The Zone : An Alternative History of Paris

AN OUTSIDER'S GUIDE TO MODERN PARIS

In <i>The Zone</i>, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of <i>La Haine</i>, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today’s Paris, and even France itself.<br><br>Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday’s Paris made way for tomorrow’s banlieue.<br><br>But the metropolitan dream was never realised. The Zone became a symbol of division: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the working-class immigrant outskirts; between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The Zone, both a physical space and a powerful myth, came to crystallise the social, spatial and ethno-racial differences between Paris and the banlieue.<br><br><i>The Zone</i> is a brilliant anatomy of the true heart of Paris. An essential book for urbanists and historians.