Encyclopedia of Urban Studies Author's Version citation: Castañeda, Ernesto. (2010). Banlieue. In R. Hutchison (Ed.), Encyclopedia of urban studies. (pp. 53-56). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412971973.n19 Banlieue Ernesto Castañeda The banlieue refers to the area surrounding a French city, commonly used in reference to Paris. The word faubourg also means lying outside the city but now it commonly refers to areas in central Paris that were incorporated early into the city. There is an implicit tendency to compare the banlieues with the American suburbs but there are important differences. In the United States the word suburb carries a positive connotation associated with private property, middle class ease, low density population and an overall high quality of life. This is not uncommon in French banlieues, yet the immediate connotation of the banlieue and its inhabitants, the banlieuesards, is one of overcrowded public housing, people of color, new immigrants, and crime. It is something closer to the stereotype of the "ghetto" in America, but while there are important differences, what is common in both cases is the association between categorical inequality, exclusion from the labor market, and social boundaries resulting in residential segregation. Today, the word banlieue carries a negative connotation; yet this hardly approximates the complex history and social reality of these spaces. History of the banlieue The importance of the banlieue can only be fully understood in a historical perspective and in relation to the city to which it is a periphery. Like many medieval cities, Paris was a walled-city for defensive purposes. As the city grew new walls were constructed, totaling six. In the years preceding the French Revolution a new wall was built but this time mainly for taxation purposes. The wall demarcated Paris proper. Its doors included custom posts and everyone entering or leaving with commercial goods had to pay a tax or right of passage called the o t oi. This physical barrier to free trade and mobilityur d’octroi - created a real boundary between those living inside (intra-muros) and those living outside (extra-muros) with economic consequences for trade and production. Consequently the cost of living was lower outside Paris than inside, resulting in an early division between a large fraction of the labor-force settling in the banlieue and consumers, visitors, financiers, and administrators living inside the city walls. In the Ancien Régime, the Parisian banlieue contained vast open areas where the nobility of Paris and Versailles went to spend time surrounded by nature. This taste was acquired by many arrivistes of the French bourgeoisie, and the petite bourgeoisie, who would go to the green banlieue during the weekends as a sign of distinction, as told in short stories by Guy de Maupassant and depicted y Jea Re oi i his ele ated fil Une Partie de Campagne 9 6 . But as o e people uilt houses in these idyllic lands, the banlieues were quickly transformed from forests into suburban and then urban areas. The remaining forests of Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne are protected and annexed by the city. After the French Revolution of 1789, the Constitutional Assembly decreed the limits of Paris to be a circle with a circumference determined by a radius of three leagues (lieues) around the center set at the Notre Dame Cathedral. In 1841, the politician Adolphe Thiers ordered the construction of a new set of walls and custom tower to be surrounded by a zone where it was forbidden to build. In 1860 the city was expanded by the Baron Haussmann and taxes continued to be levied. In this expansion Paris offi ially e gulfed l’a cie e banlieue hi h i luded the o u es of Batignolle, Belleville, Bercy, Passy, la Villette and other neighboring areas. The Paris octroi was instituted in these communes. This forced many industries to move out of the new city borders for fiscal reasons; many workers followed. The most developed and industrialized external communes also charged octroi to raise funds for local infrastructure and spending, while poorer banlieues did not in order to give tax incentives to attract industry and population. The octroi of Paris and its surrounding metropolitan area was not abolished until 1943, during the German occupation, when it was substituted for a sales tax. As the density of Paris increased, the city looked to the banlieue to locate its new cemeteries and public parks. In 1887 a large building goes up– a dépôt de mendicité - to house Parisian mental patients, homeless, vagabonds, and aged people, and to imprison women in the exterior commune of Nanterre. In 1897 this building is also turned into a hospital. To this day this building offers shelter to the very poor of the region and to newly arrived immigrants. The continuous need for housing The Paris region has always been the destiny of many internal and international migrants. Fe ale o ke s f o the p o i e, “pai , a d the Af i a ould li e i se a t apa t e ts chambres de bonnes atop ou geois uildings of western Paris, while the high cost of living and the limited housing offer in Paris would forced members of the working class to move to the Eastern part of the city, formerly the industrial area of the city, and to its banlieues. Industrialization led to a large rural to urban migration. The painter, architect, and urbanist Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, also called Le Corbusier (18871965) published influential books To a ds a Ne A hite tu e 9 a d The Radia t City (1935), where he sketches and proposes planned, rational, and utopian residential complexes formed by many large housing projects. His work would influence the construction of public housing and large public works in Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil; Co-op City in New York; the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago; and the many cités built in banlieues throughout France that house thousands of people in areas that offer very little employment and industry, in contrast to the area of La Defense, in a banlieue west of Paris, which in 2008 provides 150,000 jobs but only houses 20,000 residents. The project of La Defense was launched in 1958 in order to make Paris the capital of Europe and to attract transnational corporations. The plan succeeded in the latter but it failed to reproduce the mixed use and busy public areas to be found in downtown Paris. Following a pu li s a dal a out the mal-lotis - people who had acquired and built in new lots in the banlieue that lacked any public services like water, roads, electricity or gas- in 1914 the socialist politician Henri Sellier (1883-1943) pushed for the creation of Habitations à Bon Marché (HBM), affordable housing. A number of HBMs are built around the city in the area where the Thiers wall laid. Between 1921 and 1939 the HBM administration built garden-cities (cités-jardin) inspired by the British urbanist Ebenezer Howard. In 1935 the architect and urbanist Maurice Rotival is the first person to use the word Grandes Ensembles, which corresponds to the p oje ts in the U.S., to refer to a set of large public housing buildings to house multiple families that share common areas. Amongst the most famous HBMs is La Cité de la Muette in Drancy, built between 1931 and 1935, which is used as a Jewish internment camp during the German occupation, leading to the death of over 67,000 deportees. At the end of World War II, îlots insalubres, slums in the construction-free zone around the Thiers walls were replaced with modernist housing projects. After Alge ia’s independence in 1962 and the migration to France of pied noirs (white colonists), Jewish people formerly living in Algeria, and harkis - Muslims who had fought on the French side-, the French state decided to house the new arrivals in projects in remote banlieues of Paris, Marseille and Lyon. In 1964 there was a public scandal surrounding the bidonville of Champigny, a slum that housed more than 10,000 Portuguese in conditions of extreme poverty an hour away from the luxuries of Paris. Many Algerians lived in similar conditions. To appease public opinion the Debré law was passed to improve the conditions of the migrant workers explicitly to prevent them from leaving and thus to hindering the reconstruction and growth of France from 1945-1973 into what came to be known as Les Trente Glorieuses or The Glorious Thirty. Provisional housing was provided for Maghrebi workers. The SONACOTRA was created in 1956 in order to provide more formal housing to these new immigrants from Algeria and their families. While the state opposed the creation of ghettos, the political opposition from the richest quarters inside and outside Paris pushed for the concentration of immigrants in certain distant and poor banlieues. This has resulted in a durable inequality due to the lack of access to quality education and good jobs. This is why many inhabitants of these stereotypical areas of the banlieues live off unemployment and other social benefits. In order to address these inequities, special education zones ZEP (Zo es d’éducatio prioritaire) were created in 1981 to dedicate more funds to education in certain se siti e a eas. The rise of the welfare state along the increasing cost of living of Paris lead to the construction of HLMs (Habitations a Loyer Modéré) subsidized public housing. French workers from Paris and the province lived there first but there was an eventual involuntary conversion to relative majorities of immigrant workers many from former colonies. Even while laws stand against the concentration of more than 15% of a given group in order to explicitly prevent the creation of urban ghettos like in the United States, something deeply feared and disdained by the French. Originally, the heavy concentration of French working class, many coming from other regions of France and Europe, led to the appearance in certain banlieues of the so-called red banlieue where the communist and socialists mayors were often elected to office. According to some hypothesis this hegemony changed after the communist party failed to incorporate the large arrival of new immigrants into its local agenda and thus lacked their complete support. What the French failed to see is that social networks, unemployment and solidarity bring underrepresented groups together in order to survive strong labor market discrimination, spatial segregation and social exclusion. Borders of distinction and exclusion In 1943 the idea of the boulevard périphérique, an expressway around the city, was conceived with the explicit purpose of making sure than the boundary between Paris and the growing banlieue would be clearly drawn. In 1954 the project was launched and built along HBMs in the zone formerly reserved for the Thiers wall. Many French banlieues still give testimony to their past as old provincial villages that have been engulfed by the growing metropolitan area, and thus share many a common element: train station, public square, church, city hall, stores, restaurants, private houses and cités close by, with buses going further inside into the banlieue, and with green areas not far from reach. Day to day experiences of the banlieuesards often sharply contrast with the stereotypes held by many Parisians. The o ie La Haine directed by Mathieu Kassovitz presents a powerful metaphor but an exaggerated representation life in the banlieue. It draws attention to the issue of police violence, and broad discrimination but it helps in reproducing the negative stereotype. L’Es ui e of Adbellatif Kechiche does a much better work of portraying the everyday life of young banlieuesards. In 1947 Jean-F a çois G a ie pu lishes Paris et le désert français Pa is a d the F e h dese t where he blames Paris for devouring all the resources, talent, and wealth from the whole country, and one could add the French colonies. This centralization of power, influence, and resources will end in the symbolic desertification of the whole of France unless something is done to build industry in the province and to decentralize public functions and priorities. Even Haussmann was concerned about a luxuries center surrounded by a proletariat ring of workers that it could not house. Thus more than talking about the poverty and lacking of the banlieue one has to talk about the over-concentration of wealth in the Western part of Paris and the continuous gentrification of the city. As many French thinkers have warned France in the XXI century risks becoming a city museum for 2 million of its richest inhabitants and to the millions of tourists that visit it every year oblivious to the backstage that is the banlieue which they see at the most as they pass through it from the airport to their hotels. Among other things, the work of sociologist Loïc Wacquant stresses the diversity amongst the different French banlieues. This is something important to keep in mind given the differences between western banlieues which include areas like La Defense, Bois Colombes, or Neuilly (where current French President Nicolas Sarkozy was mayor for many years); and stigmatized and heavily populated cités such as La Courneuve, or Sarcelles. The lived space and experiences of the franciliens (Parisians and banlieuesards, inhabiting the Ile de France) goes beyond obsolete political and administrative boundaries. At the end the banlieues are an integral part of Paris because much of its work and daily life are done in the backstage of the banlieue without which the Parisian front-stage could not hold. Thus one cannot talk about the Parisian banlieue without talking about Paris, and in the same way one cannot talk seriously about Paris without taking its banlieue into account; and the same holds for other major francophone cities. Ernesto Castañeda FURTHER READINGS Fourcaut, A., Bellanger, E., & Flonneau, M. (2007). Paris/Banlieues - Conflits et solidarités. Paris: Creaphis. Pinçon, M., & Pinçon-Charlot, M. (2004). Sociologie de Paris. Paris: Découverte. Sayad, A. (2006). L'immigration ou Les paradoxes de l'altérité: L'illusion du provisoire: Editions Liber. Wacquant, L. J. D. (2008). Urban outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, MA: Polity. And by the same author: 2012 Castañeda, Ernesto. Pla es of “tig a: Ghettos, Ba ios a d Ba lieues. The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies. Edited by Ray Hutchison and Bruce D. Haynes. Chapter 7, pp. 159-190. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 2012 Castañeda, Ernesto. U a Citize ship i Ne Yo k, Pa is, a d Ba elo a: I ig ant O ga izatio s a d the Right to I ha it the City. Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City. Comparative Urban and Community Research Volume 10. Edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie. Chapter 4, pp. 57-78. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.