the zone: an alternative history of paris

AN OUTSIDER’S GUIDE TO MODERN PARIS

In The Zone, 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 La Haine, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today’s Paris, and even France itself.

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.

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.

The Zone is a brilliant anatomy of the true heart of Paris. An essential book for urbanists and historians.

Justinien Tribillon is an urbanist, freelance writer and editor. He co-founded, edited and published Migrant Journal (2016-2019), and Concrete and Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Architecture. He has also contributed to Flaneur, Algae Review, The Architectural Review, The Guardian, MONU, and Magnum among others. He gained his doctorate at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London and is also a tutor in urban studies at UCL and have been a guest critic in architecture at Central Saint Martins, the Cardiff School of Architecture, Columbia University, HEAD Geneve, and the Bartlett School of Architecture.