Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [123]
That lack of networks is a product of the banlieues themselves, both in their function and in their physical design. One of the strange paradoxes of large, high-rise public-housing projects like Les Pyramides is that they suffer from a low-population density. The neighborhoods that work best as urban neighborhoods and arrival cities—two- to five-story structures with direct access to the road and small businesses below—tend to be very high density. By spreading so few people across such an isolated expanse without room for improvisational construction, the people there are bound to be disconnected from one another. This architectural point is not lost on the banlieue residents themselves or on the politician who represents them. “By building Les Pyramides at such a low density with only pedestrian pathways, they basically killed the possibility of having a real city,” Evry’s Socialist Party mayor, Manuel Valls, told me. “It doesn’t have any downtown, there’s nothing with shops or small businesses to hold it all together. Look at the way it was built—it’s very Cartesian.”
It didn’t start that way. When African villagers first came to France after the Second World War, they built their own arrival cities. During France’s celebrated “three glorious decades” of industrialization and growth after the war, severe labor shortages led to a demand for immigrants, and the government chose to attract as many workers as possible without having an explicit immigration policy. Hundreds of thousands of Africans arrived from lands that had recently been colonies, and to discourage them from settling permanently with their families, the government at first constructed dormitory apartments for single men. As everywhere, these were a moral and practical failure.
Many North African workers ignored the dormitories and built their own arrival cities, shantytown bidonvilles in disused parts of some of France’s major cities. By 1965, at least 225,000 people were living in such settlements. The most famous product of these self-built slums was Azouz Begag, the author and sometime French cabinet minister, who spent his childhood in a ramshackle dirt-floored settlement by the river in Lyon. Chaâba was a densely populated place that resembled the flourishing arrival cities of the developing world, “a shantytown of shacks made of planks of wood and corrugated iron roofs.”12 His family lived there from 1947 until 1968, when that city, and many others like it, was razed, its residents moved to the new concrete utopias on the edge of town.
Those new buildings went up with astonishing speed. Between 1956 and 1965, at least 300,000 new apartments were built by the French state each year—many to house the expanding postwar baby boom, others to replace bidonvilles, others for new workers. Most were featureless rectangles with large empty spaces between them. Les Pyramides was a later development, meant to correct the wrongs of the earlier designs and to attract the middle class out of central Paris and into the new industrial districts on the outskirts. But industry was moving elsewhere, and a new flood of villagers was arriving. The halt of immigration in 1974 actually increased village immigration, because it led to a scramble for family reunification.
The new buildings were clean and orderly and low-rent, more than half the apartments had toilets, and they didn’t crowd the major cities of France. But they had been designed with absolutely no contribution from their future residents, without any conception that their occupants might not be fixed commodities such as “factory worker” or “foreign laborer.” The point that was missed, the point that planned housing so often misses, is that the occupants might be people in transition, on the way from one condition to another. None of the tools were there: no opportunity for home ownership, no chance to start a business,