The breakdown of the banlieue

'Les Bosquets' is the name of a cité in Clichy-Montfermeil, a satellite town in the Parisian suburbs (banlieue), located 17 km north of Paris. The french term “cité” indicates the typical housing units built around the borders of the city after the second world war. Le Corbusier’s model of the “Cité Radieuse” (radiant city) as a modernist residential housing principle has become the symbol of the reconfiguration of the European city’s landscape in the second part of the XXth century. Le Corbusier’s cités-buildings are now mostly regarded as monuments of modernity, and sometimes, like in Marseille, they have turned into desirable middle-class housings. However, in most cases the “cité” is no longer considered a functional habitat for the working-class, but rather a disfunctional environment for a widely unemployed population. Needless to say, in the French vocabulary, the cité has become the sign of a degraded urban environment haunted by the specter a growing migrant population.

Would this have appeared in Tesla's vision of the future at the 1893 Worlds Fair?

On 23 June 2010 Transit-Labour participants Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson participated in a round table discussion with academics from Shanghai Unversity in the Venice Pavillion at the Shanghai World Expo. The theme of the event was: Mega-Cities Images at ExpoL Urban Planning, Environmental Protection, Migration. Below is the announcement for the meeting plus some images of the occasion.

Thanks to Giulia dal Maso for her organising efforts.

Thanks to contributions from Dan Hassan, Ned Rossiter and Brett Neilson

The event Rethinking Regionalism from the View of Social Mobilities was organised as an occasion to re-imagine and discuss the configuration of regional formations and borders, particularly Asia and China, through the lens of social and cultural movements and transmutations. This required a shift away from discourses oriented around the nation-state, in order to evoke the constitutive interplay of subjectivities, governance and geopolitical assemblages through which regions and border zones are produced and enforced. The event facilitated three interlocking segments: two visits to labour sites in which these interplays are being articulated, and a final symposium at which these considerations could be reflected upon in light of the participant’s own contexts and research. What follows are some of our thoughts and impressions of those site visits.