ancient cities

54 Banlieue
à loyer modéré). French workers from Paris and
the province lived there first, but there was an
eventual involuntary conversion to relative majorities
of immigrant workers, many from former
colonies, despite the fact that laws stand against
the concentration of more than 15 percent of a
given group in order to explicitly prevent the creation
of urban ghettos such as those in the United
States, something deeply feared and disdained by
the French. Originally, the heavy concentration of
the French working class, many coming from other
regions of France and Europe, led to the appearance
in certain banlieues of the so-called red banlieue,
where the communist and socialist mayors
were often elected. According to some hypotheses
this hegemony changed after the Communist Party
failed to incorporate the large arrival of new immigrants
into its local agenda and thus lacked their
complete support. What the French failed to see is
that social networks, unemployment, and solidarity
bring underrepresented groups together to survive
strong labor market discrimination, spatial
segregation, and social exclusion.
Borders of Distinction and Exclusion
In 1943 the idea of the boulevard périphérique, an
expressway around the city, was conceived with
the explicit purpose of making sure than the
boundary between Paris and the growing banlieue
would be clearly drawn. In 1954 the project was
launched and built along HBMs in the zone formerly
reserved for the Thiers wall.
Many French banlieues still give testimony to
their past as old provincial villages that have been
engulfed by the growing metropolitan area and
thus share many a common element: train station,
public square, church, city hall, stores, restaurants,
private houses, and cités close by, with buses going
farther inside into the banlieue and with green
areas not far from reach. Day-to-day experiences
of the banlieuesards often contrast sharply with
the stereotypes held by many Parisians. The movie
La Haine (Hatred), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz,
presents a powerful metaphor but an exaggerated
representation life in the banlieue. It draws attention
to the issue of police violence and broad discrimination,
but it helps to reproduce the negative
stereotype. L’Esquive (in its English version, Games
of Love and Chance) of Abdellatif Kechiche does a
much better job of portraying the everyday life of
young banlieuesards.
In 1947 Jean-François Gravier published Paris et
le désert français (Paris and the French Desert), in
which he blamed Paris for devouring all the resources,
talent, and wealth from the whole country and, one
could add, the French colonies. This centralization
of power, influence, and resources will end in the
symbolic desertification of the whole of France
unless something is done to build industry in the
provinces and to decentralize public functions and
priorities. Even Haussmann was concerned about a
luxuries center surrounded by a proletariat ring of
workers that it could not house. Thus, more than
talking about the poverty and lack of the banlieue,
one has to talk about the overconcentration of
wealth in western Paris and the continuous gentrification
of the city. As many French thinkers have
warned, France in the twenty-first century risks
becoming a city museum for 2 million of its richest
inhabitants and to the millions of tourists who visit
it every year, oblivious to the backstage that is the
banlieue, which they perhaps see only as they pass
through it from the airport to their hotels.
Among other things, the work of sociologist
Loïc Wacquant stresses the diversity among the
different French banlieues. This is something
important to keep in mind given the differences
between western banlieues, which include areas
like La Defense, Bois Colombes, or Neuilly (where
current French President Nicolas Sarkozy was
mayor for many years), and stigmatized and heavily
populated cités, such as La Courneuve or
Sarcelles.
The lived space and experiences of the franciliens
(Parisians and banlieuesards, inhabiting the
Île de France) goes beyond obsolete political and
administrative boundaries. In the end the banlieues
are an integral part of Paris because much of its
work and daily life are done in the backstage of the
banlieue without which the Parisian front-stage
could not hold. Thus one cannot talk about the
Parisian banlieue without talking about Paris, and
in the same way one cannot talk seriously about
Paris without taking its banlieues into account; the
same holds for other major Francophone cities.
See also Favela; Ghetto; Paris, France
Ernesto Castañeda