I realize that I’m, like, four years late to this party, but I’m curious about the suburban slum situation in Paris. Are there no slums in the actual city of Paris? Did Paris effectively export all of its poor to the suburbs?
The general area of Paris has made the same mistakes that the U.S. made back in the 1970’s in places like Chicago. They warehouse minorities, especially Muslims, in large complexes that breed crime. They do export them in a way to get them out of the city proper.
Yes, the difference between the way Paris did it and the way U.S cities did it is that in Paris these large complexes are out in the suburbs.
The city of Paris proper is relatively small, dense, and completely built up. Although some areas are less expensive than others the entire city is high-priced land, making it impossible to tear down existing homes and build low-rent properties in their place. Politically impossible as well. No one would allow major areas of Paris to be razed for such buildings today. All those areas were converted many years ago. The only room for vast areas of such subdivisions was out in the suburbs.
They’re being made to live there? Forbidden to live in the Fifth? All on the basis of their race?
Oh wait. A lot of these are free housing projects for people who aren’t working. And so they’re not going to be on prime real estate.
A lot of the confusion here comes from somebody’s decision (I don’t know whose) to translate the French word “banlieue” as “suburb” rather than “particular neighborhood” or (probably even closer) “outlying area.” There can technically be rich banlieue and poor banlieues; as mentioned, Paris is a pretty smallish city and it doesn’t take long to get to what many people would regard as the outskirts of the city proper.
However, either through convention, political correctness, whatever, the French have decided to use banlieue, in practice, to mean any poor, minority-heavy neighborhood outside the immediate city center. Don’t take the “suburb” in this case to mean some green and leafy, non-contiguous residential neighborhood. They’re trying to say “ghetto” in a more euphemistic way.
ETA the other euphemism that gets mixed in here is “youths,” by which French journalists mean “minorities engaged in crime.” Right wing columnists have a field day mocking the stories of “suburban youths protesting the police,” which means “Arab teenagers burning cars,” but sounds like “Wally and Beaver get a lesson in civics.”