An Outsider’s Guide to Modern Paris
Justinien Tribillon argues that Paris and banlieue are two mythical and geographical spaces that have been constructed in opposition.
When I give talks about the urban planning of Paris to a non-francophone audience, I like to start by listing the French words and expressions that attendees can come up with: from bonjour to Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?, from croissant to Je n’ai pas compris, from Moulin Rouge to banlieue. This has always fascinated me: in which other languages can you say ‘suburbs’? Would you come up with Vorort in German or sobborgo in Italian?
Paris is a myth known the world over. A global beacon of beauty, elegance, intelligence, culture, refinement, romanticism. It has been painted by the greatest, photographed by the most talented, described by the most gifted, visited by the most illustrious, loved by the grandest.
There are millions of representations of Paris across the globe: it lives in Palermo, pinned on a teenager’s bedroom wall, saving up for the big trip. In the dining room of a Mexico City retirement home. On the dashboard of a Malian taxi driver picking you up at the Modibo Keita International Airport of Bamako. Taped on the sliding toilet door of a flat in Kyoto. Hung above the clock in a train station in Kerala. Dangling from a keyring shoved in the front pocket of a backpack in Houston, Texas.
That the actual Paris, the Paris I know, is a vile, dirty, stinky, feral, exhausting, pushy, aggressive city does not matter. That it is a city of immense energy and violence, that it spits on your face, kicks you in the butt, leaves you in the gutter – all of this does not matter. Because Paris is an idea, a dream, a desire.
We rarely acknowledge that the banlieue of Paris is a mythical space too. It is more remote, allusive, less tangible than postcard Paris. It is made of an artistic blur, mostly negative, that usually includes high-rise modernist towers, the characters of La Haine (1995) and Athena (2022), violence and cars on fire, or even the association of the ‘no-go zones’.
When using the word banlieue, we – may that ‘we’ be from France or from any country in the world – rarely include the posh suburbs, the likes of Neuilly-sur-Seine in the west and Saint-Maurice in the east, or the modest, often patched-up detached houses that constitute the vast majority of Paris’s banlieue urban fabric. In French, banlieue is often used as a singular instead of a plural, removing the diversity of architectures, socio-economic contexts, histories and communities who live there. The banlieue is a single entity, a block. Finally, the word banlieue is often used with a possessive – it is Paris’s banlieue, a territory of 10 million souls acting as a servicing excrescence for the city proper of 2.5 million.
Paris and banlieue are two mythical and geographical spaces that have been constructed in opposition. Their histories are entangled, to form a complex mass made of design choices, social policy, colonialism, immigration, administrative rulings, models of policing and ‘peacekeeping’, fear and hatred. The opposition between Paris and the surrounding suburbs crystallises around a specific space: the Zone. This borderland, an in-between space that divides the outer limits of Paris and the inner boundaries of the banlieue, creates a stark spatial demarcation between the ‘in’ and the ‘out’, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, Paris and the Other. To understand Paris, you need to hear the voices of the Zone.
In French, Paris proper is referred to as Paris intramuros, a Latin expression meaning ‘within the wall’. Since the late nineteenth century, the outer edges of Paris proper have been weaponised to mark off the bourgeois city from its working-class suburbs. For instance, from the 1840s until the 1920s, a two-hundred-metre-deep military wall and a series of forts surrounded the city; from 1790 until 1943, a tax on goods was levied upon entering Paris; and from the 1840s until 1940s, an in-between area with complex legal status hosted informal housing, light industries, cabarets and theatres all around the limits of the city.
The majority of the Zone was cleared by the Vichy regime to build the ring road, with portions of it surviving well into the 1970s. Constructed between 1956 and 1973, the Boulevard Périphérique itself is the epitome of the technocratic urban planning of the Fifth Republic, designed and erected at a time when Parisians were not allowed to elect their mayor. Indeed, from 1794 to 1977, Paris was the only French city under tutelage from the state. It was headed by a prefect, a civil servant appointed by the national government, for fear that a mayor backed by the people of Paris would be too powerful and uncontrollable. Indeed, the last one had ruled for just a few months when the Parisians revolted against the national government during the Commune of 1871.
The space of Paris is therefore layered with the decrees, policies and laws, imposed not by democratically elected mayors, but by civil servants, prefects, ministers, kings and presidents. Infused with moral principles, political motives, racism and lucre, Paris is made of prejudices and intolerance for its people.
Plans to turn the Zone into a new ‘green belt’, in connection with the Summer Olympics of 2024 and the cortege of money poured into new accommodations, roads and other infrastructure, together with the vast construction programmes of new métro lines across the Paris region, will further densify the urban fabric of Paris. It will reduce commuting times, provide new homes and increase the accessibility of some districts and suburban towns that took longer to reach from central Paris than many provincial towns with high-speed train connections. It will also increase tremendously the price of real estate, pricing out other sections of French society.
The Olympics, the new métro, will change the geography of Paris – it will contribute to expanding the urban area, finally pushing further away the boundaries of a city whose symbolic space has not changed since the nineteenth century. But the Zone will not disappear.
The belts of Paris will not disappear. Because the social and political matrix of the city, its deep infrastructure, will not change. The Zone will move, it will morph, and the strategies of exclusion that have made Paris the city it is today will repeat, fuelled by a renewed logic of neoliberalism that has become the prevalent mode of city planning. The spatial design of Paris will remain connected to the making of the Other, articulated to fabricate an opposition between an idealised ‘us’ and an imagined ‘them’. The journey of the Zone continues.
— An edited excerpt The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris by Justinien Tribillon
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]
