A blogger who blogs under the famous name of the great Corbu at a site called Architecture and Morality investigates the unrest in the French cités.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll dealt with this subject back in August in an English context.
PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that PJ Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. Please note that comments are reviewed by the editorial staff and may not be posted immediately. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pjmedia.com.
I would be interested in discovering how many of such public housing projects are left in the US. I think I read a year or so ago that Cabrini Green has actually been torn down. I imagine many others have been torn down as well.
Haven’t some–maybe even many–of the ’50s and ’60s housing projects in the US been rebuilt with lower density, more low-slung buildings with streets, rather than the high-rise in the park (which quickly becomes a no-man’s land at night) style inspired by Corbusier?
Now imagine thousands of Cabrini Greens dotted throughout France, and you can come to understand how fragile the shiny glass of French beauty can be shattered.
Imagine everyone in the line being armed.
Ed,
As the Blue Castles have become more dangerous the landlords who have private buildings within the castle walls have come to a wider acceptance of Section 8 money. Housing money is generally disbursed at the city level and is responsible for the maintenance of the voting moats around the castles.
When new public housing is built within the castle walls it does tend to be lower density – in part because the Blue Castles are slowly emptying. It’s very difficult to find a city, as opposed to a metropolitan area, that is actually growing. The real growth is in the walled towns away from the castles. Certainly far enough away so that the Blue Castle Barons can’t tax them.
It’s an interesting phenomenon.
Ed,
Most of them are gone or on the boards for some type of remake. Most here in Rochester have been redone, several concrete goliaths leveled for the new suburban townhouse look going so far as to have brick and ornamental fencing in an almost gated community atmosphere. Others have been converted to dedicated urban streets with individual homes.
There has been a lot of changes in thinking since the 60′s and lots of good stories about those changes. Personally, I like the one about “gated communities”.
In another entry at http://architectureandmorality.blogspot, one with a picture of one of Saddam’s palaces, Corbu mentions that real estate values are booming in Iraq.
You know, some Syrian blogger (mentioned by Wretchard at Belmont Club) maintains that the USA is undergoing a cold civil war. And one side is totally completely over the horizon into insanity.
I for one think that real estate values are an extremely good ‘metric’ of a country’s health.
And in the meantime, the Other Side carries on about Bush Lied/People Died/Chalabi should be jailed/ No WMDs. You should have heard the questions thrown at Chalabi, on CSpan, by the way. USA Today, the Washington Post, all of them.. Bush Lied/ Chalabi misled the US ON PURPOSE TO LURE THE USA INTO A QUAGMIRE OF A WAR…/ AND THERE ARE NO WMDS!!! And by the time they get to that last statement, they are frothing at the mouth….
“And in the meantime, the Other Side carries on about Bush Lied/People Died/Chalabi should be jailed/ No WMDs.”
One of the things that angers me about the Republicans is that they haven’t bothered to put together all the footage of Democrats in the 90s discussing the threat of Saddam’s wmd. Then basically broadcast it in commercials or just discuss it on cable tv. They didn’t even do it during the election. This would have shut a lot of people up. Why don’t they invite these Bush lied people on tv then show them Clinton saying the same stuff as Bush? They haven’t even bothered to defend themselves, and then they wonder why support for the war is tanking. I’m center-right after having moved from the far left since 911, and yet I’ve grown to hate them. I hate both parties but for different reasons. A pox on both your houses!
Have you seen this article from the Weekly Standard by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam who are the bloggers at theAmericanscene.com? It’s excellent and the party should adopt it. Fat chance; however, since they seem to be aggressively dedicated to mass retardation.
lindenen,
you’re right.
At weekly standard that is an article by Hayes, on trying to get documents from the DIA (?). And then, there are these weird ‘leaks’, which respectable people think are from CIA dissidents (probably the same ones who undermined Chalabi).
And where is the President and Cheney, etc in all this? Surely they could be more aggressive in fighting THIS American civil war??
Thank you Roger Simon for linking to my post. I’m finding the discussion regarding the architectural environment in which these young arab rioters live well discussed in the blogosphere.
I begin to answer whether Le Corbusier was as responsible as his critics would like to make him regarding modern public housing districts. I argue that the criticism exagerrates his culpability too much. Read it at http://www.architectureandmorality.blogspot.com
As for Cabrini, I’m aware that it was finally torn down but only recently. I drove through it numerous times when I lived in Chicago in 2001. The burned out windows and the plywood sheets covering broken ones were one terrible eyesore, and it was clear that those towers had to go. The contrast between those ugly buildings with the gentrified neighborhoods and retail going up was surreal.
Although the scale of state-subsidized housing is not nearly as visible as it is in Europe, I think the U.S. government has improved its housing policy and learned its lessons about the problems of dense housing for the poor.
Tom Wolfe wrote a book about this.
He described what happened when the authorities destroyed one of these projects, in Chicago, I think. The former residents, who’d lived in the buildings until very recently, CHEERED as the explosions went off.
Bostonian,
I actually quote that passage from Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House in the post that Roger links to above. That was the Pruitt-Igoe projects; footage of their spectacular demolition was included in the impressive early 1980s film Koyaanisqatsi.