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Coping with Slums and Slabs Steven Wassenaar A couple of decades ago French urban policy was all-inclusive, meaning that the state felt responsible for providing good living conditions for all who lived within its boundaries. The extensive new town program of the 1960s that regulated and organized Paris’ rapid growth is an expression of that ambition. Today’s policy is exclusive: being and living there is not enough to be cared for or even accepted. The eradication of ideals of the 1960s, both political and urbanistic, is in full swing.
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Recent bidonvilles (slums) and decaying dalles (large urban centers built on slabs), two extreme urban forms in Greater Paris – harsh reality and a bygone utopia – are both regularly the theatre of police violence. It is a situation full of contradictions: the dalle as an architectural expression of the ultimate capacity to design a lifestyle, the total city for model families; the slum as a fortuitous miscellany with which the poor demand a place, make their existence visible, and evade official architecture. All the same, their histories intertwine, for it was in the 1960s that immigrants living in shantytowns built the new towns and the slabs for the middle class, with flats whose keys would pass into the hands of the slum residents themselves a decade later.1 What do local authorities and other official bodies in France do when they are confronted with slums and slabs? How do they deal with the residents?
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I: Slums: Working With Precariousness
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Slum neighborhoods are emerging in France again, inhabited by Roma from countries as Romania, Bulgaria and Kosovo, who have fled from discrimination and unemployment. These slums are located on former industrial sites that are often polluted. For instance, there is an encampment with 800 residents in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Ouen beneath the smoke of an incinerator. The huts erected on railway tracks lean against one another, children play in the dirt. The local authority, which initially excluded these children from the schools, does not provide water or sanitation and the refuse piles up.2 The shantytown can compete with Third World slums, with the difference that there they are stable and most countries provide some services. The poorest are not driven from site to site as they are in France. Everything in the twenty slum neighborhoods with 4,000 residents around Paris is made from waste material: huts, stoves, furniture. The Roma find one-day jobs in the building industry, or sell metal that they recycle from appliances. Their standard of living on the fringe in France is higher than in their native country. It is noteworthy that there were slums on the same sites until 1974, in which a total of 75,000 persons lived according to official statistics from 1965, although their number was probably twice as high. Already at that time the slum residents had a long wait before they were issued with council housing, because there were doubts as to whether the immigrants would be able to adapt to the French way of life. History is repeating itself: identical arguments are now being used against the Roma, who are assumed to be incapable of integrating. How do French cities, regions and the state deal with these shantytowns? The state policy of expulsion, harassment and financial incentives to leave implemented by the prefects and police can be summed up in the words ‘clear out’. This policy, which was designed between 2002 and 2007 by the Home Secretary at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, is inefficient and bears witness to a level of inhumanity that is not often encountered in Western Europe.3 Damage is deliberately caused during police raids against peaceful Rom families by heavily armed riot troops, confirming the reputation for brutality of the French police.4 They are eager to arrest Roma if they are caught ‘stealing water’ from fire hydrants or begging
in the vicinity of slums.5 Elsewhere camps were destroyed by bulldozers so quickly that the residents lost their documents and possessions and all the adults were arrested, as happened in Bonneuil on 24 January 2006, when young children only 3 to 6 years old were left behind with no one to take care of them.6 Still, no matter how often they are driven away, the same slums and Roma pop up somewhere else. They have no choice. Misa Bota: ‘We left Romania in 2001 because my 6-year-old daughter was excluded from the school in Timişoara, because she is a Rom’. Misa was expelled from France but has kept on coming back. After years in a slum the family now lives in a house, but Misa’s greatest success is that his daughter has now been going to school for years.7 Discouragement strategy
The 10-year-old Hanoul encampment is situated beneath a motorway viaduct three kilometers north of Paris; the Communist-run local authority Saint Denis has installed a water supply and four toilets for the 150 residents. The Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles visited the camp in 2005 and wrote: ‘It has not been possible to conceal the deplorable conditions in which people have to live. I was horrified by what I saw. Never before in the daytime have I seen so many rats in such a small area; they were running around everywhere alongside the children.’8 Nothing has changed in this camp, where it is no coincidence that open tuberculosis has been found, since 2005. In fact, the conditions described by Alvaro Gil-Robles have even deteriorated: the doors and windows of caravans in the camp, where children live, were smashed during various police raids in 2006. Fifty police entered the area on 5 January 2007: adults and children between the ages of 3 and 9 were dragged out of the caravans and had to spend an hour and a half lying on the ground while their possessions were thrown out of the caravans and coffee was thrown over the beds.9 This strategy of discouragement and harassment is combined with collective deportation to Romania, in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights, or, more recently, with blackmail: if the Roma do not accept the financial incentive to repatriate, their homes are destroyed and they are left with nothing.10 The advantage of this is that the expelled Roma can be included in the target figure of expelling 25,000 illegal immigrants every year, 30% of whom are Roma. Malik Salemkour of the Human Rights League: ‘The official policy discriminates because it is intended to block access to work, education and medical care for one ethnic group: racism against Roma is tolerated.’11 The response that Nicolas Sarkozy gave to a question in parliament is proof of the prejudices that are held in the highest circles: ‘It appears that these persons [...] do not have a means of subsistence, as can be seen from the conditions in which they live and their begging. Their behavior is incompatible with public order: prostitution, incitement to vice, theft [...] and aggressive begging. These persons must be removed from the territory [...].’12 According to Médecins du Monde, the violent clearance of slums causes serious traumas and all accomplished integration is nullified. This policy, which was designed to deal with the few thousand Roma in
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special laws between 2002 and 2007, is thus based on criminalizing the representation of poverty, the slum, and making the lives of its residents impossible. Successful integration
A comparison between the situation in the shantytowns in 1974 and those in 2008 shows that in the 1970s local authorities offered the immigrants free education, transport and holiday camps, while the state forced housing associations to accommodate slum residents and built temporary flats. Certainly, today non-governmental organisations such as Romeurope provide assistance and some local authorities only clear up slums after consultations have taken place. A slum mushroomed in Bobigny between September 2006 and January 2007 and was only destroyed after the 250 residents had agreed to accept temporary housing in reception centers. This more humane strategy of consultation is the softest of the measures for clearing up bidonvilles, but it does not seem to work: the social upgrade from slum to apartment requires counseling to make it work, and many return to the slums after a few weeks. How is the problem to be tackled? In Aubervilliers, where 30% of the 72,000 residents are foreigners, there were slums with 600 residents. A neighborhood of prefab homes, mirroring the social structure of the slum, was created in 2006 for sixty persons. According to Marie-Louise Mouket of Pact Arim 93, better living conditions should be the basis of the search for further solutions.13 The Roma receive counseling via evaluation and work placement to achieve a job and permanent accommodation within three years. The families sign a contract obliging them to learn French and to have their children educated. As the prefect was in favor of the project, a multidisciplinary procedure14 could be signed, by which the state funded 50% of the project while the region and the town paid the other half of the € 1 million building expenses. Eleven of the eighteen heads of families have a permanent job and will exchange the project for a flat. After this success, a similar initiative has been begun in Saint Denis for twenty-two Rom families on a site with caravans and good sanitary facilities. These projects show that Rom families can integrate with few resources: slums are not inevitable.
conditions under a motorway for eight years, by Alvaro Gil-Robles in 2005 and again by Miloon Kothari of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2007. The dreadful conditions in which these children born on French territory have been growing up for years are a cause for indignation, but Europe is also responsible for this continual inhuman treatment of the Roma because it has compiled inventories of the unacceptable situations but does not sanction failure of the French to make improvements. Moreover, the integration projects that are already under way in France, offering housing, work, and social counseling, can be better funded and encouraged by Europe.
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Since 2007 Romania and Bulgaria have become members of the European Union and their citizens can circulate freely in the EU. Although the ten million Roma are the largest minority in Europe, people seem to know nothing about their centuries of persecution and are indifferent to their situation, which has grown worse in many countries since 1990. The French integration policy for slum residents in the 1970s – direct access to the employment market and soon afterwards to the housing market – shows that at that time the country was a smoothly running integration machine, while in 2008 it has closed the employment market to Roma for discriminatory and electoral reasons15, at a time when there are 500,000 vacancies that cannot be filled, the economy is paying a high price for jobs that are not taken, and the loss of revenue for the pension funds is running into billions16. Attention was drawn to the Hanoul camp in Saint Denis, where children have been growing up in appalling
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Migrant workers recruited to solve the housing shortage ended up in slums. Press release, Médecins du Monde, January 2007. ‘[Roma...] live in deplorable conditions in makeshift camps and are continuously forcibly evicted, either through police raids, often particularly violent, or through a pattern of constant threats, searches, destruction of property and other forms of harassment’. Always Somewhere Else, Anti-Gypsyism in France, European Roma Rights Centre, Nov. 2005, p. 12. […] I learned about several cases of violence and rape involving police officers from the Saint Denis police station‘ in ‘On the effective respect for human rights in France’ Report by Mr Alvaro Gil-Robles, Commissioner for Human Rights, 2006, Point 175-177, Full report on www.coe.int. ‘When [Roma] exercise various activities in order to survive [...], they face constant harassment by police’. Op. cit., note 3, pp. 20 & 269. Full report: www.errc.org ‘During one eviction in July 2005 in Vitry-sur-Seine, children were left alone on the site without assistance or protection.’ Op. cit., note 4, point 350. Interview with Misa Bota on 23-04-2008. According to UNICEF, 30% of Rom children do not have access to schools in Romania. Op. cit., note 4, Point 93. Complaint by French member of parliament Patrick Braouzec, 11-01-2005, to the National Security Ethics Commission (CNDS). National Agency for the Reception of Foreigners and Migration (ANAEM). The financial incentive to leave is € 300 per adult and € 100 per child. Interview on 25-04-2008 with Malik Salemkour, League for Human Rights. Response to parliamentary question n° 17477, 5-05-2003. Pact Arim helps the 100,000 French homeless and those who live in unacceptable conditions – slums. www.pact-arim.org. The procedure in which multidisciplinary teams work together is known as ‘maîtrise d’œuvre urbaine et sociale’ (MOUS). Employers have to pay the ANAEM (cf. note 7) € 900 to employ a Rom. Government reports therefore call for immigration: report of the ‘Commission pour la libération de la croissance‘, Jacques Attali, 2008, p. 172.
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Slum housing Roma from Romania and Bulgaria in Bobigny.
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Slum housing Roma from Romania and Bulgaria in Bobigny and in the background dalle Karl Marx, Bobigny.
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Integration project for Roma in St Denis: caravans.
Integration project for Roma in Aubervilliers: prefab housing.
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II: Slabs: Working With Utopia
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Districts of Greater Paris have to deal with the dalles that were built in the 1960s and 1970s and have now fallen into disrepair. These slabs were built between the grands ensembles (big ensembles) and were intended for middle-class residents who could step out of their flat onto a traffic-free esplanade to stroll, shop and socialize. Slab urbanism creates a mineral, utopian urban space in which such functions as driving, parking and housing are stacked vertically, but it turned out to generate problems and its viability is up for discussion. Demolish or renovate? The new town of Bobigny is opting for demolition of the Karl Marx slab. In the 1960s this village was suddenly designated as the capital of the new Seine Saint Denis administrative district by the Law for the Reorganization of the Paris Region (SDAURP)1, and in 1965 the urban development master plan for Paris stated that Bobigny was to become a structuring pole in Greater Paris.2 This SDAURP master plan defined the gigantic, multi-centered project of the new towns around Paris, linked by a network of regional trains and motorways. So slab urbanism is an intrinsic part of the history that is still waiting to be written. A priority urban zone procedure3 was outlined for the centre of Bobigny in 1967 consisting of thirty-five 18-floor apartment blocks placed around six raised slab platforms with shops. The car parks and roads are situated below the level of the platforms, while the districts are surrounded by greenery and open space: the ideal town, at least on paper. But Bobigny never acquired the economic importance mentioned in the SDAURP master plan, and the platform system was sabotaged when state institutions refused to connect to them. The economic crisis did the rest and the project was halted, which was to have consequences for the Karl Marx district, which was never linked with the other platforms. This led to two rival structures, the upper town and the lower town. Residents were forced to adopt zigzag routes, made worse by the unclear status of the spaces: were they private or public? The district was left to its own devices. Forty years on, the decay is visible and many shops on the slab are empty. Poverty descended on the town after the exodus of the middle class, and in 1995 it was classified as a Zone Urbain Sensible (problematic urban zone). 4 Annick and Luc Jaume moved to the Karl Marx district in 1972, at a time when their apartment was de luxe. They have seen the glorious era and the decline. Annick Jaune: ‘In the 1970s the dalle was full of life: there were lots of shops and pedestrians’. All the same, they have refused to leave their district and regard it as positive that it is now inhabited by immigrants from Brittany, North Africa or China totaling more than sixty different nationalities. Since 1998 Bobigny has been working on the renovation of the 40-year-young centre. Residents were asked for their views on their Communistadministered, multicultural town, followed by further consultations in 2005 and 2006 in the Karl Marx district in the form of urbanism workshops. Questionnaires revealed that the residents regard the slab as an obsolete obstacle, inaccessible to those with a handicap, and unsafe at night. The local authority decided
to demolish the slab and to restore the district on the natural level of the ground. Lacking the financial resources to clean up the slab and the centre on its own – at a cost of € 132 million – the town was able to fall back on the Borloo Law, whose purpose is to improve the conditions in suburbs. Since 2007 residents can follow the plans on scale models in an information point: the range of housing is becoming more diverse, lower flats and owner occupied homes are being built beside the slab, with a total of 770 new homes. The 244 families from the flats that are due for demolition are being housed elsewhere: an agency carries out a social diagnosis for that purpose and provides counseling for the eighteen-month change of address within the framework of a multidisciplinary team procedure.5 A home ownership scheme enables families with modest incomes to purchase their rented accommodation below the market value.6 The demolition of two apartment blocks will open up the district and once the slab has been removed, daylight will be restored to the streets below that are felt to be dark and unsafe. A new street grid is being laid out across the district, dividing it into four classic blocks to make the difference between public and private domains clear. Bobigny will probably develop other scenarios for the remaining slabs. Will it create private gardens or facilities on them, or, after the potential success of the Karl Marx operation, will it make the whole town slab-free? Wasp-waisted tower blocks
There are two slabs in the inner city of Paris that are being renovated instead of demolished. The first, the Font de Seine, which served as décor in Wim Wenders’ film The American Friend, is private property that is open to the public. Designated as a sector due for renovation in the Paris urban master plan7 in 1959, the district was built between 1962 and 1976 and marked a break with the local housing and factories. This onekilometer long, six-hectare slab is flanked by twenty tower blocks with 10,000 residents and 5,000 office employees. It includes schools, a library and two swimming baths; here the slab is the infrastructure that links these elements. Many of the tower blocks have a wasp waist just before they reach the slab to create more light and space. There are many positive aspects: a central location in the city, and a functional combination of work, housing and recreation. In 1998 the concrete structure showed signs of leaking, leading to the closure of the underground car parks. All the other classic problems of slab urbanism emerged too. The routes are labyrinthine, views are obstructed, and the paving is too homogeneous, which is not conducive to orientation. There is access to the slab by escalator, ramp and lift, but these are difficult to locate. The spatial rifts between slab and street, slab and river respectively, lead to dysfunctionalism and isolate the slab. It is noteworthy that the residents have returned spontaneously to the ground level because they use the subterranean entrance, and not the luxurious halls one floor higher. In this case too the residents were consulted, and they wanted to keep the slab, to which they had grown attached. A plan for the renovation was drawn up, to be implemented between 2004 and 2011. Eerie passageways on the
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slab were closed and the lighting was made brighter in the evening, while a new paving system will suggest routes between the five neighborhoods. Views towards the Seine are being created and new entrances as a continuation of the existing streets. The arrangement on the slab is being made more clearly differentiated, with open squares on one side next to gardens planted with trees. Architecture as way of life
The folder presenting the Olympiades slab in 1965 was entitled ‘change your life, change your city’.8 It announced that ‘an impossible dream comes true’ because the slab marks the invention ‘a new art of living’. It is conceived as a total city for families in which they can live, shop, exercise and meet friends. Architecture here is more than an environment: it builds a way of life. However, the economic crisis meant that some of the announced services were never implemented. The district was built between 1965 and 1976 by the architect Michel Holley, who abandoned the street as a structuring principle. Thirty tower blocks, some of them 33 floors high, flank a 15-metre-high square, below which are four or five levels of parking space. The 24,000 m2 slab is overlooked by 3,098 apartments, 45% of which are council homes. Beneath it a kilometer of underground roads provide access to 2,700 parking lots, a Buddhist temple and wholesalers of Asian food. The questionnaire conducted among residents revealed that they are critical of their surroundings. There is little for young people to do on the slab, except that it has unexpectedly become a playground for urban acrobatic sports. Every day 6,000 pedestrians walk over the square, but they also – and this was never intended – walk through the underground rue Disque and rue Javelot to avoid the slab. The difficulty of access to the slab is a problem, as well as the long time it takes to reach the street from the flats. In December 2005 the Olympiades were incorporated in the major urban renewal project and renovation could get under way.9 The aim is to make the paving more attractive and to improve the lighting. Other recommendations envisage a better link between the street and the slab, the removal of obstacles on the slab surface, the provision of quality services, and a reinforcement of the shopping function. Private and public areas are to be clearly differentiated, and the plants in pots are to be replaced by genuine parks. Since September mediators from the city of Paris have been conducting surveillance and solving conflicts. In the future the gap above the rails of the Gobelin station, where the slab was never completed, has be filled in or covered.
model, but has been confined to a few experiments which have been scattered here and there in the landscape of Greater Paris. More than curiosities, they bear witness to a rare courage to experiment radically and on a large scale. After forty years of slab urbanism, it is possible to gauge the consequences of this unique urban form, to analyze its ageing, and to examine the relation with the historic city. As one of the last energetic attempts to create the ideal city, slab urbanism proves to produce identical problems. The ambiguity of the space is one of the causes: in the traditional city the public street is accessible to all, but it is also spatially demarcated and is patently distinct from private spaces. The situation on the slab is different, where the spaces that are open to all are bigger and more diverse, while in legal terms they are private spaces. The problems may be identical, but the solutions adopted by local authorities in the poor suburbs are different from those of the wealthier capital: demolition instead of renovation, or new spectacular architecture, as in La Défense. Linking the slab with the natural ground and with the district is a condition for successful revival. Before the slabs are demolished, paying attention to redesigning them is an option, because they are young systems and we probably lack enough distance to be able to write them off immediately. The striking feature is that these districts have been made as if they were petrified, few changes have been made to their total design in the last forty years, no buildings have been added, and the town has nowhere become densified. When it was completed, the slab was not just a utopia – it was a monument right from the start.
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Loi n°64-707 du 10 juillet 1964 sur la réorganisation de la région parisienne. Schéma directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris (SDAURP), 1965. Zone à urbaniser en priorité (ZUP). Procedure for urban development projects that was in force from 1959 to 1967 to combat the housing shortage. Zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS), problematic urban districts that are priority targets of government policy. Maîtrise d’œuvre urbaine et sociale (MOUS), procedure in which local multidisciplinary teams work together. Accession sociale à la propriété to promote social intermingling. Plan d’Urbanisme Directeur de Paris, 1959. Changer la vie, changer la ville, folder voor toekomstige bewoners. G.P.R.U.: Grand projet de renouvellement urbain, started in 2001 by the city of Paris to improve eleven districs.
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Ambiguous spaces
Slab urbanism is a radical solution for the division of space by separating groups of users and is the result of a total vision of the city that was developed in parallel to the architecture of the Modernist movement. It is based on utopian urban projects, Eugène Hénard’s city of the future of 1910, the Athens Charter of the 1930s, and the Buchanan Report of 1963. It proposes the model of a new city and society, a total rupture with the existing city. It has not led to a widely applied
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Soon to be destroyed slab in citĂŠ Karl Marx, Bobigny
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Slab Front de Seine, rupture with street level and old city of Paris.
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Soon to be destroyed slab above underground parking and road, cité Karl Marx, Bobigny.
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Buildings with ‘wasp waist’, slab Front de Seine, Paris.
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Slab system in Bobigny: conserved slab Paul Eluard.
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Slab Front de Seine in Paris: rupture with street level.
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Unfinished slab Olympiades, former partially covered railway station Gobelins.
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