France razes crime-plagued housing towers

In a hard-luck Paris suburb called La Courneuve, a "towering wall of stained concrete and tile, once 600 feet long and 16 stories high," is being demolished, The New York Times reports.

The structure, named the Balzac, for the famous writer and playwright, is only the latest to be pulled down. Three other La Corneuve housing towers, named Renoir, Ravel, and Presov, have been razed since 2000, and a first tower, Debussy, gave way to dynamite in 1986—testaments to the failure of modernist high-rise housing for immigrants and other people of modest means.

The Times says Balzac will be replaced by "a cluster of smaller units, part of a $60 billion nationwide plan to refurbish France's roughest neighborhoods." But the paper casts doubt on whether this most recent plan for rebuilding will fare much better than flawed earlier efforts. 

In the 1960s, influenced by LeCorbusier's theories, France deliberately made the projects big and set them apart from most other components of the community, such as workplaces, the paper says. Now the emphasis is quite different—on "mixing" and "openness"—which suggests that French thinking has moved along the same line as thinking about housing for low-income people in the US. 

Reporter Scott Sayare suggests, however, that despite the inclusion of a school and a work space for local entrepreneurs in the rebuilt La Courneuve development, there will still not be enough jobs for the impoverished residents. And educational efforts may fall short. 

The French effort seems in some respects less comprehensive than the Obama Administration's Choice Neighborhoods program—subject of an article recently summarized on New Urban Network. Though the overall budget for Choice Neighborhoods is much smaller than the French initative, each of the projects the Obama initiative takes on is to receive a broad array of government programs aimed at improving conditions for the residents. Whether there will be enough employment, though, is a big question in the US as well as in France.