‘The Zone’ Reveals Images of Paris Beyond Its Clichés

A middle-aged Black woman wearing glasses smiles as she leans against a stone balustrade and looks towards the river. Bare branches of a tree dangle overhead. Across the banks are palatial French buildings. Next to her picture, in diptych, appears the phrase I can’t believe I’m in Paris repeated twice. It’s an amusing and relatable work from 1995 by the artist Ken Lum that speaks to the mass of tourists who flood the French capital each year. ‘There are millions of representations of Paris across the globe’, writes urbanist Justinien Tribillon in his new book The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris, and continues, ‘it lives in Palermo, pinned on a teenager’s bedroom wall, saving up for the big trip. In the dining room of a Mexico City retirement home. On the dashboard of a Malian taxi driver picking you up at the Modibo Keita International Airport.’ Everyone has their own picture of Paris. For those who realize their dream, visiting the City of Light can feel like entering a tableau vivant, but it is also just as staged. From influencer selfies to wedding portraits, from film sets to fashion shoots, it has become a backdrop for image production.

Because of this, Paris is difficult to see. Our collective imaginings make it a hard place to understand beyond clichés of Haussmannian apartments and vin naturel on café patios. For Tribillon, who has been writing in English about his hometown for around a decade, it is ‘a vile, dirty, stinky, feral, exhausting, pushy, aggressive city’. The Zone attempts to tell the history of the French capital from its periphery. Quite literally – it is surrounded now by a ring road called the Périphérique Boulevard, a physical and psychic barrier of what is inside and outside. The area near that boundary was a strip of land previously known as ‘le zone’, which was within the city walls but not protected by civic law, a sort of extraterritorial territory, managed by the military. Starting in the 1840s, shanties of its poorest proliferated there only to be cleared by the Vichy regime in the 1940s; exact numbers of its population are still unknown. Its spirit remains, though, as the edge of the city is often the poorest.

The French capital is structured around the myth of a binary: you are either inside it, or you are outside it. The fact that the Paris metropolitan area has a population of roughly 12,000,000 (almost 20% of the population of France) while the city proper is only around 2,000,000 should alert you to certain disparities. There aren’t literal walls, of course – at least, not any more, it was the last city in Europe to remove them – though there certainly are still psychological ones. Tribillon discusses how rebuilding the old fortifications in the 19th century led directly to the ring road that now encircles it. In detailing the politics of housing and greenwashing along the city’s edge (who knew parks could be so politically repressive?), as well as the history of the Périphérique itself, a central paradox is revealed: the Parisian political elite polices its margins to sustain its central image as an inclusive, glamorous place, open to all.

As the city becomes more and more expensive, particularly in the wake of the Olympics, opinions about what happens in the suburbs may change even further. For a few years, for example, the banlieues have been where Poush, one of the largest schemes for artist studios, has had its space. The organization gets two-year leases on large building complexes from developers, always outside Paris, and then moves to the next when time is up; rent increases follow. The city’s geographical size has grown before, and it could again, but 200 years of mistreatment on its edges may make it more difficult to change than in other cities because of the history of its urban planning.

It is hard to say how these forces of gentrification and expansion will all play out after the Olympics, particularly because Seine-Saint-Denis, the most storied suburb, is where the Olympic village is, though I have my fears. After years of living in the centre of the city, I do prefer what I call ‘ugly Paris’: the parts of the city that developed late, where modernist towers abut former 19th century slums, where the colonial history of France is evident in the diversity of its inhabitants. It’s a more honest picture, because what makes Paris interesting is not its clichés but its complexity. Instead of focusing on the images that conjure an almost unbelievably beautiful place, The Zone provides a compelling history of the city’s margins, exploring its politics and policies, revealing its illusions, making the City of Light more believable by illuminating the circumstances of the workers who sustain it.

Justinien Tribillon's The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris is published by Verso Books 

_{Main image: Prang's Plan of Paris and its Surroundings, showing all fortifications (detail). Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons and the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library}