[URBAN NOTE] "When terror strikes urban geographies of hope"

[rfmcdonald]

At Spacing Toronto, Paul Cohen writes eloquently about the neighbourhoods in Paris impacted by the terrorist attacks of this month, what they mean and what they are like.

While this is all true, my sadness these past days has been of a deeply personal nature, focused more on the particular than the universal. For the second time in a year, the neighborhood where my home of seventeen years is situated was struck by terrorism. If last January we were just sitting down for an early lunch when the wail of police sirens converging on Charlie Hebdo’s nearby offices pierced the quotidian humdrum, this time we found ourselves an ocean away, worriedly reaching out to neighbors, friends and family in Paris. It is especially painful to watch such terrible events unfold over familiar and beloved geographies. When terrorists struck the Bataclan music hall, first responders set up a triage station in front of our local post office. Our daughter learned to walk in a small park within view of the music hall. The press published photos of the injured being evacuated in front of the building where our pediatrician’s offices are located. The 11e arrondissement’s city hall, where my wife and I were married, sheltered victims during the attacks. The international media have now set up camp just behind our apartment, right where our biweekly outdoor market takes place.

In the short time since the attacks, English-language media have offered a sociological shorthand to describe the neighbourhood where most of the attacks took place, spanning the 10e and 11e arrondissements: hip, “bobo”, the front line for Parisian gentrification, an area of well-frequented bars, restaurants and live music venues. This too is true. Anyone familiar with the geography of the attacks shares the same, sickening supposition that the terrorists were intimately familiar with the cartography of eastern Paris nightlife. In an unfathomable irony, the center-left daily Libération – in whose headquarters, a short walk away from our home, Charlie Hebdo’s journalists sought refuge after last January’s attacks – had just put a front-page story for the following morning’s edition to bed entitled “Bienvenue à hipsterland”, on how the phenomenon drives working-class people from such neighborhoods. And I am as guilty as anyone in pushing the neighborhood’s ‘boboification’: like many of our friends in the neighborhood, I moved to the 11e in 1998 as a graduate student, stayed on when I became a university teacher, and saw the area change. Over the years, I shared countless meals at the targeted restaurants, argued about politics or football at the now sadly famous cafés, and enjoyed many wonderful concerts at the Bataclan. This, I freely admit, should make my testimony suspect, perched on the precipice of mournful narcissism and pathos.

But there is more to the neighbourhood than bobos and bistronomie. The rising tide of real estate prices has not spared this historically working-class neighborhood, to be sure, and a steady influx of higher income residents since the 1990s has transformed its sociology. On our quiet street, a motorcycle repair shop has given way to a vintage toy store, a rubber hose and pipe factory recently vacated space now occupied by an Italian designer housewares shop, and a small dentures workshop just gave way to a wine bar. But public housing (nearly 20 % of Paris’s housing stock) and rent controls have helped make Paris one of the most socially and ethnically diverse urban areas in France. Teenagers from the two racially mixed public housing projects on our street congregate on weekend evenings for animated conversation. A kosher Tunisian restaurant does a brisk business serving up Sephardic fare, across from a Chinese print shop that serves the growing local East Asian community. In the early evenings, grandmothers gather in the same park where television crews are camped out right now to chat in Turkish, Arabic, and Taqbaylit as they watch ethnically diverse groups of kids play football. Two blocks south, one can browse at an anarchist bookstore; several blocks in the other direction, one can shop in specialist Muslim bookstores. Several mosques, synagogues and Jewish schools are located within walking distance. A small congregation gathers each Sunday at a nearby storefront evangelical church. A bit further afield several Catholic churches celebrate masses in French, Portuguese, Mandarin and Tamil to serve their ethnically diverse parishes.