Miguel Murado

QUIET days at Clichy. That was Henry Miller’s title for his book on the happiness of living in the outskirts of Paris. Sure, that Clichy was not the same Clichy in the news these days, the Clichy of riots and violence. Anything but quiet are the days in Clichy-sous-bois, the banlieu, where the grandsons of the immigration vent their adolescent anger on buses, schools and firemen… Some say that this is because those are symbols of the State. Maybe there is less sophistication involved here: Like the cars, they are simply at hand.

Like every time when there is a catastrophe, the prophets (sociologists, psychologists, architects and urbanists) take to the rostrum. Something has to be done, they claim, to improve the living conditions in these marginalized neighborhoods of the big cities. They are right. Yet the fatalist observer (it could be me) cannot but to note that those terrible neighborhoods were, at some point, the result of another attempt to improve the living conditions in the outskirts of the big cities. Those banlieuses had been created precisely as a socially sensible response to the housing crisis in France during the Fifties, when not just hundreds of thousands of African migrants, but also a million “Pied noirs” returned from Algeria crowded the streets. Those banlieuses were indeed the work of the sociologists, psychologists, architects and urbanists of the day.

At the time, the uncontested king of architecture was the much revered Le Corbusier, a sort of Swiss Mao of urbanism who believed that the 45º angle was the key to social happiness. With the complicity of several governments, Le Corbusier and his followers filled the World with nightmares like Brasilia, a terrifying urban dessert which the jungle is been mercifully devouring for years. Le Corbusier’s stile of house on top of concrete pillars of uniform shape and appearance, overcrowded of overcrowded apartments and dysfunctional lifts, prospered. Soon it covered the World, from Kinshasa to the next corner, like the background of an Existentialist stage play.

Like all totalitarian thinkers, Le Corbusier dreamed of an inhuman World, maddeningly regulated, happily impersonal. The result is Clichy, a place which, riots aside, we discover, all of a sudden, as the real hell it is and it has always been. Just before our prophets invent a new one.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 10-11-2005