By an odd coincidence, about a week or two ago we got to watch The Story of Sprawl, a series of eight segments on two DVDs distributed by the planning organization Planetizen, purporting to give the viewers “a unique look at the forces that created urban sprawl.” In fact, they do nothing of the sort. They never mention any of the factors, both positive and negative, that inspired or drove urban populations out of older American cities into the suburbs. These DVDs mostly deal with ideologically inspired socialist architecture that created huge public housing projects which proved to be a failure. The Cabrini project in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, had to be demolished because with the passage of time they became unmanageable pits of drugs, crime and violence.
But guess what? We now get the same story from our cultural betters in la Belle France. The New York Times brings a similar dispatch from La Courneuve, a Paris suburb. Scott Sayare, Razing a Neighborhood And a Social Engineering Idea, N.Y. Times, September 7, 2011. For the whole story, including a pitcture of the demolition, click here. It turns out that over there, the French authorities are in the process of demolishing Balzac, a 16-story high public housing project built in the 1960s amidst much hoopla, as the answer to low cost urban housing. Sound familiar? But what happened there is pretty much what happened here: the architectural vision may have looked pretty on paper but proved to be inept in execution and misguided in terms of accomplishing its stated purposes. It turns out that the Balzac housing project is the fifth or sixth such project to be demolished, starting in 2000.
The article is conspicuously silent on whether or not the decline of these public housing projects has had much to do with the changing urban French demographics, notably the influx of poor immigrants from Muslim countries, who have failed to assimilate into the French culture and who have been the source of ongoing violence in French cities.
An acute, if unintended insight into what’s going on over there is provided by the Times observation that whereas Debussy, the first such tower to be demolished back in 1986, was dynamited, now the Balzac is being demolished “by crane.” Why? “[B]ecause the police balked at the notion of bringing high explosives into the neighborhood. They feared they might be stolen.”
And so it goes in la Belle France.