All my entries in this blog to date have been occasioned by being in the place being written about at the time. This one is different.
I was in the departure lounge at Melbourne Airport when I first heard about the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of Friday 13 November. The Australian TV news channel was running with the story, and I have the app for Le Monde on my iPad so I was able to read the news reports coming through there as events unfolded. Since then the world's media have been saturated with coverage. A lot of it has been about the victims.
The question in my mind is different: 'Why attack those particular sites and those districts of Paris?' You see, apart from the Stade de France (which I have seen from the train but never visited) I know the districts in which the other attacks occurred very well. They were all within the 10th and 11th arrondissements (administrative areas) of the city. I know the 11th particularly well, having carried out research there. It features in one of my more referenced journal articles:
P. White and H.P.M. Winchester, 1991, 'The poor in the inner city: stability and change in two Parisian neighbourhoods', Urban Geography, Vol 12, No 1, pp. 35-54.
In this we looked at social evolution in the eastern part of the Folie-Méricourt quarter of the district. One of the attacks was on a restaurant in rue de la Fontaine du Roi. I used often to visit a nearby restaurant in that street - indeed I took students on field classes to eat there. I have walked past the Bataclan on boulevard Richard-Lenoir many times. The two sites attacked in the 10th district - the Carillon and the Petit Cambodge - lie in a tangle of streets near the Canal St Martin that is very familiar to me. And the last time I went along the rue de Charonne, the site of the final attack, was on a bus.
I first got to know this inner eastern part of Paris in the mid 1980s - 30 years ago. But I revisited it much more recently when I was at the Sorbonne to examine a PhD thesis on 'social mixing' in Parisian neighbourhoods and took the opportunity before the formal examination to reacquaint myself with both the 11th and the 20th arrondissements that provided much of the material for the thesis.
When Hilary Winchester and I published our article in 1991 we described the 11th as an area in transition. It was traditionally a working-class Parisian district, largely self-contained in its operation - with printing and bookbinding important in the north, and furniture making in the south. There were still a number of insanitary housing areas, and small enterprises and petty commerce dominated most streets. To the west, near the grands boulevards, lay an entertainment area with the 'Cirque d'Hiver' (winter circus - a small indoor arena) and some theatres (including the doomed Bataclan). One or two major arteries had been cut through by 'Baron' Hausmann in the 1850s. Georges Simenon had housed his great detective Jules Maigret in an apartment in boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
By the 1990s the 11th was becoming, in many parts, a blighted area of unimproved housing, declining employment, and increasing social problems. It was rapidly changing to being an area housing poor immigrant populations, many of them of Islamic origins. The diversity of food shops and restaurants was considerable - particularly along the rue Oberkampf and in the streets leading up to Belleville where a significant Vietnamese / Chinese presence had been established. Why should terrorists today target sites in such an area, where ethnicity might be at its most diverse?
Well, today the 10th and 11th arrondissements have changed again. Reading again our 1991 article I find that we were quite prescient in our predictions. We did not foresee large scale gentrification and the creation of a completely new image. "Worn out housing will make way for the rehousing of the respectable lower middle class, involving also the displacement of the marginal poor, such as single foreign immigrants who do not qualify on the housing lists." This has indeed happened. Over the last 30 years the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris have arguably undergone a greater degree of transformation than many other areas of the city, with considerable investment in housing improvement and some new construction. That hasn't meant that these areas have become the preserve of the wealthiest classes - they remain wedded to the western parts of the inner city. But these districts have risen from being some of the poorest to being what could be called the most 'ordinary' in Parisian terms, with a wider cross-section of residents than might be found in other districts.
To strike at the political elite or the haute-bourgeoisie the terrorists could have chosen the 8th or 16th arrondissements, or parts of the 15th or 17th. But these would be terra incognita to Islamic extremists. In hitting at targets in the 10th and 11th they struck at what are today some of the most ordinary parts of the city - areas where most Parisians (probably except those haute-bourgeois) feel comfortable and at home. But they are also, of course, areas with a history of immigrant and ethnic minority settlement providing perhaps some local knowledge and cover for the terrorists. And maybe the fact that they are districts that are being 'lost' to immigrants as area upgrading continues played a further role in singling them out.
As I write there is a gun battle going on in St Denis to the north of Paris - an area where multiple minority groups have become increasingly predominant in recent years. When there were riots in St Denis and other northern and eastern suburbs in 2005 I was in Hong Kong. The Guardian newspaper, knowing that I had done research on such suburbs, contacted me for views and ran a think piece using some of my material and ideas. Ten years later I find that my research interest over many years in Parisian neighbourhoods once again provides food for thought and some insight into current events.
I was in the departure lounge at Melbourne Airport when I first heard about the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of Friday 13 November. The Australian TV news channel was running with the story, and I have the app for Le Monde on my iPad so I was able to read the news reports coming through there as events unfolded. Since then the world's media have been saturated with coverage. A lot of it has been about the victims.
The question in my mind is different: 'Why attack those particular sites and those districts of Paris?' You see, apart from the Stade de France (which I have seen from the train but never visited) I know the districts in which the other attacks occurred very well. They were all within the 10th and 11th arrondissements (administrative areas) of the city. I know the 11th particularly well, having carried out research there. It features in one of my more referenced journal articles:
P. White and H.P.M. Winchester, 1991, 'The poor in the inner city: stability and change in two Parisian neighbourhoods', Urban Geography, Vol 12, No 1, pp. 35-54.
In this we looked at social evolution in the eastern part of the Folie-Méricourt quarter of the district. One of the attacks was on a restaurant in rue de la Fontaine du Roi. I used often to visit a nearby restaurant in that street - indeed I took students on field classes to eat there. I have walked past the Bataclan on boulevard Richard-Lenoir many times. The two sites attacked in the 10th district - the Carillon and the Petit Cambodge - lie in a tangle of streets near the Canal St Martin that is very familiar to me. And the last time I went along the rue de Charonne, the site of the final attack, was on a bus.
I first got to know this inner eastern part of Paris in the mid 1980s - 30 years ago. But I revisited it much more recently when I was at the Sorbonne to examine a PhD thesis on 'social mixing' in Parisian neighbourhoods and took the opportunity before the formal examination to reacquaint myself with both the 11th and the 20th arrondissements that provided much of the material for the thesis.
When Hilary Winchester and I published our article in 1991 we described the 11th as an area in transition. It was traditionally a working-class Parisian district, largely self-contained in its operation - with printing and bookbinding important in the north, and furniture making in the south. There were still a number of insanitary housing areas, and small enterprises and petty commerce dominated most streets. To the west, near the grands boulevards, lay an entertainment area with the 'Cirque d'Hiver' (winter circus - a small indoor arena) and some theatres (including the doomed Bataclan). One or two major arteries had been cut through by 'Baron' Hausmann in the 1850s. Georges Simenon had housed his great detective Jules Maigret in an apartment in boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
By the 1990s the 11th was becoming, in many parts, a blighted area of unimproved housing, declining employment, and increasing social problems. It was rapidly changing to being an area housing poor immigrant populations, many of them of Islamic origins. The diversity of food shops and restaurants was considerable - particularly along the rue Oberkampf and in the streets leading up to Belleville where a significant Vietnamese / Chinese presence had been established. Why should terrorists today target sites in such an area, where ethnicity might be at its most diverse?
Well, today the 10th and 11th arrondissements have changed again. Reading again our 1991 article I find that we were quite prescient in our predictions. We did not foresee large scale gentrification and the creation of a completely new image. "Worn out housing will make way for the rehousing of the respectable lower middle class, involving also the displacement of the marginal poor, such as single foreign immigrants who do not qualify on the housing lists." This has indeed happened. Over the last 30 years the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris have arguably undergone a greater degree of transformation than many other areas of the city, with considerable investment in housing improvement and some new construction. That hasn't meant that these areas have become the preserve of the wealthiest classes - they remain wedded to the western parts of the inner city. But these districts have risen from being some of the poorest to being what could be called the most 'ordinary' in Parisian terms, with a wider cross-section of residents than might be found in other districts.
To strike at the political elite or the haute-bourgeoisie the terrorists could have chosen the 8th or 16th arrondissements, or parts of the 15th or 17th. But these would be terra incognita to Islamic extremists. In hitting at targets in the 10th and 11th they struck at what are today some of the most ordinary parts of the city - areas where most Parisians (probably except those haute-bourgeois) feel comfortable and at home. But they are also, of course, areas with a history of immigrant and ethnic minority settlement providing perhaps some local knowledge and cover for the terrorists. And maybe the fact that they are districts that are being 'lost' to immigrants as area upgrading continues played a further role in singling them out.
As I write there is a gun battle going on in St Denis to the north of Paris - an area where multiple minority groups have become increasingly predominant in recent years. When there were riots in St Denis and other northern and eastern suburbs in 2005 I was in Hong Kong. The Guardian newspaper, knowing that I had done research on such suburbs, contacted me for views and ran a think piece using some of my material and ideas. Ten years later I find that my research interest over many years in Parisian neighbourhoods once again provides food for thought and some insight into current events.
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