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As I recently wrote in an article about Mathieu Kassowitz’s La Haine, I will probably write a lot about Paris’s banlieues in the coming year(s), as I will be soon returning to live on that side of the Atlantic ocean. I spent the last weeks elaborating documents to illustrate what these “banlieues” really are. This is as useful to people who are not so familiar with Paris’s geography as for people who live in the center of the city, since most of the latter rarely venture in the suburbs. The maps presented above, associated with the list of illustrations below, therefore attempt to present a geographic inventory of the “Cités” and “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” (Sensitive Urban Zones) that exist in the first four zones of Paris’s region’s public transportation system. The term banlieue is abusive in the sense that it means suburb, but it is understood internationally — and to some extents in France too — as low-income neighborhoods whose architecture is characterized by “barres” (long and massive housing buildings) and “tours” (towers) that host, among others, an important population of foreign and first/second generation French (often young) North and West Africans.
The 95 cités presented both on the maps and in the inventory below, host together about 805,000 inhabitants (figures from 2006 calculated from this data bank), which makes it approximately 12% of the total population of the considered area (the first four zones of Paris’s public transportation system). The urbanism used to design these neighborhoods is strongly inspired from the modernist theories of urbanism that aimed at “liberating the ground” and creating more or less self-sufficient pieces of city. On the following illustrations one can easily realize the poor quality of the public space that has been “liberated” on the ground (parking, leftover lawns or dirt areas, etc.). Many of the commerces that were operating within the neighborhoods closed down and little activity was left available for the inhabitants, many of which are unemployed. As for the self-sufficient characteristics of these neighborhoods, they clearly created a distinction between the inside and outside of the cités, creating potentially what I have been calling “proletarian fortresses” in the past (see past articles) but, more importantly, it formed urban zones of exclusions that soon translated into social exclusion for the bodies who inhabit them. This manifests in the rest of French society by a national fear for these neighborhoods fed by daily TV news narratives that marginalize simultaneously the cités in their urbanity and the population that live in them in the otherness (racially, culturally, socially, and sometimes religiously) that they embody for the White French population — that includes the biggest part of the past and current governing elite.
The urban exclusion embodied by the cités operates at the scale of their town or city (noted for each of the following 95 illustrations), but also at the regional scale. Paris is a centralized city and a look at the public transportation network (the maps above show the main one, Metro and RER) allows one to realize, not only how crucial it is to reside within a reasonable distance from this network, but also how this network is fundamentally oriented toward the center of the city with little connection between cities of the banlieues themselves. The “Banlieue Archipelago” that gives its title to this article and these maps therefore consists in the representation of a de-centralized network generated by the cités themselves. It is a sort of cartographic manifesto that does not pre-envision what the links it introduces (in the second map) really stand for: a call for action(s) to revolutionize these pieces of urbanity from inside — the governmental policies to revolutionize them having stagnated (deliberately or not) to the statuses of discourses so far. Architecture as a discipline certainly has a role to play in it; yet, on the contrary of many attempts made from the outside these last forty years, it principally consists in a process of ‘desarchitecture,’ i.e. a deactivation of the physical/spatial mechanisms of geographical and social exclusion that characterize the banlieues’ situation as it currently is.
INVENTORY OF THE BANLIEUES IN THE RATP ZONES 2-3-4 BY ADMINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENTS:
HAUTS DE SEINE (92) ///
AGNETTES (LES) / Gennevilliers / 7,555 inhabitants (2006) / 52 hectares
BACONNETS (LES) / Antony
BLAGIS (LES) / Bagneux / 18,343 inhabitants (2006) / 125 hectares
BUTTE ROUGE (LA) / Chatenay-Malabry / 12,025 inhabitants (2006) / 125 hectares
CARAVELLE (LA) / Villeneuve-la-Garenne / 5,137 inhabitants (2006) / 13 hectares
CHEMIN DE L’ILE / Nanterre / 8,721 inhabitants / 64 hectares
EUROPE / Colombes / 10,815 inhabitants (2006) / 65 hectares
FOSSÉS JEAN (LES) / Colombes / 14,973 inhabitants (2006) / 84 hectares
LUTH (LE) / Gennevilliers / 8,211 inhabitants (2006) / 37 hectares
NORD ASNIÈRES / Asnières-sur-Seine / 16,028 inhabitants (2006) / 73 hectares
PABLO PICASSO / Nanterre / 22,280 inhabitants (2006) / 95 hectares
PETIT COLOMBES / Colombes / 9,911 inhabitants (2006) / 63 hectares
PETIT NANTERRE / Nanterre / 8,804 inhabitants (2006) / 54 hectares
PLAINE (LA) / Clamart
PONT DE SÈVRES / Boulogne-Billancourt / 4,814 inhabitants (2006) / 10 hectares
SEINE SABLIÈRE / Villeneuve-la-Garenne / 4,382 inhabitants (2006) / 18 hectares
SEINE ST. DENIS (93) ///
4000 (LES) / La Courneuve / 15, 124 inhabitants (2006) / 79 hectares
ALLENDE / St. Denis / 2,670 inhabitants / 9 hectares
ALLENDE / Villetaneuse / 1,179 inhabitants (2006) / 4 hectares
BEAUDOTTES (LES) / Sevran / 9,058 inhabitants (2006) / 40 hectares
BEL AIR / Montreuil / 5,992 inhabitants (2006) / 40 hectares
BLANQUI / Bondy / 6,282 inhabitants (2006) / 37 hectares
BOISSIÈRE (LA) / Noisy-le-Sec / 1,188 inhabitants (2006) / 5 hectares
BOSQUETS (LES) / Clichy-sous-Bois-Montfermeil / 30,327 inhabitants (2006 / 201 hectares
CHAMPY / Noisy-le-Grand / 4,918 inhabitants (2006) / 26 hectares
CLOS ST. LAZARE (LE) / Stains / 10,533 inhabitants (2006) / 51 hectares
COURTILLÈRES (LES) / Bobigny-Pantin / 11,210 inhabitants (2006) / 93 hectares
FAUVETTES (LES) / Neuilly-sur-Marne / 11,059 inhabitants (2006) / 66 hectares
FLORÉAL / St. Denis / 5,417 inhabitants / 28 hectares
FRANCS MOISINS / St. Denis / 9,293 inhabitants (2006) / 42 hectares
LONDEAU (LE) / Noisy-le-Sec / 6,537 inhabitants (2006) / 37 hectares
MALASSIS / Bagnolet / 6,674 inhabitants (2006) / 34 hectares
MONTREAU / Montreuil / 3,930 inhabitants (2006) / 23 hectares
MOULIN NEUF / Stains / 1,276 inhabitants (2006) / 8 hectares
NORD BONDY / Bondy / 9,313 inhabitants (2006) / 57 hectares
NOUE (LA) / Montreuil / 6,117 inhabitants (2006) / 28 hectares
ORGEMONT / Épinay-sur-Seine / 10,871 inhabitants (2006) / 60 hectares
PAUL ÉLUARD / Bobigny / 6,235 inhabitants (2006) / 17 hectares
PAVÉ NEUF (LE) / Noisy-le-Grand / 7,240 inhabitants (2006) / 29 hectares
QUATRE CHEMINS (LES) / Aubervilliers / 29,223 inhabitants (2006) / 106 hectares
PONT BLANC / Sevran / 6,902 inhabitants / 29 hectares
ROSE DES VENTS (LA) / Aulnays-sous-Bois / 22,617 inhabitants (2006) / 193 hectares
ROUGEMONT / Sevran / 6,460 inhabitants (2006) / 46 hectares
SOURCE (LA) / Épinay-sur-Seine / 22,706 inhabitants / 113 hectares
SUD DUGNY / Dugny / 3,250 inhabitants (2006) / 11 hectares
TILLEULS (LES) / Dugny-Le Blanc-Mesnil / 13,098 inhabitants (2006) / 80 hectares
VAL DE MARNE (94) ///
BLEUETS (LES) / Créteil / 5,321 inhabitants (2006) / 25 hectares
BOIS L’ABBÉ (LE) / Champigny-sur-Marne / 14,408 inhabitants (2006) / 77 hectares
CURIE (PIERRE & MARIE) / Ivry-sur-Seine / 6,470 inhabitants / 39 hectares
FABIEN / Bonneuil-sur-Marne / 10,354 inhabitants (2006) / 63 hectares
GARGARINE / Ivry-sur-Seine / 5,750 inhabitants (2006) / 31 hectares
GRANDS CHAMPS (LES) / Thiais
GRAND ENSEMBLES VITRY / Vitry-sur-Seine / 24,077 inhabitants / 111 hectares
GRUISIE / Villeneuve-le-Roi / 1,615 inhabitants / 11 hectares
HABETTE / Créteil / 5,014 inhabitants (2006) / 23 hectares
HAUTES NOUES (LES) / Villiers-sur-Marne / 6,105 inhabitants (2006) / 21 hectares
HAUTS DU MONT MESLY / Créteil / 3,042 inhabitants (2006) / 16 hectares
ILE DE FRANCE / Limeil-Brévannes / 1,153 inhabitants (2006) / 8 hectares
JACQUES CARTIER / Choisy-le-Roi / 2,862 inhabitants (2006) / 10 hectares
JARDINS / Champigny-sur-Marne / 5,666 inhabitants (2006) / 35 hectares
LUTÈCE (LA) / Valenton / 1,799 inhabitants (2006) / 8 hectares
MORDACS (LES) / Champigny-sur-Marne / 4,830 inhabitants (2006) / 71 hectares
NAVIGATEURS (LES) / Choisy-le-Roi-Orly / 13,298 inhabitants (2006) / 84 hectares
NORD VILLENEUVE / Villeneuve-St.-George / 5,125 inhabitants / 22 hectares
PALAIS (LE) / Créteil / 4,942 inhabitants (2006) / 35 hectares
PARC (LE) / Limeil-Brévannes / 1,380 inhabitants (2006) / 7 hectares
PAUL BERT / Villeneuve-le-Roi / 1,562 inhabitants (2006) / 17 hectares
PLATEAU / Villeneuve-St.-Georges / 2,517 inhabitants (2006) / 16 hectares
POLOGNES (LES) / Valenton / 1,775 inhabitants (2006) / 8 hectares
SUD ALFORTVILLE / Alfortville / 7,761 inhabitants (2006) / 41 hectares
VAL DE FONTENAY / Fontenay-sous-Bois
YVELINES (78) ///
INDES (LES) / Sartrouville / 11,528 inhabitants (2006) / 60 hectares
ESSONE (91) ///
BERGERIES (LES) / Draveil / 2,995 inhabitants (2006) / 26 hectares
CILOF / Viry-Chatillon / 4,260 inhabitants (2006) / 25 hectares
CROIX BLANCHE (LA) / Vigneux-sur-Seine / 9,632 inhabitants (2006) / 59 hectares
DANTON / Draveil / 2,285 inhabitants (2006) / 27 hectares
GRAND ENSEMBLE MASSY / Antony-Massy / 15,296 inhabitants (2006) / 78 hectares
NOYER RENARD (LE) / Athis-Mons / 4,756 inhabitants (2006) / 26 hectares
VILLAINE / Massy / 7,351 inhabitants (2006) / 56 hectares
VAL D’OISE (95) ///
CARREAUX (LES) / Villiers-le-Bel / 4,313 inhabitants (2006) / 22 hectares
CARRIÈRES / Montmagny / 3,222 inhabitants (2006) / 25 hectares
CHARDONNERETTES / Sarcelles / 3,065 inhabitants (2006) / 26 hectares
DAME BLANCHE (LA) / Garges-les-Gonesse / 16,847 inhabitants (2006) / 139 hectares
DOUCETTES (LES) / Garges-les-Gonesse / 10,922 inhabitants (2006) / 45 hectares
FAUCONNIÈRE (LA) / Gonesse / 5,980 inhabitants (2006) / 30 hectares
FONTAINE BERTIN (LA) / Franconville / 1,898 inhabitants (2006) / 6 hectares
FRANCES (LES) / Montigny-les-Cormeilles / 6,980 inhabitants (2006) / 49 hectares
GALATHÉE / Deuille-la-Barre / 3,454 inhabitants (2006) / 28 hectares
JOLIOT CURIE / Argenteuil / 2,388 inhabitants (2006) / 16 hectares
LOCHÈRES (LES) / Sarcelles / 38,050 inhabitants (2006) / 168 hectares
PUITS (LES) / Villiers-le-Bel / 10,748 inhabitants (2006) / 101 hectares
RAGUENETS / St. Gratien / 5,806 inhabitants (2006) / 25 hectares
ROSIERS (LES) / Sarcelles / 5,010 inhabitants (2006) / 27 hectares
TETE DE PONT / Bezons / 2,855 inhabitants (2006) / 25 hectares
VAL D’ARGENT / Argenteuil / 26,836 inhabitants (2006) / 134 hectares
VAL NOTRE DAME / Argenteuil-Bezons / 7,538 inhabitants (2006) / 73 hectares