The New York Times: 

“In Poor Margins of Paris, New Recipe for Success Is Local

By LIZ ALDERMAN

Published: May 14, 2013

PARIS — Mourad Benamer remembers the day his parents first visited the sleek new sushi restaurant he had just opened near the Champs-Élysées. Against all odds, Mr. Benamer had broken out of the rough suburb, or banlieue, where he grew up in a family of poor Moroccan immigrants just northeast of Paris, and hit on a formula that would soon turn into a business success beyond his dreams.

We came from a place where there was injustice and a lack of opportunity,” Mr. Benamer, 36, recalled of his banlieue, Bondy. But there he was in the heart of tourist Paris, on a winter afternoon in 2007, with his mother pointing incredulously to truffle-and-foie-gras maki being rolled out to patrons at Eat Sushi, which since then has expanded into a chain of 38 restaurants across France.

“How did you manage to do all this?” she asked.

His answer was simple: he did it on his own.

“I was not going to let this feeling that we have no chance keep me closed inside the banlieue,” Mr. Benamer recalled recently.”

Photo: La Courneuve, north of Paris. The jobless rate in the suburbs is twice the national rate. Agnes Dherbeys for The International Herald Tribune

The Atlantic Cities: 

France Will Dim Its Lights to Conserve Energy

By MAÏA de la BAUME. Published: January 30, 2013

PARIS — The City of Light is about to get dimmer. As of July, all shops and offices inFrance will have to shut off their lights at night, under a government decree issued on Wednesday.

The decree, from the Environment Ministry, is intended to save energy and “reduce the print of artificial lighting on the nocturnal environment.”

France is proud of its lights. Tourists cherish the Christmas illuminations on the Champs-Élysées, the 20,000 flashing bulbs on the Eiffel Tower and the bright, imaginative shop windows of large department stores like Printemps and Galeries Lafayette.

Major attractions like the Eiffel Tower will remain lighted, and local authorities can make exceptions for Christmas lighting and other celebrations. But France has decided to be “a pioneer” in preventing light pollution, said Delphine Batho, the environment minister.

The new law, she said in a statement, will also cut carbon dioxide emissions by 250,000 tons a year and save the equivalent of the annual consumption of 750,000 households. It is part of a series of government measures announced in December to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste.”

Photo: Mehdi Fedouach/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Atlantic Cities: 

“How France Built Inequality Into Its Cities

CLARE FORAN NOV 20, 2012

A year ago, I took a job as an English teacher in France. I was expecting to see the Old World. What I found instead was Val-de-Reuil, one of France’s New Towns. Val-de-Reuil was built from the ground up in the 1970s. At the time of construction, it was supposed to set the standard in urban planning.

But things haven’t quite worked out that way. Today it’s one of the poorest cities in France. Rows of four and five-story, low-rent apartment complexes line the streets with balconies jutting out from their concrete facades. Val-de-Reuil has two middle schools, one high school, a movie theater and a shopping plaza like you might find in an American suburb. There is no discernible city center. The architecture of the buildings is modern, but not cutting edge and the city has a stark, uniform look to it. In a country that prides itself on history and tradition, Val-de-Reuil seems out of place – a town of boxy, geometric construction in the middle of the French countryside.

Val-de-Reuil is one of nine New Towns built in the 1960s and ‘70s to address overcrowding in France’s largest cities. The New Towns were also meant to be meticulously planned, self-sufficient communities in their own right. This was an appealing alternative to the tangled mess of the Paris suburbs, large areas of which had been overrun by towering blocks of low-income housing projects.

But though the city was built to correct for the deficiencies of suburban sprawl, Val-de-Reuil has replicated many of the problems it was intended to solve. Its clunky government-subsidized housing looks a lot like the tenements that dot the landscape of the Paris suburbs, albeit on a smaller scale. And the similarities don’t end there. Both the New Town and the Paris suburbs, particularly to the north and east of the city, are plagued by a high rate of unemployment.

So, what went wrong?”

Photo: Jean-Christophe Besson

“Europe’s Cities: Gentrification or Ghettoization?

By Harvey Morris.

ONDON — The widening gap between haves and have-nots in debt-saddled Europe has sharpened a debate over whether the accelerating gentrification of its major cities is leading to the ghettoization of their urban poor.

The rioting in housing projects in the northern French city of Amiens this month marked a recurring phenomenon in France, after decades of planning policy consigned the urban working classes to suburban “banlieues” where poverty and unemployment are now rampant.

In Berlin, a magnet for an international set of affluent hipsters and artists since the Wall came down in 1989, locals are opposing a plan to demolish Communist-era apartment blocks in a prime city center location and replace them with upscale homes and shops.

And in Britain, a proposal to sell municipally-owned homes in expensive neighborhoods, and move their low-income tenants elsewhere, prompted accusations this week that it would drive disadvantaged families into ghettos.

The gentrification debate is not confined to Europe. Neither is it new. Spike Lee, the American director, touches on the theme in “Red Hook Summer,” his latest Brooklyn movie. And social commentators have been debating the pros and cons since young professionals began revamping the urban landscape by regenerating old properties in previously working class neighborhoods.

The Observer last weekend revived an article from 1977 that reported tensions between older working class residents and middle class newcomers in the north London district of Islington.

“Like many a colonialist before them, the gentrifiers are convinced that their arrival has brought light into a dark place,” the article stated, before quoting a local doctor as saying: “You couldn’t even get a decent Camembert when I first came here.”

As factories and wholesale markets closed down in the centers of many of Europe’s cities, Paris became the archetype of the post-industrial European capital.

In a process of what the French call “embourgeoisement,” old districts were revamped as the working classes and poor immigrants were moved to vast developments on the outskirts.

In an essay last year, Hervé Marchal and Jean-Marc Stébé wrote: “Central Paris, which has attracted more and more of the mobile elite, has been completely gentrified, with rocketing housing prices driving the low to middle classes ever further out.”

Contrary to a perception among Londoners that their city remains more vibrant, thanks to a social mix that Paris may have lost, the French authors added: “The center of London is similarly totally gentrified. The British capital’s integration into the global economy has created profound changes on the human level.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: The aftermath of rioting in the French city of Amiens pictured on August 14. Guillaume Clement/European Pressphoto Agency

“At Edge of Paris, a Housing Project Becomes a Beacon

by Michael Kimmelman. March 27, 2012

PARIS — Hard by the noisy highway, overlooking a cemetery and a former garbage dump, La Tour Bois-le-Prêtre glimmers on a spring morning. Sheathed in a fresh cloak of glass balconies and corrugated aluminum panels, it rises on the edge of this city amid a landscape of decaying cement-and-brick housing blocks.

This half-century-old tower used to be one of those blocks. Its makeover, by a creative team of local architects — Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal — is a case study in architectural ingenuity and civic rejuvenation. It’s a challenge to urban innovators, too. Instead of replacing the old tower with an entirely new building, the designers saw what was worthwhile about the existing architecture and added to it.

Retrofitting, it’s called. Preservationists in America have argued for a long time about the benefits of reusing obsolete structures. Since some 80 percent of what’s been built in the United States has been constructed during the last 50 years, reuse seems like the inevitable wave of the future. The practice is not common when it comes to large public housing projects. But there have been a few successful attempts. This one is the latest.

Poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris and in the city’s inner-ring suburbs are, as in many cities, dominated by these much-maligned projects from the 1960s and ’70s.  Not long ago I visited Sevran, one of the poorest Paris suburbs, where the rioting that spread across France in 2005 started. Unemployment now hovers around 40 percent among the young there. Violence has gone up in the last couple of years. There was a shooting not long ago in a kindergarten.

 Sevran is full of housing towers. French policy, similar to the American approach that has reshaped the inner cities of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Louisville and elsewhere, favors demolishing these projects and moving out tenants. Several towers have come down in Sevran, replaced by community gardens, sports fields, some new housing and a new school. More towers stand empty, awaiting destruction.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed a vast extension of the Paris subway system that would link the city center with dozens of alienated suburbs like Sevran, along with new exurban commercial districts. Employment and growth depend on improved access to public transit.

Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s mayor, told me: “Urban renovation alone can’t solve our problems of unemployment and drugs. But it at least gives us the opportunity to live with more dignity.” Architecture has its natural and obvious limits, in other words. But it is powerful as well.

So it is with La Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, which sits on the farthest edge of the 17th arrondissement, a mixed district with persistent pockets of poverty, where a Métro extension would also go. The tower was a natural candidate for the French wrecking ball after decades of neglect and decay, but tenants didn’t want to lose their homes. So an unusual question arose: might the building become a candidate for a different approach?

A competition was organized by Paris Habitat, the Paris Office for Public Housing, in 2005 to renovate the building. The challenge: to repair the tower’s crumbling infrastructure, upgrade its common spaces and its exterior, and — this was the most radical part — add more light and square footage to dark, cramped apartments, without changing the footprint of the building, which couldn’t be extended.

Oh, yes, and to spend less money for all this than the cost of tearing the building down and then rebuilding.”

Via: The New York Times

Photo: La Tour Bois-le-Prêtre A public housing project in Paris has been upgraded from a standard tower into a pleasing landmark, above, with sunny balconies. Frédéric Druot