To many city residents the banlieues surrounding Paris represent a dystopian vision made real – all high-rises and social isolation. Can new walking tours and a 300-mile track mend centuries of misunderstanding and distrust?

Sarcelles has come to represent everything wrong with Paris’s banlieues to such an extent that there’s even a word – Sarcellitis – to describe the ennui created by modernist high-rises, concrete and social isolation.

The northern suburb represents a dystopian vision made real – especially for those who have never visited. Taking a tour is the last thing on their minds.

We want to reduce the negative prejudice on the banlieues and show how essential suburbs are for the whole city Jens Denissen

But that is precisely what two parallel projects aim to encourage. Paris’s greater urban area holds France’s second-richest community, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and its poorest, Grigny. Its architecture ranges from semi-rural one-storey detached houses to drab tower blocks; meanwhile its social and ethnic fabric is highly fragmented and segregated. Not much has changed since the riots of 2005 and 2007.

Both the Sentier Métropolitain, a 300-mile track around Greater Paris set to be finalised by 2020, and the Voyage Métropolitain, guided walks to show Parisians around the banlieues, hope to improve dialogue.

“Walked exploration makes encounters possible,” says Jens Denissen, a German urbanist who set up the Voyage project with Léa Donguy as a way for people to discover Greater Paris on a human scale. “We want to reduce the negative prejudice on the banlieues and show how rich, diverse, lively and essential suburbs are for the whole city.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Voyage Métropolitain shows Parisians the many sides of Greater Paris

On a cold Saturday morning I join 80 people in hiking gear for a Voyage starting at Sarcelles station. We walk through streets too wide, lined with buildings too short, attracting curious glances from locals. I strike up a conversation with Songül, who runs a restaurant selling lahmacun and other Turkish delicacies.

“It’s really good to see so many people down here in Sarcelles,” she says, before pausing and pointing at her right eye as she adds, “but I can see they’re all Français.”

Denissen agrees that many walkers on the Sarcelles trip are highly educated, mostly white, French citizens. “People on our walks often already have an interest in the metropolitan scale of Paris,” he says. “Sarcelles is a familiar name, so architects and urban planners want to come to see a place they wouldn’t visit on their own. One thing is certain, the next step is for us is to engage more directly with organisations, including local groups, that can stimulate a genuine diversity.”

Local activist Fatima Idhammou is one of the Voyage’s local contacts. “For many Sarcelles residents, being successful means leaving the town to live somewhere else,” she says. “We need to change that mindset. If you ask me what is my perfect city to live in, I answer Sarcelles, but with all of Paris’s cultural amenities.”

Parisians v banlieusards

Paris – unlike London, New York or Berlin – is not officially a city under one metropolitan government. The City of Paris comprises 2.2 million inhabitants in an area of 105 sq km. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has no jurisdiction over the 10 million inhabitants who live within the capital’s urban area – imagine Sadiq Khan in charge of the City of London only, or Bill de Blasio as mayor of Manhattan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A deprived housing estate in Grigny, a suburb south of Paris, which was the scene of violent riots in 2005. Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Guardian

It was to fill this gap that Greater Paris was created from the city proper and its suburban ring in January 2016. But the technocratic exercise of adding an extra layer of government has fallen short of fixing many decades of bad feeling and misunderstanding between Parisians and the banlieusards.

The reciprocal distrust finds its roots in the late 19th century. In 1860, Napoleon III decreed that the City of Paris would swallow 11 neighbouring towns (including Montmartre, Belleville and La Villette). The total absence of consultation with locals and elected officials was avenged by the local press, whose cartoonists ferociously pictured Parisian greed. The image of the central city devouring its suburbs remains vivid to this day.



While Baron Haussmann was busy giving the city its distinctive architecture and unified urban design, the suburbs responded with a disparate mosaic of stories, architectural styles, and social and ethnic groups.



On another weekend I join a group of 28 to explore the leafy suburbs and semi-rural areas around Versailles. Paris’s banlieues are not all like Sarcelles, and the Voyage is all about walking through these diverse urban spaces. The participants are from central Paris and the suburbs – a photographer, a translator, a radio producer, an entrepreneur. The smaller crowd offers a more intimate feeling.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sentier Métropolitain route around Greater Paris

Sarah Zouheir works on the Grand Paris Express, a €23bn project to expand the century-old Paris subway system into the wider metro area. “All week I hear the names of different cities and neighbourhoods, I look them up on maps,” she says. “It’s really interesting for me to leave the office and come for a casual walk on my day off to experience these places for real.”

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As the group progresses through the tidy town of Buc, we scatter among the market stalls selling cheese and locally grown strawberries, and later pass a disused military base bearing the stigmata of second world war bombing. The grand view of Versailles Palace reveals itself as we cross a patch of vacant land, littered with cigarette butts and empty beer bottles. The site will soon be transformed to host equestrian events in the 2024 Paris Olympics, explains one participant.

“For me, walking the city is like when you go to an exhibition of contemporary art and the person next to you is in awe about a piece, but you don’t get what’s so fascinating,” says Thomas Davergne, a physiotherapist from the 13th arrondissement of Paris. “I need to be told where to look at, why to look at this, how to understand it. These walks are like a window on the city.”



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