You are in:
- Archives » 2007 » October 2007
Marxist Town Planning
How to ensure that Europe's beautiful old cities remain vibrant cultural and economic centres for the third millennium? It's a puzzle that has intrigued politicians for years.
One far-left Spanish novelist who lived in Paris has come up with a novel approach to the challenge: "De-Europeanise" the French capital, throwing its portes open to a new generation of immigrants (mostly from Africa) who will "destroy" Paris in order to recreate it for the 21st century.
The idea that European cities can only survive by stripping them of their remaining vestiges of European-ness appears in a novel by Juan Goytisolo. Goytisolo is profiled in a fascinating article by Andrew Hussey on the "battle for the soul of Paris" in this weekend's Observer.
"It may well be the case that the future history of the city lies with the banlieues", writes Hussey (the banlieus surrounding Paris house somewhere between 8 and 10 million people, many from immigrant backgrounds). Goytisolo wrote a comic story about how Paris would be turned on its head if all its street signs were written in Arabic, leaving it up to North African immigrants to "hold the code" of the city.
"Goytisolo has indicated his real meaning in a brief essay in Spanish called 'París, Capital del siglo XXI' ('Paris, Capital of the 21st Century'). In essence, the argument is that Paris has to be completely destroyed in order to emerge as the capital of the 21st century. Goytisolo had in fact spent decades of his life in Paris, mostly living in the Sentier district. This is where the revelation had come to him that the idea of a European capital - made by and inhabited only by Europeans - is not just an anachronism, but a dangerous myth that must be destroyed. The reason for this, he said, is because the purely European idea of the city does not correspond to the reality of the streets. Paris is, for example, one of the biggest African cities in the world. It just so happens not to be in Africa."
(...)
"Goytisolo said to me that he had always loved the city because he believed that its oldest and truest tradition was the instinct for cultural and political subversion. 'Paris is revolt and revolution,' he said, 'or it is not at all. That is all I have to say - and why I understand the youth in suburbs. To fight back, to argue hard, is, I think, the oldest tradition in the city.'"
"It was this tradition, he also said, that had been temporarily lost at some point towards the end of the 20th century and that needed to be reawakened. The city had to be 'de-Europeanised' in order to make space for new dissident voices. This was in fact the real answer to the problem of the banlieues - the way to bring Paris back to life again is not just in the Delanoë solution of tidying up the city and offering free bikes but to literally break down the borders to the city, bring the immigrants and so-called outsiders into the heart of Paris, where they can start to develop a new, genuinely multicultural and hybrid culture."
Hard to imagine the French buying this one, even though as Hussey points out, the change is already taking place in areas to the north and east of central Paris. Hussey himself wrote an excellent history of Paris, so he knows his subject.
The article is published close to the second anniversary of France's worst riots since 1968, which were provoked by the deaths of two teenagers from the banlieu Clichy-sous-Bois, who were electrocuted when they hid from pursuing cops in a power substation. French news conducted some serious soul-searching on the anniversary of the boys' deaths: One reporter noted that while Clichy-sous-Bois is mere kilometres from Paris, it can take two hours to get to the centre of the city from the banlieu. Inhabitants of certain neighbourhoods feel as if the government is trying to keep them out.
Goytisolo's ideas on Paris are extreme and clearly bizarre (though Hussey interprets the proposal in a more realistic light, such as making it easier for the inhabitants of the suburbs to get into Paris to find work). One shudders to think what would become of Paris should the last bourgeois family be airlifted from the Jardin du Luxembourg and their place usurped by kids from the "neuf-trois".
However, critics of multiculturalism will see much that is familiar in the novelist's work. The sense that the dominant "home" culture has become stale or rotten. That, at best, it deserves equal footing with migrant culture and mores. It may be that posterity classes Goytisolo's proposals for Paris among his comic pieces - but as Britain ponders the legacy of multiculturalism, some are sure to argue that much of what he wants for Paris has already been enacted in British cities.
