmatised social space whose residents are at once physically and culturally excluded from society.

At the heart of the banlieues lie the cité, colossal clusters of brutalist tower blocks erected between the 1950s and 1970s to accommodate workers from North African states and former colonies who were assisting in France’s project of post-war industrialisation. These tower blocks, built facing inwards as if to emphasise their insular dislocation from the outside world, were constructed far away from community facilities and lacked the appropriate public transport to connect them. Physically and conceptually, the cités have therefore enclosed individuals and families already deprived of capital, and then exacerbated it by spatially excluding them from the affluence and wealth of the centre of Paris. Today some 4.4 million people live in such places, and amongst them, three out of five children are living under the poverty line. Unemployment in the banlieues has hovered at around 20% for the last two decades; it stands at 30% amongst the youth.

Indeed, here we can draw comparisons between the construction of the cités, and Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. In the nineteenth century, the Parisian bourgeoisie often spoke of the ‘les classes dangereuses’ (‘the dangerous classes’); if we perceive Haussmanisation as a concerted bourgeois effort to expel the popular classes from the centre of the city, then we begin to see a pattern emerging in French urban planning: a political project that asserts hegemony through the polarisation of the periphery from the centre. Whereas it was once motivated by a bourgeois disdain for the popular classes, urban planning has since been characterised by a racially infused desire to keep the ‘undesirable’ immigrant population away from Paris’ centre. In the banlieues, we therefore see a dark refrain of France’s colonial past: racial segregation only here without national borders, and instead insular, isolated high-rise projects. This is only aggravated by France’s adherence to a Republican model that minimises the politics of difference, and instead espouses a universalism that sees all citizens as equal, regardless of religion, race, gender etc. This is simply not the case, and the multicultural dimensions of post-colonial France have been denied.

Conditions have provoked riots to erupt intermittently in the banlieues since the 1980s. 2005 is perhaps the most famous, when, during three weeks of rioting, over 8,000 vehicles were burned. While seminal moments such as 2005 have illuminated the festering social crisis in France, whereby a large section of multi-ethnic peoples have been effectively excluded from the Republic’s raison d’etre of liberté, égalité, fraternité, they equally hold a pernicious latency. Above all, at the heart of the crisis in the banlieues lies a problem of perception and stigmatisation. Sensationalised images of, say, burning cars, only compound the existing perception of a conflict between the supposed rule-abiding citizens of Paris, and the perceived unruly mob in the banlieues. Nor have France’s terrorist attacks in recent years helped. The right-wing has weaponised these events as a problem somehow related to the banlieues, demonising the cités as anti-French hotspots of Islamic fundamentalism. In reality, the profiles of French jihadists do not track back to the cités; many have, in fact, come from bourgeois families. And, of course, this stigma isn’t only abstract. It prevents residents of the banlieues getting jobs and attending good schools; it invites draconian policing, racial profiling, unemployment, poverty, anger, political apathy.

The simultaneous inability of Paris to build upwards due to housing restrictions, and its inability to grow outwards due to its entrapment within the stringent parameters of the Périphérique, have engendered a stark disparity between Paris and its suburbs. Central Paris has become increasingly rarefied, characterised by architectural uniformity and upper-class, white-European homogeneity – a vestige of the past. Meanwhile, the social and spatial exclusion of the banlieues has been exacerbated by the government’s prioritisation of law and order over long-term socioeconomic and urban regeneration. Paris must take affirmative action, establishing affordable housing in the city centre and creating a continuity between its city centre and its conurbation so that the Périphérique is no longer an impenetrable class-race barrier. A more fluid boundary would allow the banlieues to benefit from the centre’s economic capital, and meanwhile Paris would no longer be hindered so glaringly by its stagnating uniformity and homogeneity.