City of light, city of flames
Sooner or later, slums always explode.
They may slumber for months, years, even decades, but always — always — they go up in flames.
I wish this were not so, but it is.
Something awful is happening in
With unrest expanding through the northern suburbs of high-rise apartments that house some of
The clashes began last Thursday after two African Muslim teenagers [Ziad Benna and his friend Bouna Traore, 15, sons of working-class African Muslim immigrants -- Ed.] were electrocuted [they scaled a wall and leapt into the cables of a power substation. -- Ed.] in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois while trying to evade police.
Demographically, slums are concentrations of the under-income (unemployed or informally or intermittently employed). Geographically, they are fortifications that seek us out and keep them in. Politically, they are deniable lacunae … until they explode.
A decade and a half ago I was touring a particularly tough property with a developer client and friend who was describing the new gated and uniformed security he had installed. Of roughly two hundred apartments, there were about fifteen male heads of household, and about a hundred and fifty overnight gentleman callers. “Looks like a low-security day-release prison,” I joked, but my developer friend grew quiet and said, “There’s more truth in that than there should be.”
Some years back, Nancy and I took the Metro to Saint Denis, in whose cathedral all French kings were crowned and where today many of them lie entombed. I recall how grim were the catehdral’s surrounding neighborhoods, how devoid of humanity.
As I posted in early September,
It set off five days of rioting, firebombing and car burning that continued here at least through Tuesday.
On Sunday, as the street fighting continued, a police tear gas canister landed inside a mosque during Ramadan prayers, further inflaming the impoverished communities.
On Tuesday night, sporadic fighting crossed into the suburbs from Clichy-sous-Bois to
France-Info radio reported about 150 fires throughout the area, including 69 vehicles and dozens of garbage bins.
Riots occur in slums through a combination of gradually intolerable pressure and random visceral spark. Pressure rises through the unholy quintet of squalor, isolation, unemployment (which breeds boredom and anger), gangs, and crime. For forty years, ever since De Gaulle’s Algerian escapade,
The street fighting less than an hour’s subway ride from the heart of
“It’s unemployment, it’s pressure — it just exploded,” Bouhout Abderrahmane, 54, who heads the local Muslim Cultural Association, said Tuesday morning, visibly exhausted after an all-night effort to quell the continuing violence in this town.
As I have posted elsewhere, slums are economically rational, arising whenever demography meets government inaction. They become politically frightening places, where ‘those people’ live.
As I posted some months back, good housing civilizes, bad housing animalizes, whether in Watts,
Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo.
High-rise blocks make people into beasts.
In 2000, one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of
Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size,
If you have ever been to
Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the center of
Roehampton:
Le Corbusier thought everyone should live like this; in practice, only the poorest do.
Le Corbusier’s vision reached his apotheosis at Expo 67, where disciple Moshe Safdie he built Habitat, a jumble of child’s-block apartments intended convey a
Habitat 1967
What a horrible place to live, I thought (and still think) …
One person’s roof is another’s garden … but an affordable housing manager sees indefensible space and infinite vandal escape routes.
Yet it was offered as the urban utopia:
The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words: “The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”
O Brave New World that has such people in it!
But what is the problem to which these housing projects, known as cites, are the solution, conceived by serene and lucid minds like Le Corbusier’s? It is the problem of providing an Habitation de Loyer Modere—a House at Moderate Rent, shortened to HLM—for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2% and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.
An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cit√©s are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”
The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cites of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of
Watts, 1965. Detroit, 1967. We have seen this before.
When open society withdraws from a slum, a closed society takes its place, and that closed society is governed by quiet brutality.
When agents of official
Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou perir, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
Eerie and frightening: this is precisely the behavior experienced in the 1970’s in Boston’s Columbia Point, where the youths would pull a fire alarm, wait for the trucks to come down the single access road, and then throw Molotov cocktails down upon them.
What makes this so poignant for housing is that once a slum is entrenched, there is seldom a way out short of violence, but we can prevent slum formation, if we confront the problem and spend the money.
Modern urban slums represent a visible public policy failure. Where they exist, government has failed; as citizens, we have failed.
Out of Watts came the President’s commission on urban violence, and out of that came Section 221d3 and Section 236, and a proper understanding of the essential principles of public-private partnership in affordable housing, and what works and what doesn’t, including income mixing.
Severe income concentration is slowly but ultimately toxic. If we ignore the slums, for years and even decades our failure has no cost, but once the lid is off the Pandora’s box of horrors, television magnifies the effect. Anger feeds on anger, violence is briefly intoxicating, rage finds an outlet.
Benna described his brother, Ziad, the youngest of five children, as “very shy, very nice, very helpful — he was a good boy, the baby of the family.”
Their father works for the city of
Ziad, who arrived four years ago, was struggling to learn French in school, Benna said. In a community where 25% of all heads of household are unemployed, Ziad was thrilled that his high school teacher had arranged for him to start a vocational training program this week, according to his brother.
Urban
- Before there can be progress, there must be a real solution — one that involves housing, economic development, job training, and cultural assimilation.
- Before there can be a real solution, there must be political commitment, not political vaporware.
- Before there can be political commitment, there must be a political catastrophe.
I think that catastrophe is coming to
Rioting youths opened fire on police and set dozens of vehicles ablaze in a seventh night of violence in
In escalating unrest, shots were fired at police and firefighters, while gangs besieged a police station, set fire to a car showroom and threw petrol bombs.
At least 15 people were arrested and nine injured across north-east
I fear urban carnage in the City of
May I be wrong.
UPDATE (Friday, 4-Nov): The rioting continues and may be metastasizing:
LE BLANC MESNIL,
Officials said at least 400 cars were torched in the Paris region, an increase from previous nights. But there were fewer direct clashes with riot police who were deployed in force across the suburbs north of
400 cars torched? What’s going on here?
A firefighter walks past the ruins of a Renault car dealership in
“The peak is now behind us,” Gerard Gaudron, mayor of
But reports of unrest also surfaced north of
