looks at some of the newly designed affordable housing projects that are trying to address the question of how architecture can respond to immigration, integration, and poverty in Paris one year after the riots. Related: France's banlieues: year of the locust.
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riots in 2005 were just the beginning of france's troubles with large disfranchised communities. increasingly growing nationalism is going to fuel even bigger fires as the immigrant population also grows in numbers.
not only france but whole western europe is on the threshold of large unrests as of now, many racial and social limitations that has not been resolved, and economic growth is not distributed among the less desirable 'others'.
increasingly radicalizing african and muslim minorities are going to be a huge setback for eurepean way of life which has not realistically dealt with the issues of immigrants but still try to benefit from cheap labor under slave like conditions relatively speaking.
this unintegrated young second and third generation immigrants in europe are not passive like their fathers have been and is very well aware of what they are missing when they see their counterparts on the streets and in the parks and in the work force. when they have less and less to lose they put more and more on the line.
dangerous situation indeed.
well said, orhan.
the housing of immigration combustion. italy threw up this mini-wall to section of the bleakest of their failed integration policy, their pitiful social housing.
There was this good article on Europe's post WWII 'council estates,' described as effectively 'open air prisons' for the poor.
And, in the U.S. they just seem to find their way straight to prison much sooner - another legacy of failed immigration housing.
nevertheless, France did recently mandate the construction of housing for the homeless. perhaps there has been a shift, and maybe even some architects can have a hand in building more solid roots for migrants and the poor.
still, there is an inevitable faultline rumbling across the planet separating the First world from the global south - seams are bursting, borders are militarizing, landscapes are recolonized and resubverted. it's something akin to the global warming of human migration - irreprable geaographies, unparalleled economic tension. geopolitical earthquakes, refugee tsunami waves, mass asylum detention. blah blah blah.....
More reading.
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