Fighting urban decay: a case study

"It is the visual, cultural and aesthetic environment one finds himself in that brings dignity"

I ended it on a pretty harsh note last time. It may seem unbelievable, but I’m actually a big optimist. Our current situation is certainly running its course, but that doesn’t mean what comes next will not be better. It just won’t be under the same framework.

It is very easy — and funny — for dissenting voices to keep pointing out the catastrophic and tragic failures of the dominant ideology, but it is much more valuable to show how things could be done instead. I want to share this with you, and show how superior the alternative can be.

I’d like to take a look at a small relatively unknown example of how urban decay can be fought, in one of the most declining urban centers on the planet. I hope you’re not sick of France yet, because that’s where this is going.

The lost territories of France

Around Paris is what is called the “banlieue” which can be roughly translated to “the suburbs”. But be careful. While to the lambda American or other this may mean wealthy isolated pockets of upper middle class residential areas, that is not what we are talking about here. It’s certainly not as bad as Detroit, but the decline is steep.

These suburbs used to be very posh areas, in fact some of them very historic neighborhoods. The most well known of course being the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, the infamous “Department 93”. You can tell there was something to it because of such monuments as the Basilica of Saint-Denis. It is essentially the first Gothic building, and the place of burial of French kings. No less. Clovis, the King of the Franks, as well as the Sun-King Louis XIV were both buried in its crypt.

More recently, the national football (soccer for our American readers) stadium, the Stadium of France was built there. Always a fun observation for someone who couldn’t imagine the area before the decay, why would they ever build this here?

Today, the department of Seine-Saint-Denis is one of the most derelict areas in France. Some of its towns sport the highest crime rates in the country. The police has no goodwill left with the population, and is not backed by the authorities which makes their job difficult. Hence, a proliferation of thugs, drug dealers and other such scum bloom.

The public schools in these areas are designated by the government as “Priority Education Zones”. This means that any newly formed teacher will be sent to the trenches for experience. Naturally, that’s because otherwise no one would dare teach there and the schools would be abandoned. How’d you like to start your career around delinquents and the worst possible professional conditions? Needless to say, those ideas have not done much good for either the students, or the teachers.

If you’ve ever landed at the Charles De Gaulle airport and taken the line B of the RER (fancy acronym for a subway) with the plebs and tourists who don’t know any better, you will have enjoyed the atmosphere of those areas. They are the first stations on your way to the city, for a few minutes you might think you took the wrong plane.

The culprit here is of course the Regime. The influx of immigrant workers wanting to find a better life for their families required building residential buildings as cheap as possible, and fast. Essentially a bunch of ugly Khrushchyovkas with after a few years of operation: broken lights, vandalized hallways, and never-repaired elevators ensuring old ladies have to walk up 10 stories to bring the groceries up.

The result was the “cités” (literally ‘cities’) within the suburbs, little enclaves of Algerian, Tunisian, Portuguese, Congolese, Senegalese, Moroccan and other such cultures around the capital. But far away from the nice neighborhoods, of course.

When one man made it, he would import his family and perhaps bring in his brother or his cousin, and so on. Therefore, most of these people ended up with the exact same neighbors they had in the old country. Tight knit communities help each other out. The consequences of these policies are known to all. We shall not dwell on them too much, you may find them yourself on YouTube.

The case of Montfermeil

East of Paris lies a town of ~30,000 inhabitants called Montfermeil (you pronounce it Mon-fair-may). If you’ve read Les Misérables, you’ve encountered it. It is the home of the inn where Jean Valjean meets Cosette. During the Hundred Years’ War the town was occupied by the English and Jeanne D’Arc passed by it. Fast forward to the post-WW2 era and Montfermeil is now a ghetto. What on earth happened?

It starts with a man named Bernard Zehrfuss. In the 1950s he was appointed Chief Architect of Public Buildings and National Palaces. His two most famous claims to fame are the UNESCO building, as well as the first building to inaugurate the new modern district of Paris: La Défense.

This is the CNIT, or Center of New Industries and Technologies. I bet it looked grandiose in the 50s. This is what it looks like now.

Zehrfuss was inspired mainly by “American rationalism and its modernity”, and naturally he was a rival of Le Corbusier — the more the merrier as they say, or in French “more crazies, more laughs”. He continued on with these concrete monstrosities, and in the 1980s he finally admitted “at the time, we were mainly trying to reduce costs”. Anyway, we’re focusing on him because in the 1960s he was hired to plan a new housing development called “La Cité des Bosquets” or the city of groves. Sounds lovely. The idea was to build a highway linking Montfermeil to Paris and the Roissy CDG airport, and pitch to the French middle class a more natural setting right at the doorsteps of Paris. The state at the time had encouraged real estate speculation by giving out attractive loans to developers.

Zehrfuss and his friends got to work on building huge concrete blocks and the properties were to be sold as condos. In 1966, the housing bubble burst, the highway project was shelved, the value of the properties tanked, and the apartments were instead rented out. These things were expensive, and there needed to be some return on investment. Therefore, the maintenance was reduced as much as possible, the fees exploded, and the rents increased. The middle class fled the area, and the buildings decayed.

The companies had no other choice but to rent them out to lower income populations. In the 1970s, the first electricity and water cuts began as amenities were not paid for. The walls started to darken, floods occurred, the doors in the lobby were broken, the elevator stopped working, and the typical scenario ensued. When the project first started, you had around half of the inhabitants issued from immigrant backgrounds. Fifteen years later, it was 90%. The area became an isolated enclave, and exhibited all the characteristics of the environments outlined previously. By the 1990s, the area had become a ghetto.

In 2005, France got its own experience with police brutality related rioting. Two teenagers fleeing a police check hid inside a power substation, and were tragically electrocuted in the process. In response, the suburbs of Paris erupted into mob violence, arson, and vandalism. Being at the epicenter of the events, Montfermeil’s city of groves was not exempt. Almost 3000 people were arrested, around 200 police officers were injured and three people died.

The scientific approach to delinquency

You may be surprised to hear the town of Montfermeil was a stronghold of the French Communist Party since WW2. In 1983, an independent right-winger was elected and put an end to further social programs targeting the housing developments. In 2002, his deputy mayor Xavier Lemoine was elected.

Thus begins an actual attempt to fix the problem, and not give in to fatality. The situation as it stood was the following: 225 burned cars per year, more than 200 snatch thefts per year, several fatal assaults on the elderly, very bad school performances, etc.

A series of simple measures were taken. A police station was built in the area with a force of 150 officers serving around 60,000 inhabitants. The town itself got its own municipal police composed of 10 well trained and equipped officers, two K-9 units (police dogs) and 70 cameras.

A network of contacts was built composed of people in every stairwell of the housing developments, one or two families that could inform the mayor’s office of exactly what was happening there instantly. This allowed the mayor to take better decisions, when needed, on whether the municipal or national police should be called upon, or even to escalate matters to the Prefect’s office. In addition, a network of 350 neighborhood watchmen across town, as well as a citizen’s reserve which volunteers for 15 days per year for missions parallel to law enforcement.

A “mediation brigade” composed of a mix between the above volunteers as well as elected officials ready to work throughout the night in neighborhoods. The goal of this is to prevent escalation during frenzies (such as say a highly publicized story of police brutality such as the Théo Affair) where police presence would inflame the situation whereas it would be avoidable. If it does not work, the cops of course take over.

A retired police officer was also sought after for intercession. As a retired officer is no longer part of the police but also still a policeman in spirit, he can go have coffee at someone’s home in the afternoon or talk to youngsters in a parking lot. These are things which the official bodies cannot do, precisely because they are too “official”. Someone like that can collect information that the former would never be able to, and mediate potential disputes with institutions.

Legal statuses were enacted, to differentiate between public spaces (streets), semi-private spaces (lobbies, hallways) and private spaces (apartments). These distinctions were defined to preserve “unity of time and space” in any interventions. The police does not enter or behave in an apartment as it does in a hallway. These are two different domains. You will note that this is a subtle way to take into account broken window theory. If the street is problematic then the hallway will be and vice versa, if an apartment is dysfunctional it will spill out eventually.

On this subject of force and proper escalation, Xavier Lemoine explains:

There is always a gradual nature to interventions, since I think I am very mindful of the modus operandi of law enforcement who must be irreproachable. We must be irreproachable on the form to be strong in the substance. If we are reprehensible on the form, then we will have a hard time keeping the substance up and then everything goes south pretty quick. A little side note on the Théo affair… I think that the Théo affair with the President of the Republic who went to Théo’s bedside, even though everyone knew exactly what this was about, was only because we were around the All Saints holidays.

In 2005, it was also around then that we had the riots. We were a few months away from the Presidential elections, and it was not convenient to get back to the 2005 cycle even though it would have had very different outcomes. And so even if law enforcement were informed of the nature of the character in question, the presence of the President was a way to give out a signal of “appeasement”, forgive me the term, to ensure the suburbs would not move too much and they had already started. We had to put out the fire quickly as no one wanted riots a few months before the elections.

Which shows precisely that the government, our government — us collectively and I include myself in it as it’s too easy to give lessons when we are not in a position of national responsibility which others may have — was under a sort of hostage situation where we distort the reality of events in some ways to keep a sort of illusory calm. The Théo Affair is a perfect example of the situations we have to navigate because we haven’t done the proper work beforehand.

[…]

At the end of the day, it’s a balance of power we find ourselves in and we have to know who will win and who won’t since behind that […] there are around 4000 shitty individuals that we must neutralize if we want to find peace. The thing is however, that these individuals hold hostage millions of people. And the population is in a survival logic, I cannot ask more of them, and I cannot blame them for it or ask otherwise from them.

They will observe who, from either the institutions or the delinquents will have the last word. If they feel that it is the institutions then they will flip back towards the institutions, and at that point we will start having cooperation, operational intelligence, etc. If however they feel that the institutions are a little bit shaky; well in the logic of survival and coming in every day and having to show your ID to enter [your building], you’re not going to be a hero by not showing it and doing the job of institutions. So for most people, it’s going to be a reluctant cooperation with delinquency with Omerta.

The instances of delinquency were also noted and reviewed regularly. This enabled the mayor to propose actions before the delinquents reached the point when their actions would have penal ramifications. This can be as simple as a young man lighting pieces of paper on fire and throwing them outside the school. No harm done, but it is caught and reported by teachers, the police, maybe even the bus driver. This then allows the mayor to decide if it is worth meeting the kid, his family, his social circle, and prevent it from becoming something else.

The Urban vs the Human

The additional and more subtle approach, which is lost to our Progressive friends, is not the question of social justice, or other such drivel. It is the visual, cultural and aesthetic environment one finds himself in that brings dignity. Let’s see what Xavier Lemoine has to say about it.

I am convinced that until we have collectively brought back by the quality of architecture, the quality of urbanism, and the quality of the public space, dignity and pride to the populations who live on French soil, it is in vain to try to succeed in developing security, educational, or social issues. I arrived in 1987 in the town of Montfermeil […] and for 20 years we put in millions into different and varied policies, but in a slum of degraded condos with no maintenance whatsoever. All these policies were in vain. Once we gave back dignity and pride with the three requirements of architecture, urbanism and public spaces, these people once again had something to uphold. […] Then they finally become actors in the security, maintenance, preservation of what we have given back to them. Until you’ve done that, it’s impossible.

Understandably, if a young man lives in a shithole, goes to school in a shithole and all he sees are shitholes, there’s not going to be much of a breeding ground for dignity. Sorry, those decade old prebuilt classes don’t do the job.

Additionally, the town did a lot of work teaching the French language to adults. When you have people in your town who’ve lived for 25 years in France and barely speak the language, there is a big problem. As an immigrant who speaks with a heavy accent and can barely read, your children automatically become your window into the country’s culture. This slightly alters the relation of authority, and is a catalyst for everything you might expect. You’re never going to know the real performance of your child at school until it’s too late, or if he was excluded for a few days, because he’s the one reading the reports to you.

You’ll be pleased to know that even with 90% of school children issued from immigration or low income backgrounds, the town has produced very good results and the education level increases year by year. The number of burnt vehicles dropped form 225 to around 10 a year. The number of delinquent offenses has been reduced to virtually trivial numbers. The vast majority of young people identified as potentially delinquent have not pursued their ways (Lemoine claims only two have persisted thus far). If you’re wondering what happened to those buildings, one of them was blown up in the 90s, and the rest were progressively demolished.

The national justice system is stuck in its ways and does not help the local leaders like Xavier Lemoine. For example, one particular measure in 2006, in response to a significant rise in armed robberies (+200%), which consisted of banning all minors between 15 and 18 years old from congregating in groups of more than three within the city center without adult presence, was struck down by the administrative tribunal. And yet you clearly see that this isn’t impossible and that urban decay is not an inevitable part of living in cities.

Xavier Lemoine has been re-elected in Montfermeil three times in a row, and always with more than 60% of votes. I’ll leave you with this last note from him:

The policies which we’ve put in place sometimes do not produce results in the next six months, but after ten years. Since I’ve been in office for sixteen years, I can tell you I haven’t seen the result of my policies before ten years. So whoever tells you he can fix the problem within the next six months, I’d like that but I don’t see how. So you need to give yourself time and patience, albeit you still need some form of stability and political continuity.

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On the matter of judicial decisions, we can be puzzled as I am. I’ve been working with the Justice system for thirty years and I tell them nicely “I still haven’t understood how you operate”. Perhaps that’s the role of the Judiciary, to not understand how they work so that we can be very respectful of their decisions. But I say this in all simplicity, there’s no animosity towards those people. […] Having been painstakingly present at tribunals, I still remain puzzled. Anyway, we have to work without it. It would be better with, but we have to do without and that’s important.

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We should not consider this urban, socio-economical dysfunction as a cause, it is only a consequence of causes that are cultural. If we do not get ahead of this and review our policies accordingly, then yes we will keep pumping billions. […] Everything I try to do with my team and the help of the population of our town is to try to get people to know, respect, and love France. We cannot blame people for not respecting us if we have not made ourselves known through the most precious things we have.