Why should the French have all the riots?

A banlieue grows in Brooklyn.

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via Curbed

New York Times, November 27, 2005
Idea Lab

Revolting High Rises
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

There is a somewhat comic lining around the cloud
of France's suburban riots. Suddenly the word
banlieue has been embraced by people not known
for peppering their conversation with French
words - callers to right-wing talk shows, for
instance. Obviously, they want to stress how
different those suburbs (burning cars and hip-hop
hand gestures) are from our own (swing sets and
Weber grills). European politicians, anxious lest
their countries be perceived as "the next
France," have made a similar point. Wolfgang
Schäuble, a prominent German Christian Democrat,
said recently, "We do not have these gigantic
high-rise projects that they have on the edge of
French cities."

Meanwhile, people in Marseille, which has one of
the heaviest concentrations of immigrants'
children in France, were relieved that their city
was left mostly unscathed when those children
staged a nationwide uprising. What is different
about Marseille, residents say, is that it is too
hemmed in by mountains and sea to ship its poor
to the outskirts. Executives, entrepreneurs and
others who don't have to punch the clock are the
ones who live farther out - in Aix-en-Provence,
for instance, which is reachable by fast trains.
Marseille is not like most French cities, where
the urban core is made up of neatly tended
architectural treasures and the disorder is
pushed to the periphery. It is turned inside out,
so that "inner city" and "suburbia" retain their
American connotations. That may have spared
Marseille a lot of problems.

La crise des banlieues turns out to be an
ambiguous phrase. Is there a problem in France's
suburbs or with France's suburbs? For Schäuble,
it's the buildings. For the boosters of
Marseille, it's where you put them.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes
have been more than ready to explain, bears some
of the blame for both. His designs inspired many
of the suburbs where the riots of October and
November began. In fact, he inspired the very
practice of housing the urban poor by building up
instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought,
would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city
laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and
fetid back streets since the dawn of
urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed
badly with something poor communities generate in
profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate
males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank
(and, when that became too terrifying to use, the
graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds
of families ransom.

Le Corbusier called houses "machines for living."
France's housing projects, as we now know, became
machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of
this alienation is some mix of the buildings
themselves and the way they're joined to the
city. But in practice, the most effective urban
renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It
focuses on the buildings by razing them.

The Netherlands provides the best example of how
this works. Amsterdam and Rotterdam stand in the
same urban-planning relationship as Paris and
Marseille. The core of golden-age buildings along
Amsterdam's canals are surrounded by
industrial-age apartments and then by a fan of
housing projects. Rotterdam, because it was
rebuilt after heavy bombing in World War II, has
big concentrations of poor and working-class
people, many of them immigrants and their
children, living in the bull's-eye of the
metropolitan area.

So the two cities are urban-planning opposites.
And since the murder of the filmmaker Theo van
Gogh by a Dutch Islamist last year, it has become
common to speak of them as political opposites.
Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, represents the
Labor Party, which has controlled the city for
decades and is often accused of excessive
multicultural sensitivity. Rotterdam's housing
policy is in the hands of Leefbaar Rotterdam, the
party of the populist Pim Fortuyn, who was
assassinated in 2002. Until recently, the housing
boss was Marco Pastors, a charismatic and
controversial leader known for tough talk on
immigration.

Yet the cities' redevelopment policies are
virtually identical. Both are well into a
headlong retreat from gigantism and uniformity.
The notorious high rises of De Bijlmer in
southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in
1975 but were soon generating the kind of
pathology on display in the banlieues. A
succession of Labor mayors have presided over
their dismantling to make way for smaller "garden
houses." When the city determined that 11,000
units of housing were needed in the Nieuw West
area, it decided to demolish 13,000 units and
build 24,000 on a more neighborly scale, to avoid
what Cohen calls "huge, stretched-out deprived
areas."

In right-wing Rotterdam, meanwhile, Pastors has
done almost exactly the same thing. He poured
resources into mixed-income projects started by
the Labor Party in the once-dismal neighborhood
of Bospolder-Tussendijken and added others of his
own. His reasoning is the same as Cohen's. Both
argue for maximum residential diversity on the
grounds that people now have "housing careers."

In the old days, the argument runs, a person with
a working-class identity could live in
"working-class housing." But today people have
housing careers that vary as much as their
professional ones. When they are young and not
terribly bothered by noise, they might choose
small, functional places close to cultural
attractions and nightlife. They can move to
larger, quieter ones when they have families and
then trade space for comfort when their children
leave home. Corbusier-style city planning shows
no evidence of having considered this. If you
don't vary the housing units in a given
neighborhood - if you fill entire quarters of the
city with standard-issue monoliths - you condemn
upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The
only people who develop any sense of place are
those trapped in the poverty they started in.

In the course of the October uprising, French
observers called this slum-based sense of place a
"nationalisme de quartier." It is a problem.
Residents of some of the most dismal projects
have often proved unwilling to relocate, even
when the government has promised to move them
into much nicer places. Perhaps they have grown
attached to their dangerous homes and neighbors.
It is more likely that they're leery about
accepting the promises of any government that
once stuck them in such a depressing spot to
begin with.
____________

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, has
recently written about Turkey for the magazine.