The breakdown of the banlieue

'Les Bosquets' is the name of a cité in Clichy-Montfermeil, a satellite town in the Parisian suburbs (banlieue), located 17 km north of Paris. The french term “cité” indicates the typical housing units built around the borders of the city after the second world war. Le Corbusier’s model of the “Cité Radieuse” (radiant city) as a modernist residential housing principle has become the symbol of the reconfiguration of the European city’s landscape in the second part of the XXth century. Le Corbusier’s cités-buildings are now mostly regarded as monuments of modernity, and sometimes, like in Marseille, they have turned into desirable middle-class housings. However, in most cases the “cité” is no longer considered a functional habitat for the working-class, but rather a disfunctional environment for a widely unemployed population. Needless to say, in the French vocabulary, the cité has become the sign of a degraded urban environment haunted by the specter a growing migrant population.