More!

Michael Jennings is back at it with astute observations and which oftn counter the conventional wisdom. Today he discusses his visit to Rotterdam where he saw an exhibition about cities:

Paris outside the Periphique is much more interesting.

It is fashionable to decry the ugliness of Paris' suburbs. They are of course notorious for their ghastly housing estates, and for the riots of last year that took place in some of them. The French word for suburb, banlieu, has almost become a dirty word. But the situation is vastly more complex than that. It is indeed true that some suburbs are unspeakable centrally planned and now practically ungovernable housing estates. But the first impression one gets when walking under the Periphique is that here is where the actual economy starts. One finds budget hotels, car repair stores, markets selling African masks, retail parks, Asian supermarkets, working class neighbourhoods full of ordinary people who can't afford to live in Pairs proper, all kinds of things that are discouraged in Paris itself. There is unbridled capitalism here.

And not just capitalism but I think, more importantly and perhaps more convincing to many who recoil from soiling their hands with trade, is that there is vitality, there is life

Comments

[JRoth]

Never been to the Periphique, only been to Paris once, but:

My impression of almost every part of Paris I visited was vitality. Champs Elysees was generic cosmopolitan strip (Times Square, Michigan Ave., etc.), but the Left Bank felt surprisingly real (for want of a better term - I'd expected something more like Haight-Ashbury or Berkeley, nothing but wannabes and poseurs), and the neighborhood where I stayed, near Gare du Nord, is the Indian district, chock full of sari stores and emporia.

I dunno. Maybe the 'burbs are even better. But I was pleasantly surprised to find Paris an euthentic delight.

[Benjamin Hemric]

I haven't been to the outskirts of Paris and I'm not familiar with the writings of Michael Jennings, but I am familiar with the outskirts of NYC and other American cities and it seems to me that Michael Jennings could be romanticizing the "working-class-ness" of the commerce on the outskirts of Paris. ("This is 'real' because it is for 'real' people.")

Also, it seems to me, judging from NYC and other American cities, that commerce tends to be more separated-out from other uses and thus more concentrated -- and visible -- in outlying areas than in city centers. So it would seem unlikely to me that you will find much in the way of commerce in the housing projects themselves and more likely that you will find it all bunched together in commercial strips.

A NYC example: When I worked as a New York City tourguide people use to ask me all the time, "Where are the supermarkets?" The supermarkets were, in fact, all over the place, but they were on the ground floors of various buildings having other functions (mostly on the ground floors of big apartment houses) and thus less visible. In a less traditionally urban area, the supermarket is likely to be a large freestanding building surrounded by a parking lot -- and thus lots more visible.

Even parking garages, car rental companies and car washes are likely to be less visible in downtown locations, so it seems to me. One of my favorite examples is a large-ish parking garage (with a car rental company in it?) on University Place that has a Japanese restaurant, a cigar store, a pizzeria, etc. on the ground floor along with a canopied entrance to a large bowling alley (which is on an upper floor) and tennis bubble (with is on the roof).