MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, I spent a year teaching English to high school students in Paris. The school was in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy neighborhood barnacled on the western border of central Paris, whose mayor at the time was a rising star of right-wing politics named Nicolas Sarkozy, set to win election a few years later as the sixth president of the Fifth Republic. Sarkozy’s children attended the school, which was filled with bored rich brats enduring the chore of formal education before they cruised into plum positions at firms owned by their parents, their friends’ parents, and their parents’ friends.
I arrived in Paris, at the age of seventeen, a virgin. I left Paris, at the age of eighteen, a virgin. I stayed on the school campus, in a whistling old room with hardwood floors and no toilet, and ate dinner in the basement canteen with various members of the maintenance staff who also lived on-site, almost all of whom were unfailingly friendly and eager to chat with this strange Francophone teenager from the Antipodes. My dining companions warned me about one co-worker who was, they said, troubled, strange, a loose cannon—a kind of doomer incel, I gathered, avant la lettre. The incel, a short guy in his twenties who seemed perpetually in need of a shower, insisted on calling me “Aaronne,” with a concluding double n–e, which gave my name a feminine aspect, and he took advantage of any occasion on which he spotted me to practice his English. One weekend, I crossed his path as he was exiting the school courtyard in his ancient Renault Clio on the way to the Bois de Boulogne, the vast forested park south of Neuilly. He stopped and sprang from the car.
“Aaronne! Aaronne,” he began, before switching to English, his speech emerging in staccato spurts. “If you want—to see a bitch—with a cock—and tits—I take you to the Bois de Boulogne. Five minutes—we are there. Pas de problème.”
He flashed a big toothless grin, waiting for me to accept this generous offer to join him on his adventure in genital observation. I paused, frozen in virginal shock, then answered in English, deliberately speaking as quickly as possible in the hope that he would not understand me. “Oh, that’s a very kind offer for which I am most grateful, but unfortunately I am otherwise indisposed and will have to defer to another occasion!”
His smile grew wider. “Okay, we go now.”
Eventually I declined, in French, and he drove off, disconsolate. From that day, in my terrified and unconsciously transphobic seventeen-year-old mind, the great dark wood of Boulogne came to symbolize the peril lurking beyond Paris’s center.
Will the banlieue ever exert the same magnetism over visitors to Paris as the limestone center?
My knowledge of the city’s geography expanded as the months unrolled. Though technically an inner suburb of Paris, Neuilly is often grouped with the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements to its immediate east; when considered together, this triangle forms the most affluent residential area in France. “Neuilly? C’est vide, plat, et ennuyeux,” one of the teachers announced to me one day. Neuilly is empty, flat, and boring. And he was right: Even by the monotonous standards of Haussmannian Paris the neighborhood was uncommonly drab, a fastidious faubourg of untouchable gardens, hosed façades, and rich-guy bistros whose streets were sedately active during the day then dictatorially quiet at night. (The sole exception was Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul [1953] in the neighborhood’s southern panhandle, a pair of buildings so interesting and important to the history of architectural modernism that no one in Neuilly ever talked about them.) Extreme wealth had an aural power, swaddling Neuilly in a protective hush. The whole neighborhood seemed insulated from the city beyond—from both the twinkling promise of central Paris to Neuilly’s east and the troublesome banlieue, with all its neglect and misery, that lay further afield. Neuilly may have been boring, but at least it was safe, the teachers kept reassuring me: Their disdain for the school’s dull, privileged enclave was nothing compared to their scorn for the lawless zone of high-rises and burning cars in Paris’s outer-suburban north and east. On a school excursion to Monet’s house in Giverny, one teacher asked me if I had any favorite French films. I mentioned La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz’s influential 1995 study of teen boredom and rebellion in the Parisian banlieue. The teacher snorted. “C’est un truc de bougnoule ça—c’est de la merde!” Arab bullshit, was the verdict.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
Life in the suburbs, for the many teachers who lived there, meant life in the comfortable western suburbs of Paris, a middle-class zone of free-standing homes, cheerful village squares, and plentiful access to bread. By virtue of their distance from the kernel of Paris, these neighborhoods were suburban, but economically, culturally, and ideologically they were very much not “la banlieue” as it was understood in the collective French psyche: a subtle but crucial distinction. There were no other young people on the school’s teaching staff; the students were the same age as me, if not older, but viewed teachers as a lesser species. Sensing my solitude, various senior staff members occasionally invited me to dine at their homes on weekends. I would take the RER, the city’s main commuter rail network, across the snaking Seine and out to places like Chatou and Rueil-Malmaison and Le Vésinet, where I would enjoy polite three-course dinners that always included a sensible amount of wine and impasto smears of soft washed-rind cheese to finish. “Vous êtes de Sydney même?” the teachers or their spouses would often ask me. Are you from Sydney itself? Sydney proper? This always struck me as an odd question: The center of a city and its suburbs were always, to my mind, part of the same urban organism. There was no “Sydney même,” no Sydney itself; there was just Sydney. Who would insist on such a psychotic demarcation between the city “proper” and its sprawl?
In time I understood that, for many Parisians, “Paris même” expressed the only part of the city to which the name “Paris” could properly be ascribed. Everything about the cultural geography of Parisian conversation seemed designed to funnel its inhabitants to the center, and I unwittingly complied: Leaving these dinners, I returned to Neuilly ravenous for “Paris itself,” for its radial bombast and density of experience, and on my days off I spent hours traversing the arrondissements of the core in increasingly antic circles, desperate to take it all in. The suburbs? To the west, they were safe and uninteresting. To the south there lay the Bois, a zone of exciting perversion too unpredictable to risk. And to the north and to the east, to those quartiers chauds that consistently fed the panics of the nightly news bulletins? That banlieue, the real banlieue, remained a mystery.
THE FRENCH DECAPITATED their king more than two centuries ago, but their capital still has its crown fixed firmly in place. In the 1840s the French government, at the instigation of Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers, built a continuous defensive wall around the center of Paris; this sprawling bastion of ramparts and ditches was ringed by sixteen detached forts dotted throughout the urban hinterland. Many of the forts survive; the defensive wall was destroyed in the years between the two world wars. Though no longer immured, Paris today remains enrobed within layers of nomenclature. There is, most famously, the Boulevard Périphérique, a twenty-two-mile highway retracing the line of the old Thiers Wall that dirties the romance of the boulevard by associating it with the periphery, designating everything outside it as marginal to the life of the city. But beyond that high-modernist ribbon of concrete, the imagery used to describe non-central Paris turns aggressively sartorial. There are various enceintes (girdles) and ceintures (belts) immediately adjacent to the périph, including the recent revival of an old idea to surround Paris with a ceinture verte (green belt); there is the constellation formed by the city’s standalone nineteenth-century forts, jewels glinting in the suburbs; and then there are the crowns proper, the petite couronne (little crown) of the three administrative départements that encircle central Paris, and the grande couronne (big crown) of the four départements beyond the “inner” three. (Though it flirts with cultural attachment to the Parisian omphalos, Neuilly, as the easternmost suburb of the département of Hauts-de-Seine, technically forms part of the petite couronne.) Belts, concealing greenery, jewelry, crowns: The Parisian periphery dresses its king, sparing it the nudity that blights so many of the world’s other great capitals.
Yet Paris is plainly as much “la banlieue même” as “Paris même,” indeed more so if judged by population: The core only accounts for two million or so of the thirteen million souls who populate the Parisian basin. By numbers alone, the banlieue is Paris, meaning that the city is defined less by the strutters of Saint-Germain-des-Prés or the bobos of the eleventh arrondissement than it is by the Sodexo diners and Auchan goers of the metropolitan prairie. For more than half a century France’s leading planners, architects, and urbanists have strained to invest the city beyond the twenty-arrondissement snail of inner Paris with the dynamism of the photogenic center, to make it matter—politically, culturally—as much as the filigree-balconied blocks of the grands boulevards, the conspiratorial streets of the medieval core, and the imperial roundabouts of Étoile and La Bastille. But Paris refuses eccentricity: The French capital remains as insistently centripetal as efforts to decentralize it—and with it, the French state—have been historically futile. Saint-Denis, Drancy, Bobigny, and Sarcelles are not simply the names of individual suburbs in Paris’s north and east; for many Parisians they also serve as metonymies for urban dysfunction—a prejudice accelerated by blockbuster films like Dheepan (2015) and Athena (2022), in which the suburban fringe is universally portrayed as a netherworld of crumbling prefab construction, social cannibalism, and annihilating rage.
Superficially, the banlieue presents the French city at its most American, atomized and supine under the tyranny of the hypermarché and the grande surface, those retail barns that keep the kitchenettes of the suburban towers stocked with bottles of Orangina, Cristaline, and Pschitt.
It was not until the early twentieth century that French officials began to take the suburbs beyond the heart of Paris—stripped of their plurality and rendered in the singular as “la banlieue,” a unitary, undifferentiated urban excrescence emerging from “Paris même”—seriously as an object of policy. The Franco-Prussian War showed the nineteenth-century defensive wall erected around the capital to be magnificently ineffective. Eventually this masonry shield was dismantled and replaced by the périph, but its legacy endures to this day in Parisians’ use of intra muros, a Latin expression meaning “inside the wall,” and extra muros, or “outside the wall,” to designate the two faces of Paris—one endlessly romanticized, the other demeaned as an incurable embarrassment, or simply not spoken about at all. In the half-century between the decommissioning of the military enclosure and its replacement by postwar France’s great tribute to the automobile, a grimy, boglike zone of makeshift housing and polluting industry, peopled mostly by ragpickers and factory workers, took up residence on the edge of Paris proper, entrenching popular notions of the city extra muros as a place of filth and poverty. This was the “zone” from which Dr. Bardamu of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932) drew his wretchedly poor clientele, a place of “damp little piles of rubbish” incinerating until dawn, “ruined lungs,” “red wine and fatigue.” Politicians shared Céline’s bleak view of life beyond the twentieth arrondissement, denigrating the suburbs as overpopulated, chaotic, and insalubrious, “cancerous cells” threatening Paris proper.
From this anxiety emerged the first comprehensive efforts at urban planning for the région parisienne in its totality, rather than the center alone. Many of the architects, engineers, urbanists, and planning experts who contributed to this initiative shared the political class’s fundamentally oppositional view of the suburbs as a place to be feared and kept apart—both literally and figuratively—from the sanitary, bourgeois center. “The banlieue has become plethoric, overpopulated, and is now overflowing into Paris,” wrote Louis Dausset, the president of Paris’s regional planning council, in 1932. Others sensed an opportunity. The birth of Parisian planning was also the occasion for a cartographic revolution: French planners jettisoned the retrospective viewpoint that was until then the norm in French mapmaking, which involved charting the city as it already existed, for a forward-looking approach that imagined the city as it might one day be. The most influential map produced under this new regime—and the first to comprehensively present the Parisian basin—was urbanist Léon Jaussely’s 1922 plan for the extension of Paris.
Earlier maps tended to defer to the color scheme of the Lutetian limestone that gives the historic façades of the center their characteristic tint, that Parisian neutral that’s not exactly slate and not exactly butter, but—depending on the sun and the intensity of the city’s notorious grisaille—a bit of both at the same time. Jaussely, by contrast, painted his map by hand in a palette of pinks, forest greens, baby blues, and royal golds, lending it the chromatic brilliance of early Renaissance devotional art or a shimmering Klimt. The plan d’extension provides a startling portrait of a road not taken: Jaussely’s projected Paris of the late twentieth century is an intensely riverine, canalized, and integrated city, with a giant, fletching-shaped port in its northwest, annular roadways providing connection between the outer suburbs, airfields, speedways, and copious green space. Perhaps the map’s most radical innovation is what it doesn’t show: Jaussely reduced the border between the Camembert of the Haussmannian core and the outer suburbs to a barely perceptible green line and chose to depict the sedimentary slab of central Paris in the same yellow hue as the still-undeveloped (or haphazardly developed) land of the banlieue. The frown of the Seine organizing central Paris into right and left banks is still visible, but its representational power—as the aquatic symbol of “Paris même”—is diminished as it is shown to be a meander among many. Through his daring feat of cartographic projection, Jaussely essentially erased the distinction between inner and outer Paris, encouraging the map’s viewers to imagine the city as a single unit in which distinctions between the center proper and its improper fringe no longer mattered, and Haussmann’s cheese wheel was sociologically indistinguishable from its surrounding buffet.
None of Jaussely’s ideas for the city’s development ever saw the trouble of a shovel. Subsequent planning maps entrenched a mode of visually dividing the city into a distinct center and periphery: Urbanist Henri Prost’s influential 1934 blueprint for the development of the metropolitan region, for example, depicts central Paris as a thickly bordered black yolk girded by a straw-colored suburban saucer extending for miles into the distance, giving the whole city the appearance of a carcinogenic fried egg. Visualizing the history of urban development, English paper architect Cedric Price once analogized the city to an egg—boiled in ancient times, fried from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, scrambled in its modern guise. According to this schema, Prost took Paris back to the nineteenth century, a retrogression that was nevertheless its own kind of chronological scramble. What French planners probably needed was to conceive of the ovular city in the preferred national preparation: as an omelette.
The Franco-Prussian War showed the nineteenth-century defensive wall erected around the capital to be magnificently ineffective. Eventually this masonry shield was dismantled and replaced by the périph, but its legacy endures to this day in Parisians’ use of intra muros, a Latin expression meaning “inside the wall,” and extra muros, or “outside the wall,” to designate the two faces of Paris—one endlessly romanticized, the other demeaned as an incurable embarrassment, or simply not spoken about at all.
From the 1930s, the opportunity to conceive of Paris differently was irrevocably lost: The maps and plans that came in the wake of Jaussely’s early, utopian vision of a consolidated Paris all emphasize verticality, hierarchy, a strict opposition between the well-bred city and the classless banlieue. (The most aggressive plans for the modernization of Paris throughout this period, such as Jacques Lambert’s 1922 sketch for a grand 820-foot-wide avenue of sixty-story art deco towers running from the city center to Saint-Germain and the Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier’s endearingly lunatic 1925 proposal for the wholesale demolition of the inner Right Bank and its replacement with identical skyscrapers, were dismissed as practically unworkable and politically unpalatable in light of the post-Haussmannian concern for historical preservation.) A 1956 departmental map for the development of various îlots (blocks) throughout the petite couronne, for example, reheats Prost’s egg, depicting the Haussmannian yolk in gray and the surrounding suburban ring as a speckled white outer. And yet, the desire to spark the suburbs to life has never relinquished its hold over the French political establishment, whose members still subscribe—even as many of them demonize the denizens of the banlieue as “la racaille” (scum) and promise to wash troublemakers away with riot hoses, as Sarkozy famously did during an outbreak of suburban violence in 2005—to the paternalistic view that the little people out there in Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne also deserve a few crumbs of the culture and amenities available to those in the historic center.
Paris is plainly as much “la banlieue même” as “Paris même,” indeed more so if judged by population: The core only accounts for two million or so of the thirteen million souls who populate the Parisian basin.
Emblematic of the state’s never-ending project to reclaim the suburban là-bas for French modernity and progress is Banlieues (note the rather pointed plural), a photographic collection published in 1990. The photographs themselves are nothing memorable, the standard “suburban life in all its diversity and fleeting joy” carousel of empty park benches, women smiling in front of cars, priests in cluttered apartments, tough-looking kids, and old men in hats. What distinguishes the book is its introduction, a reflection on life in the banlieue written by novelist Philippe Sollers, a man who did not live in the banlieue and barely, it’s fair to assume from the introduction, ever even visited it. Over four stupendously lazy and patronizing pages, Sollers—founder of the prestigious literary journal Tel Quel, lion of the Parisian intelligentsia, friend of Derrida and Barthes—argues that the “experimental inhabitants” of the banlieue actually have it pretty good, since they are “far closer to a bourgeois member of the Parisian nomenklatura than they are to a Chinese peasant, an over-surveilled Cuban, a Palestinian stonethrower, or an African dying of hunger.” Sollers’s conclusion? Life in the banlieue was “not poverty, no” but “collective life, our future.” Cheer up, proles: Your kids might be énarques one day. Though his text now reads as obviously silly and dated, it’s continuous with a desperation among France’s elites to make the banlieue “work”—as a cultural project, as an exemplar of French excellence—that remains prevalent to this day.
SINCE WORLD WAR II, the wisdom among these elites on how best to address the “suburban question”—how best, that is, to house the capital’s poor at low cost, in a way that will promote “integration” and some form of fealty to the state—has passed through several distinct phases. Social housing, at various scales of affordability, has always been at the heart of state-led development of the banlieue. First came the grands ensembles, Soviet-scale low-income housing developments designed to domicile the millions of new arrivals who flooded into Paris after the collapse of France’s colonial empire—the insipid gray towers with which the banlieue remains most closely associated in the popular imagination today. Next, channeling a society-wide backlash against the aesthetic monotony and moribund street life of the grands ensembles, the state poured its energy into the villes nouvelles, a series of planned new towns dotted around the urban outskirts that aimed to build out the banlieue at a more human, livable scale, tailored to the post-1960s cult of “lifestyle.” Along the way there were various experiments in architectural separatism, most notably in working-class neighborhoods, just beyond the périph, controlled by the Communist Party. More recently, there has been a turn to the market, with the state playing a less decisive role in engineering the fate of whole neighborhoods and embracing something closer to the Anglosphere’s dogma of the public-private partnership. After decades of France proudly going its own way when it comes to urban design, this has made many new developments around Paris visually indistinguishable from the type of mixed-use construction you might see throughout New York, Washington DC, or other big cities of the US Northeast. Cheap cladding, the street-level disease of the fast casual food chain, and the aesthetic of the joyful prison block: The primary signifiers of new housing-and-retail projects in the US are now becoming a common sight in Paris.
For decades, getting between these disparate satellites of the post-Gaullist urban project in anything other than a car has been a real logistical challenge. Paris’s main transport networks reflect the hub-and-spoke morphology of the city’s development: The metro, the RER, and the Transilien (the lesser-known commuter train network, operated by the national rail company) form an aggressively radial system that funnels every journey across Paris through the city center. From the stacked and noiseless cars of the Transilien to the farting, manual-door single deckers of the old metro, the Parisian commuter is never allowed to forget that everything must run through the middle. However, that may be about to change. Sarkozy first proposed the idea of a separate administrative authority for “le Grand Paris” (Greater Paris) in 2007, and following the ratification of that political reordering a project is under way to build the Grand Paris Express, a vast orbital extension to the metro system that will finally link the many banlieues of the little crown to each other, reducing congestion through the historic nucleus and potentially creating a new, less insistently centralized way of Parisian life.
Will the city’s extremities, linked to each other at last by train, reanimate each other, the center, the urban whole?
The Grand Paris Express is frequently described as the largest construction site in Europe: By its completion in the early 2030s, the project will add four lines, 124 miles of track, and sixty-eight new stations to the metro’s existing network. The trains will all be driverless and travel at an average speed of 34 miles an hour; 90 percent of the new network will be underground. With its connotations of speed and scale, the very name “Grand Paris Express” evokes, in some sense, the heroic aspirations of suburban Paris’s postwar development; in the planning and publicity materials the project is clearly positioned as an extension of the Fifth Republic’s dirigiste planning legacy, and the desire to make a world-historical statement about French engineering, French design, the capacity and brilliance of the French state is everywhere apparent. Line 15, a halo connecting Paris’s nearby suburbs that in parts will loosely follow the path between several of the banlieue’s detached nineteenth-century forts, is the Grand Paris Express’s most ambitious undertaking. (There will be stations built near the forts of Aubervilliers, Issy, and Mont-Valérien, all of which are still standing.) To walk the fenced lots and excavated streets around the future stops along la quinze is to be reminded, at all moments, of the Express’s generation-defining grandeur; illustrated hoardings project the impressive transit hubs to come and the smiling commuters who will people them, promising an unprecedented era of social harmony, easy circulation, and smooth consumption in the banlieue.
Belts, concealing greenery, jewelry, crowns: The Parisian periphery dresses its king, sparing it the nudity that blights so many of the world’s other great capitals.
The Grand Paris Express’s official website includes renderings of each of the forthcoming stations. Many are predictable Javits Center–esque lightboxes of glass and steel, but a few continue the loopy legacy of the postwar planners who gave us the Choux de Créteil (1974), the post-medieval ZAC (1975–94) adjoining the royal cathedral at Saint-Denis, and the Espaces d’Abraxas (1982), Ricardo Bofill’s future Hunger Games set in Noisy-le-Grand. (ZAC, which is short for “zone d’aménagement concertée” or “development zone,” is not to be confused with its sibling acronym ZUP, which means “zone à urbaniser en priorité” or “priority urbanization zone.” Both are pronounced as full words rather than initialisms: Urban renewal in Paris is an intensely percussive affair, best understood as a series of architectural zuts, bofs, bafs, and clacs.) There’s a station that will take the form of a cave submerged under a park; one that will transport (able-bodied) commuters down a grand, spiral staircase until they reach the platforms 170 feet underground, making it the deepest train station in France; there’s even one that will pay homage, however pallidly, to Paris’s rich tradition of béton brut, a station in Drancy-Bobigny crowned by a five-story student residence whose rectangular, concrete-framed windows faintly recall the 1970s brutalist bâtiment Malraux, now the headquarters of the departmental housing authority, a half-mile away. Each station’s dedicated web page includes a short interview with the presiding architect; all the talk in these presentations is about “interconnexion,” “désenclavement” (opening up) and “décloisonnement” (decompartmentalization) of the banlieue. Never mind the unvoiced reality of expropriation and expulsion, all those residents in the super-metro’s blast zone kicked out of their homes to make way for the future; the hope shared by the potentates and functionaries of French planning is that the Grand Paris Express will inject the capital with a “new urban élan.” The great unbuttoning of Paris may finally be upon us. But what became of Paris’s costume changes of the past?
OF ALL THE HUSKS OF EARLIER experiments in innovative station design, none may be more poignant than Cergy-Saint-Christophe, the main transit hub of Cergy-Pontoise, a 1980s-era ville nouvelle fifteen miles northwest of Paris. The entrance hall, a tubular arcade enclosed, at one end, with a giant clock, is still magnificent, forty years after its inauguration. But virtuosity is in short supply in the station’s surrounding streets, a depressing collection of shuttered pharmacies, condemned hairdressers, shoe repair shops that have endured years since they saw their last shoe, empty fast food joints with English names like Food Station and Chicken Spot, and squat brick buildings so structurally unhealthy and disarticulated that many of them are covered in protective nets, giving the appearance of patients preparing for a medical procedure. The prominence of the station clock—one of the biggest in Europe—means that time is inescapable in Cergy-Pontoise, but it has not been kind to the ville nouvelle. When I visited, one recent morning, there were barely any people on the streets; in the pedestrian zone between the station and Les colonnes de Saint-Christophe (1986), the Bofill-designed housing colonnade that sits at the top of the hill plunging down toward the river Oise, construction workers attending to the diseased façades of the old-new town comfortably outnumbered residents.
Around the Bofill development the tableau was just like an Eric Rohmer film, only without the sunshine, insouciance, and all-white cast. That’s slightly misleading: It was not just white people but people of any description who were missing. The vast granite plaza that Bofill’s operatic exercise in neoclassical edification encloses was completely empty; a few of the mirrored windows in the apartment complex were open, breaking the reflected gloom of the low Parisian sky, but the whole scene was so eerily post-human that it was impossible to know whether these apertures were evidence of the building’s habitation or abandonment. As Elli et Jacno sang in “Un bonheur bien fragile,” part of the electropop group’s soundtrack for Full Moon in Paris, one of the two films from the 1980s that Rohmer set in the villes nouvelles, “On est bien seul quand on est seul à Paris.” You’re really alone when you’re alone in Paris. Wandering down the vast hillside esplanade of the Axe majeur, a ceremonial street to nowhere built by Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan that ends at the edge of an artificial lake, I eventually made it to Cergy’s old port. Port-Cergy presents, in its puzzle of twisty streets and tired free-standing homes, a kind of obverse to the modern geometric city above it. But even there, amid the boulangeries and café-bars, the whole place had the aspect of a seaside town struggling through the off-season. Cergy-Pontoise struck me as a place built for a summer that will never come.
The great unbuttoning of Paris may finally be upon us.
The new town’s modern state traduces the aspirations of its birth. Cergy-Pontoise was conceived amid the effervescence of 1970s France, when the post–May 1968 loosening of social norms and the confidence generated by the Trente Glorieuses, that thirty-year postwar stretch of unchecked economic growth and cultural reassertion, combined to turn urban ways of life into a new frontier of architectural innovation and progress. Rohmer was a particularly keen anthropologist of the villes nouvelles. In Full Moon in Paris, from 1984, the characters shuttle back and forth between Lognes, in the city’s southeast, and the historic center; in 1987’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Rohmer’s second outer-suburban feature, all the action takes place in Cergy, on the artificial lake and in the pedestrianized streets surrounding Bofill’s just-opened colonnade, where one of the characters lives in a demonstration apartment filled with sophomoric chipboard furniture. Both films dramatize the struggle to enjoy a meaningful life beyond “Paris même”; the question of the banlieue’s viability as a place for Parisians to grow and thrive is at the very core of the drama. “I don’t believe in the suburbs,” declares Octave, the feckless and dandyish friend of Full Moon in Paris’s protagonist Louise. “I need to feel like I’m in the center, in the center of a country and a city that could almost be the center of the world.” There’s a consistent play of doubles and opposites at work in both films. While Full Moon in Paris ends with Louise, freshly dumped by her boyfriend, departing her rather scholastic and severe modern apartment in the ville nouvelle and heading to the RER station, perhaps readying to give up on life in the banlieue once and for all, Boyfriends and Girlfriends alights on a rather more equivocal perspective on life in the pomo boondocks. “His beauty is banal because everyone likes him,” one of the male protagonists says of his occasional tennis partner, a drably handsome and charismatic civil servant motoring up the ladders of the French bureaucracy. The film invites us to think similarly about the ville nouvelle itself, to see it as an urban other that is no less attractive than central Paris for its comparative lack of conventional beauty. Suffused with the brightness and clarity of mid-’80s progressivism, Boyfriends and Girlfriends presents Cergy-Pontoise at its most peppy and carefree.
The more somber and interesting Rohmerian reflection on the villes nouvelles comes from L’Enfance d’une ville (The infancy of a city), a little-known documentary released in 1975. The film, also set in Cergy-Pontoise, represents Rohmer’s first sustained study of the ville nouvelle as a novel urban form, at a time when Cergy was still taking shape and did not yet boast the architectural follies for which it is now best known. It’s a remarkable exercise in sly documentarian entrapment. Presenting himself as an enthusiast of the infant town, Rohmer coaxes various urbanists and planning officials responsible for steering Cergy’s development into a string of damning revelations. One admits that no retail shops want to be on the elevated pedestrian passages that separate foot from road traffic, that many residents frequently get lost in the town’s illegible scrabble of streets, that the buildings are all a bit monotonous; another admits that it was a mistake to shove all the city’s retail stores into the main shopping center, as it’s stripped the settlement of street life; Bernard Hirsch, the brains behind the ville nouvelle’s masterplan, confesses that he only approached Bofill to contribute to the development after seeing him on TV and thinking he sounded impressive. French urbanism is nothing if not piercingly self-critical.
For more than half a century France’s leading planners, architects, and urbanists have strained to invest the city beyond the twenty-arrondissement snail of inner Paris with the dynamism of the photogenic center, to make it matter—politically, culturally—as much as the filigree-balconied blocks of the grands boulevards, the conspiratorial streets of the medieval core, and the imperial roundabouts of Étoile and La Bastille.
Superficially, the banlieue presents the French city at its most American, atomized and supine under the tyranny of the hypermarché and the grande surface, those retail barns that keep the kitchenettes of the suburban towers stocked with bottles of Orangina, Cristaline, and Pschitt. This mournful retail panorama makes it possible to picture the banlieusards locked in an endless cycle of Houellebecq dinners: institutional choucroute garnie from Carrefour, trays of microwaved linguine from Picard, perhaps even the horror of the shelf-stable Monoprix hachis parmentier. The reality is less discomfiting. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the number of immigrants who call it home, the banlieue is reliably a place where it’s possible to eat well. I’ve had phenomenal soupe Phnom Penh at the Café de Lognes in Marne-la-Vallée; I’ve enjoyed the gut-stuffing spécial—a turbocharged version of the distinctly non-Hellenic sandwich grec that is Paris’s signature drunk food, a kind of flatbread canoe heaving with sweet meat and ringed by post-impressionist splatters of sauce piquante—at Restaurant le 129 in Saint-Denis; I’ve found perfectly charred kottu amid the din of the iron spatulas at a packed Sri Lankan place in Aubervilliers. The market in Saint-Denis, housed in a radiant ferrovitreous Beaux Arts hall and reputed to be the busiest fresh produce market in the country, is probably the closest you can get in modern France to experiencing the Halles of Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris. (Zola’s Halles, of course, fell victim to the modernizing tendencies exhibited in the banlieue once those energies were redirected centrally: The nineteenth-century market halls were demolished in the early 1970s to make way for an underground shopping mall and public garden.) Here you’ll find produce tables so full and fragrant they’re virtually their own ecosystem, butchers’ windows packed with clouds of lamb kidneys and tangled sheets of tripe, fruit sellers proffering “une pomme pour monsieur, une orange pour mademoiselle” to kids as round and happy as Fragonard’s cherubs. This is the kind of democratic vernacular space with which Paris, in the foreign imagination, is rarely associated, exhibiting a vibrance far superior to the precious produce emporiums of the museumified middle.
Beyond its food and the many marvels of its residential and civic architecture, however, the attractions of the banlieue are scant. The lives of the banlieusards are every bit as rich, one assumes, as those of intra muros Parisians. But whatever excitement germinates behind the doors of the villes nouvelles and grands ensembles is not transmitted to street level. Whimsical and opulent as the structures that Bofill and company gave the Parisian banlieue may be, none of them has helped the communities to which they’re attached escape the dull fate of commuter towns everywhere: the sleepy commercial strips and depopulated sidewalks, the lack of any place to get a drink past midnight, the abiding sense that people here are just passing through, biding time, waiting to get somewhere else, that life is happening everywhere but here, in the outer-urban provinces. In 1993 banlieue dweller Annie Ernaux released a volume of vignettes about life in Cergy-Pontoise in which the main activities of the town’s residents seemed to be buying groceries (at the supermarkets in the Trois-Fontaines shopping center, still in operation) and taking the train to Paris. The book chronicles Ernaux’s frustration as she attempts to “penetrate the essence of the town” but instead finds nothing more than “shadow and light” amid the “dazzling concrete” of its pompous squares: “I have lived in the New Town for twelve years, yet I still don’t know what it looks like. I am unable to describe it, not knowing where it begins or ends; I always drive through it.” The ville nouvelle that emerges in Ernaux’s Exteriors—peopled only by shoppers, commuters, workers, litterers, and beggars—is a zone built for pure subsistence, a place to escape and retreat to once one is overcome by “Paris même.” Not much, seemingly, has changed.
DID I WANT TO SEE a bitch with a cock and tits? Will the banlieue ever exert the same magnetism over visitors to Paris as the limestone center? It seems unlikely. But will it change thanks to the Grand Paris Express? Will the city’s extremities, linked to each other at last by train, reanimate each other, the center, the urban whole? Will Paris finally realize the desire for eccentricity, a real eccentricity, so graspingly obvious in the madcap imaginings of its architects? Eh bien, c’est possible.
Down in the old Communist stronghold of Ivry-sur-Seine, where I ended my long circuit through the Parisian rim, I found ample evidence to suggest that the collision of public money and architectural ambition is not always destined to disappoint.
“The city is more vice than it is virtue,” Hirsch puckishly declares in L’Enfance d’une ville as he outlines the Cergy-Pontoise to come, a thrumming urban precinct in which opportunities for respectable grown-up hedonism—cafés, restaurants, bars, cinemas and theaters—will abound. In reality, the “vice” with which the banlieue has come to be most closely associated is of a rather more proscribed variety. At the opposite end of the Parisian perimeter to Cergy, a three-mile belt mixing public housing, private homes, and the ville nouvelle of Marne-la-Vallée stretches from Noisy to Lognes. Development across this exurban corridor is strangely disjointed, textureless: There are dwellings, shopfronts, and transport hubs, but it never feels like the whole coheres into anything resembling a city. Bofill’s state-commissioned Espaces d’Abraxas in Noisy-le-Grand opened at the beginning of the neoclassical-crazed 1980s, functioning for a time as a symbol of France’s invincible vigor (raw concrete out, ornamental columns in) amid the devaluation of the franc and the early tremors of Mitterrand’s turn to austerity. The approach to the complex takes you along an avenue lined with newer developments studded, at street level, with restaurants like Pizza Time and Noomy, My Bistro, where you can get a dish called Le chicken parmesan for €14.90. The centerpiece of Abraxas, a nine-story colonnaded apartment block clad in brown stone that functions as a kind of inhabited monument, curves inward from the street, concealing the splendor of its main courtyard from public view and offering the impression of a development that turns its back on the neighborhood that hosts it. The day I visited, I found the estate to be mostly empty. An air of benign neglect pervades the colonnade and its adjoining buildings, with their cracked windows and busted doors: Following the development’s inauguration, maintenance costs quickly became prohibitive, and the Espaces have since adapted to a steady state of managed decay. But it’s the housing campus’s quiet that is most unsettling.
As I staggered through Bofill’s sublime, knave-like atriums and proceeded—via the mute geometry of the Jardin des Sources, an adjacent park that transports its visitors across elevated walkways upholstered with shrubbery—to the Arènes de Picasso, the colossal gong-shaped housing development by the Spanish-Uzbek architect Manuel Núñez Yanowsky that was inaugurated around the same time as Abraxas, I eventually became aware of presences following me. Yanowsky was a member of the Taller de Arquitectura, of which Bofill was the leader; the two estates are close not only in distance but in their shared commitment to the marriage of meliorism and magnificence. “Hey you!” someone in the shadows of the commercial strip leading toward the Arènes yelled out, in English. “Pas de photos!” Without responding I continued to walk, eventually entering the spherical plaza of the Arènes proper, where I skillfully snuck—or so I thought—a few quick waist-level shots of Yanowsky’s iconostatic orb. Immediately a crew of young men descended on me. “Pas de photos, c’est privé!” one of them shouted. No photos, this is private property. After about ten seconds, once I put my phone away, the group scattered, melting back into the cream walls and porticos of the housing project. I felt no ill will toward these young men, who plainly wanted only to reclaim a sense of ownership over their neighborhood; in their position, disenfranchised by the state and compelled to call a tourist attraction home, would any of us behave differently? Later, when I looked the developments up online, I realized I’d escaped this encounter with the neighborhood patrol fairly lightly; the Google Maps listings revealed a litany of traumatic accounts of visitors who’d been verbally and physically assaulted—and in one case, even stoned—while exploring the grounds of Abraxas and the Arènes. “I don’t recommend going there, even to take pictures; there are plenty of lookouts and dealers; the place is absolutely not safe,” reads one review of Abraxas. “INHOSPITABLE AND FULL OF DANGERS,” warns another.
At Abraxas, as was the case with his housing developments in Cergy and elsewhere throughout Paris, Bofill appropriated the imagery and language of monarchy to confer a sheen of royalty on the milieux défavorisés of the outer suburbs: The main colonnade, for example, is still known as the “Palais d’Abraxas.” This linguistic and architectural gambit has failed: Today, names like the “Palace of Abraxas” and “Versailles for the people,” as Bofill himself described his Arcades du Lac development (1982) in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, read less as an index of the people’s coronation than as a mocking reminder of the disparity between residents of the banlieue’s social housing projects, many of whom are desperately poor, and those in the top percentiles of France’s income distribution. The paradox of many of these projects, and a prime cause of their dysfunction, is that they are densely populated yet feel desperately isolated: What’s most troubling and illustratively powerful about Abraxas is not the hostility of its residents to outsiders but the severe disconnection between the development, which feels insular and enclosed even in those parts of it that are exposed to the elements, and its surrounding neighborhood. Rather than auditing the historical wreckage of earlier attempts to invigorate the banlieue, however, the French government is charging right ahead with fresh experiments in suburban uplift. A mile or so east rises the ziggurat of Noisy-Champs station, which once open will become one of the busiest interchanges on the Grand Paris Express’s Line 15. The station’s main hall, a domed timber-and-metal double helix ascending to a point like a decorative swirl of crème diplomate, offers an affecting contrast to the Espaces d’Abraxas nearby. At one end of Noisy sits a decrepit and dangerous development symbolizing the curdled idealism of the twentieth century; at the other, a lustrous new station that signifies the undimmed zeal of the modernizing French state.
And yet: what heaviness, what brutality to reduce every attempt at public housing in the suburbs to failure. Down in the old Communist stronghold of Ivry-sur-Seine, where I ended my long circuit through the Parisian rim, I found ample evidence to suggest that the collision of public money and architectural ambition is not always destined to disappoint. Flush against the southeastern edge of “Paris même,” Ivry is not exactly the banlieue in the traditional sense. But its historic status as a center of the “red belt” that once ringed Paris, which helped feed the foundational desire among the city’s twentieth-century powerbrokers to keep the artisanal city and the assembly line banlieue well apart from each other, makes it a useful point of differentiation in the laboratory of suburban experimentation.
Les Étoiles d’Ivry. Lauren Martin
Ivry-sur-Seine is the Other to Neuilly-sur-Seine’s bleak tableau of upper-bourgeois self-satisfaction, a place that’s varied in construction and seems somehow to be in motion where Neuilly is implacable and static. To be fair, the neighborhood’s exercises in urban engineering, especially those of a more recent vintage, do not all impress. At the point where the Seine meets the Marne sit Huatian Chinagora, a delightfully excessive hotel in the form of a Chinese pagoda, and the passerelle aux câbles, a graffiti-covered 1920s pedestrian bridge that would be crawling with selfie takers in any city less equivocal than Paris about the beauty of its industrial structures. On the side of the Seine closer to the thirteenth arrondissement, in a detoxified stretch that once housed some of Paris’s most important factories, a new development called Ivry-Confluences is taking shape. With its apartments all tucked away in bland boxes and functional coffins, the still-incomplete development exemplifies the recent drift toward generic and aesthetically unadventurous mixed-use solutions to outer Paris’s housing needs. There’s a real embourgeoisement of the old leftist periphery at work here. Social housing will make up only 40 percent of Ivry-Confluences’s eventual 6,500 apartments, which gives some sense for the reduced horizon of modern approaches to mass habitation in Paris; part of the project will involve the conversion of the Halles Sagep, a late-nineteenth-century pumping station, into a hybrid food hall and event space. In Ivry, all the architectural ferment bubbles not in the modern building site of the aqualands but away from the river, back toward Paris.
Clustered around the civic center is an extraordinary collection of apartment buildings, all of them 100 percent affordable, that shows how far the standards of architectural ambition in Paris have fallen since the 1980s: the celebrated Étoiles of Jean Renaudie (1975), which spiderweb up to the edge of the stout Cité Maurice Thorez, the neighborhood’s signature 1950s red-brick housing development, like a cheeky younger sibling hatching a prank; the superb post-Corbusian vaults of the Cité Spinoza (1972) and the concrete snowflake of Le Liégat (1982), both the work of Renée Gailhoustet; and various projects on which Renaudie and Gailhoustet collaborated, like the îlot Danielle Casanova, which resembles an ocean liner run aground, improbably, on the streets of inner-suburban Paris. Where the Casanova building is nautical, the Tour Lénine (1970), a point tower that was Gailhoustet’s first project in Ivry, seems vaguely cosmonautical, adding to the neighborhood’s tickling confusion of forms: tall and short, slab and spiderweb, space and soil. Never has poured concrete seemed more tectonically accidental. Conceived under the peculiar conditions of freedom and autonomy created by a local Communist Party compelled to seek housing solutions independently of whatever the state was pursuing at a national level, these structures were all built over a fifteen-year stretch from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. By the end of the Cold War, fashion—like the ideological contest that kept Communism competitive in French politics—had moved on; Gailhoustet shuttered her practice for good in 1999.
The great mage of Ivry died in her apartment on the fourth floor of Le Liégat in 2023, but she lives on—in her buildings, of course, but also in countless interviews and profiles on YouTube, many of which were filmed on her vast terrace garden in the final two decades of her life. These discussions memorialize Gailhoustet as a wonderfully frank and uncombed figure utterly unmoved by corridors, right angles, and her own status as a pioneer for female architects. “No one cared that I was a woman; people aren’t as anti-feminist as you think,” she said, reflecting on her career, after receiving the Prix des Femmes Architectes in 2014. The architecture she and Renaudie sought to materialize in Ivry was “anti-cellular” and “combinatory,” and even when experienced solely at street level, it’s still engaging and improvisational in a way that sets it apart from the terminal postwar housing developments of many other segments of the banlieue. Here there is neither alienating grandeur nor antiseptic repetition; here—among the caps of the concrete waves that the estates, as an ensemble, evoke—there is street life, public space that feels like it serves a public that actually wants to use it, a network of alleys and cul-de-sacs that promise tranquility and intimacy rather than life-threatening danger, an extravagance of greenery, an inviting wildness, the ovo-urban organic. This, too, is the banlieue, or at least one dream—lost for now, but perhaps recuperable—of its future.