It will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many plans for urban utopias. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more. Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on.
Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out? This is Here There Be Dragons. Okay, you might notice that I have a bit of a deeper baritone in this episode. I have allergies, unfortunately. But maybe you like the voice better. So we'll proceed business as usual and see what happens. Okay, so last episode we left off talking about Grand Paris, the plan to breach the urban borders of the city and unit Paris with its surrounding banlieue through huge infrastructure projects.
So it will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many many many plans for urban utopias. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more⦠Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on and on. Often utopias are designed to be ideal living spaces for residents.
Do plans for utopia actually create more democratic spaces in the city? Post-war France was a rapidly modernizing place. Towns throughout France went from wartime rations to electricity and washing machines in the blink of an eye, swiftly replacing traditional lifestyles with modern ones. The mile-long highway that separates Paris from its banlieue. In the 60s there had been a project to build a highway. It was part of Pompidou's great projects for Paris, so they had expropriated a lot of land to build a highway, which in the end, it was never built.
So, there were wastelands and we loved playing there. They were spaces of incredible freedom, abandoned spaces, spaces of transgression. We jumped the fences, and played in the grass, in the ruins. It was extraordinary. I remember those spaces very well. These were all the projects of the sixties in Paris and in the banlieue.
