State-space: La Courneuve and Paris

Abstract

The peripheralisation of poverty in Paris began with Haussmann’s renovations in the 19th century and came to a head with the construction of mass housing (the grands ensembles) on the northern and eastern peripheries of the city in the 1960s. The latter arguably represents the purest example of how a metropolis can be re-centred, with the preservation and pacification of a historic centre and business district and the expulsion to the periphery of the working class and immigrants who are denied the right to the city and right to use of the centre (Lefebvre 1996: 34). For Hazan (2010: xiii), contemporary exclusion from the city is very much in line with the history of Paris, in which, ever since the great confinement of 1657 that locked up the poor, deviant and mad in the Hôpital Général, ‘the combined action of town planners, property speculators and police has never stopped pressing the poor, the “dangerous classes” from the centre of the city.’ Paris has led the way in establishing a centre-periphery relation that appears a perfection of the practices of exclusion that are now common in London and New York.

I don’t really feel Parisian … Courneuvian? Yes … The mentalité is different. When we go to Paris, they look at us in a different way… they think: ‘they are not from here’… They are not like us. They live in Paris, we are living in La Courneuve. It’s very different… (Slimane, 17)