Summary Of Paris Dreams

The marginalization and isolation found in the suburbs of Paris are the results of 20th century postwar Paris failed urban planning. City officials attempted to reconstruct Paris into a higher functioning city based on models of other metropolitan communities; using designs that broke the city into sections. As a result, urban planners created separation between classes, which produced a loss of connection and identity for immigrant families. That class division became a breeding ground for hostile attitudes, serotypes, and generations of poverty in the suburbs. These increased tensions centered on race and wealth are today modern Paris’s most pressing issues. The flawed urban planning that gave birth to the suburbs created what Prime Minister

Manuel Valls once called, “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in Paris. Through literature and film the depiction of life in the suburbs or “banlieues” portray honest accounts of the loss of identity, hate, and isolation these people face due to their country’s segregation through its housing projects.
Through history we can trace the annexation of Paris’s lower class to the rule of Napoleon III and the work of Baron Haussmann’s. Haussmann’s redesigns of the capital through new boulevards were successful in his attempts to push the inner slums to the edge of the city (Kimmelman 3). After the World War II, Paris biggest urban development issue was housing and reducing its ever-growing population (Rearick 84). Following the German occupation, France received a large influx of immigrants from northern Africa and southern Europe. Immigrants in search of laborer jobs were placed at the bottom of the social ladder. As the slums continued to grow, so did their battle for housing during the mid-1950s (Rearick 84). In 1958, during the Fifth Republic, under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, Paris would begin “designing [itself] like a sleek machine whose parts would function more smoothly”. Housing in the capital was inadequate for the population, half of which did not meet modern standards (Rearick 85). Most people impacted by its inadequacy were the immigrant lower class and also the ones most affected by their solution for the problem. Around twenty percent of the homes did not have running water and eighty percent did not have bathrooms (Rearick 85). These issues furthered the argument that Paris was “full of inconveniences, noise, and dirt” (Rearick 84). Arguments like those helped urban planners begin their destruction of the slums and creation of the suburbs, which would begin the process of immigrant identity loss in Paris. The transformation of Paris came at the cost of the city’s diversity and mixture (Cobb 220). By displacing them from their community’s and the capital it marginalized them by making them feel less than French natives. A group of individuals, some first generation citizens, finding no connection to the only home they have ever known and no connection with a background that they have come from.
With “function” in mind urban planners based their models of Paris from cities, they believed, functioned more efficiently, like London and New York City (Rearick 87). In the 1960’s, the city began building its suburbs a “ring of satellite new towns, providing modern apartments for poorly housed Parisians and newcomers to the region” (Rearick 87). In the eyes of the city planner’s demolishing lower buildings cramped for space they could replace them with skyscrapers and end the long-standing housing issue (Rearick 90). As author Richard Cobb wrote in, Paris and Elsewhere, “There is nothing more from humanity and more devoid of the human scale than an architects model plan for a new urban development” (Cobb 212). Building up cold, isolating skyscrapers where their homes and community’s once stood was the start of the disconnect immigrants felt in Paris. This kind of gentrification marked the start of immigrant isolation, beginning with the loss of their homes in the central city. The people of the thirteenth and the twentieth arrondissement were most affected by Paris’s modernization plans, “where one large slum after another was gutted and replaced with high-rise apartment buildings” (Rearick 94). Over 6,000 people lived in some of these devastating structures; most never leaving their neighborhood, were strongly attached to their community (Rearick 94). For these communities of immigrants, being pushed out made them feel little connection to the city and resulted in disillusionment.
As the city’s layout began to change many inhabitants of what once was the slums left; for financial reasons, for work, or to be closer to friends (Rearick 96).
“In 1970 the population of Paris had declined to 2,600,00, that of the banlieues had reached 5,600,000” (Cobb 219).

“A third of new apartments were subsidized public housing”, the city’s plans for urban renewal were at the cost of Paris’s historic buildings and community life. As Charles Rearick writes in his novel Paris Dreams, Paris Memories, “urban planners looked at shabby areas and saw only poverty, wretched housing, public health dangers, criminality, and wasted space” In urban planners minds they saw the creation of these apartments as progress made, providing a “better quality of life” (Rearick 112). However, to the people whose homes were destroyed and social lives ended were forced to reassess their place in Paris. As urban planners started destroying these neighborhoods and building up modern apartments, the process of alienation began. Richard Cobb uses the neighborhood, Marais as an example. Following the displacement of its original occupants to the suburbs, the diversity in the neighborhood and workforce ended, he dramatically says it’s when the neighborhood signed its “death warrant” (Cobb 221). Even though Cobb may be dramatic the results are correct, immigrants and their presence of culture and influence in Paris vanish once they are swept outside the city. The further they are pushed out of their homes, jobs, and schools the more they begin to feel

ostracized.
Urban planners believed their ideas for Paris would make the city a powerful, global powerhouse. In result, the modern architecture and city’s redesign would make the suburbs a place where unconnected immigrants grew angry, were ignored, and whose community became handicapped by their country’s failure to address the problem. Urban planners attempts at modernization where flawed. The architecture and designs were cold and harsh, and all immigrant culture once present in the city was pushed out. That loss of presence resulted in what now is a major issue for suburbs, lack of identity as French citizens. Critics of urban planners were correct in their pleas for the government to reevaluate its modernization plans (Rearick 116). Urban planners were corrupt; their plans were to make the city efficiencies, but their intentions were rooted in dollars signs, not people (Rearick 112). Failed urban planning is the major factor that contributes to the cultural divide among Parisians in the suburbs. Other issue like, poor education, lack of jobs, stereotypes, and generational oppression all stem from post-World War II reconstruction.
The social problems that plague the suburbs are the outcomes of the gentrification of immigrant communities in central Paris. These issues fill the background of Faïza Guène novel, Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, a story about teenage girl, Doria, who is of Moroccan descent. Doria who lives in the “paradise projects” outside of Paris, struggles with identity as a French born citizen with Moroccan ancestry. Doria’s lack of awareness’ towards her identity is a direct result of the housing project she has grown up in and it’s reflection on her community. When we first met Doria’ we learn her father has recently left her mother and her to return home to Morocco to remarry and father a son. Throughout her internal dialogue, apart of her struggle to identify with something is the loss of the role her father played. The relationship Doria had with her Moroccan ancestry factor in to her identity as a Frenchman. The design of the housing projects boasts inequalities that create isolation for those of immigrant descent. For example, the education system Doria describes is prejudice towards her based on stereotypes and hate. Doria who is in high school, QUOTE MEAN TEACHER COMMENTS
Her teachers push doubt, and make her like many others in the suburbs feel lesser.

In Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the issue Doria faces at school is impacted by the isolation the suburbs have from central Paris. In the New York Times article, Paris Aims to Embrace Its Estranged Suburbs by Michael Kimmelman he writes, “a century’s worth of urban decisions that have exacerbated the country’s gaping cultural divide”

The distance between both community’s create feelings of isolation amongst these citizens. An important moment that highlights the separation is when Doria and her mother visit the Eiffel Tower. Doria’s mother have been a French citizen for almost two decades, lived less than an hour away, but never see the monument. The imbalances between the levels the city functions at are appalling. Example being the schools systems in each community, Paris has forty-seven percent more elementary schools than the suburbs (Kimmelman 2). Throughout the novel, Doria is struggling with school. She recalls the callous and racist comments her teacher make towards her, even her supposed, “advocate”, her social workers continuo to perpetuate the cycle of belittling. Doria continues to struggle with the idea that she is less than because of her heritage after she fails her test at the end of the year and is given no real choice in attending hair school. The disinterested teachers, lack of funding, and distaste for school the teenagers of the suburbs live in are all results of

the isolation the suburbs have created with Paris. “Too many teenagers grow up with little connection to the world”, said journalist from The Economist in his essay Forgotten in the Banlieues. This isolation is what furthers the social gap and loss of identity in the suburbs of Paris.