Grounds in Disarray: Social Housing, and the Open and Public Spaces of Parisian Suburbs
In March 2022, a civilian, driving a stolen car, was fatally shot by the police in the suburb of Servan, a commune of Seine Saint Denis, a mere 10 miles from Paris. His death unleashed a cycle of “Violences Urbaines” (urban violence), causing unrest, car burnings, and a slew of confrontations between the police force and the youth of the cites (large social housing projects). On another occasion, French brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi killed twelve people in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, provoked by caricatures of Muhammed published by the magazine in 2015. These clashes in metropolitan Paris are often tied to the suburbs either as a place where the conflict occurs or from which its protagonists originate or the site in which the crisis unfolds. While these forms of violence are not limited to the suburbs, the threads that tie these built environments to the social, economic, and cultural crises of their dwellers, make one wonder about the extent to which the association of one to the other is real or constructed. I have embarked on a project that investigates these contentious points: I have documented these sites, walking beyond the ring road to the suburbs primarily concentrated in the north and northeast of Paris, on multiple occasions. In this photoessay, which is chosen from a larger archive, I was confronted with another, more subtle form of violence, one that I would like to call violences urbaines.
“Beyond violence and desolation, this tangle of built environment and its conflicted grounds present so much more to us. In their contradictory extremes they indicate the power and potential of architecture to foster possibilities for life.”
The violence which originates or erupts in the cités, registered materially in the spaces of the banlieues (suburbs), have made such associations unavoidable, leading us to wonder if architecture can in its physical reality, its symbolic form, and its underlying structure turn into a vessel through which violence and inequality are institutionalized? Yet a visit to any of these cités unravels slower, more destructive forms of violences urbaines, enacted against the built environment and the many inhabitants who dwell in these peripheral zones. The buildings’ aging materials, the graffiti-covered walls, the derelict grounds, and the isolated playgrounds evince that both the environment and its inhabitants are also bearing the brunt of this slow violence enacted on them. The dwellers of these projects have been afforded housing, and some of their primary needs are attended to, yet they are deprived of more complex structures for congregation, exchange and togetherness. Against broad media coverage and stigmatization associated with the banlieues, these housing projects present a unique heritage of late modern architecture. Some are already on the register of twentieth-century heritage for their architectural attributes. These projects provide shelter and welfare for a significant population who would otherwise be deprived of access to housing facilities. Parisian suburbs are noteworthy from an architectural and urban point of view, as they present a concentration of these projects outside the historic city, forming a large peripheral zone around the core.
This peripheral zone is characterized by high-density towers floating above large expanses of terrain at ground level, variously labeled as green, open, or public space. Nevertheless, despite their designation and their inhabitants’ desire for such amenities, these are inhospitable spaces; they do not feel open nor inviting to the public. Rather, they constitute an in-between landscape, between the urban and the peri-urban, liminal sites where the city proper dissolves into desolate stretches of public housing projects in the outskirts of the city. Here the transformation of the ground surface, imagined by architects, landscape architects, and planners who conceived the projects is both physical and metaphorical: it traverses distances connecting the city and the suburbs, social housing complexes and their public grounds, people and their homes, but by the same token it also segregates and filters them.
Part of a long-term research project, the photographs included in this photoessay capture both the fragility and the beauty of the peripheral zones in greater Paris. In thinking about the problem of urban violence, the photos here showcase slower and less perceptible forms of urban violence enacted on and through the built environment. Taken during the last five years, they circumambulate the Boulevard Péripherique which separates the well-defined city from its amorphous suburbs, documenting a zone where a large population, many of them immigrants with limited economical resources, resides on the fringes of the metropolis. No direct form of human violence is recorded in their depictions. Rather, they document a built environment that carries traces of the passage of time, the deterioration of materials, and the disappearance of public provisions in the open spaces due to delinquency. The photographs record the otherworldliness of these architectural projects, open spaces, and all that surrounds and fosters life in this indeterminate zone. They are intended to capture fleeting moments of beauty, depicting the contrast between the structured historic city and the lack of a variegated, rich and complex urban life, thus making tangible the tension between the monumentality of the projects and the scale and needs of the individuals who inhabit them. These grounds, in their many forms and proliferations can be activated to offer provisional and permanent functions that are integral to thriving urban or peri-urban lives.
In the photographs presented here, there are projects which contain architectural innovations and experimentations by renowned architects: Emile Aillaud, Paul Chemetov, Renée Gailhoustet, and Jean Renaudie. These projects are presented alongside others commissioned by the Bureau de HLM (habitation à loyer modéré, acronym for affordable housing in France) and municipal entities, which are architecturally less significant but equally prominent in their scale and prevalence. A central theme of my research is the different formulations of the notion of ground surface that appears in some of the projects built between 1945 and 1975. A closer examination magnifies the differences between intentional gestures, experimental moves, and attempts in combining urban, landscape, and architectural elements at once. Contrasted with less visionary projects that simply provide shelter, these projects present their authors’ attempts at creating whole environments. While those projects manifest success to different extents in breaking down the scale and creating a layered structure of interaction between the individual and the collective, the idea of the ground, both as a physical reality that connects the two and as a metaphor that pronounces the need for such connection, is present in many of the spaces I visited. In my visits I have witnessed moments of sheer beauty, extreme contrasts, and gentle tenderness. Beyond violence and desolation, this tangle of built environment and its conflicted grounds present so much more to us. In their contradictory extremes they indicate the power and potential of architecture to foster possibilities for life. They also exhibit the limitations of envisioning mono-functional environments that fail the other needs of their inhabitants. If we are to do anything with this late modern heritage in light of societal and climatic crises that surround us, straddling these grounds is a necessary first step.
These photos are mere indications of the complexity of the Parisian metropolis, one that deviates from the image of Paris in the collective imaginary. More empathic representations of this other Paris, which has long been characterized with broad brush strokes, have become manifest in film, photography, and music revealing a built environment worth understanding and thoughtful reconfiguration. In order to confront the collective impact of the complex climatic and societal forces today, we need to recognize our agency, as architects, landscape architects, and urban designers, in making sense of the complex, often problematic, yet remarkable heritage of late modernism. In so doing, we can trace the slow and steady erosion of many forms of urban violence, both taking place within and on these complexes. Starting with a careful analysis and an empathic gaze to understand these environments is a first step in telling these stories.
