Season 2 Episode 7 - UTOPIE (UTOPIA)
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. But one person’s utopia can be another person’s nightmare depending on who you talk to.
In this episode we’ll be diving into the utopias scattered throughout Paris in the 20th century. Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out?
Jess 0:00
This is Here There Be Dragons. I’m your host Jess Myers. 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. It’s impossible to walk the city streets and not be neck deep in the fragments of ideal cities dreamed up by emperors, artists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and most importantly, citizens.[1]
{[1] Cesare Birignani, “The Police and the City: Paris, 1660-1750” (Columbia University, 2013), http://oatd.org/oatd/record?record=handle%5C%3A10022%5C%2FAC%5C%3AP%5C%3A20567.}
Often utopias are designed to be ideal living spaces for residents. But one person’s utopia can be another person’s nightmare depending on who you talk to. What is a laborer’s place in bourgeois utopia or an immigrant’s place in nationalists’? Do plans for utopia actually create more democratic spaces in the city?
In this episode, we’ll be diving into the utopias scattered throughout Paris in the 20th century. Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out?
[MUSIC Interlude]
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 60s through the 80s saw a huge amount of government-supported projects from infrastructure to the city’s first skyscraper, the Tour Montparnasse.[2]
{[2] Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).}
This was also the time when the infamous péripherique from episode 6 was built. The 22-mile-long highway that separates Paris from its banlieue. It was first built to offer access to the city by the cars being minted in Renault’s and Citroën’s automotive factories at the edge of the city. [3]
{[3] Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies : Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1995., 1995).}
Growing up in a nearby banlieue, Françoise remembers the impact these projects had on her childhood.
FRANÇOISE 2:37
“Alors je m’appelle Françoise Romano j’ai 58 ans je suis architecte et professeur d’architecture et critique et j’ai grandi en banlieue parisienne en banlieue proche de Paris Châtillon. Dans les années soixante, y avait eu tout un projet d’autoroute.”
[Translation]
So my name is Françoise Romano I am 58 years old I am an architect and professor of architecture and critic and I grew up in the Parisian suburbs near Paris Châtillon.
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.
“…très bien.”
Jess 3:28
After the difficulty of Nazi occupation during World War II, President George Pompidou’s post-war administration wanted Paris to be a symbol of modernity, showing the world that France’s hard times were in the past. Like his imperial predecessor Napoleon, think Haussmann’s famous boulevards, President Pompidou chose enormous infrastructure projects as a means of modernizing Paris. These projects included a modern art museum, the Centre Pompidou, the city’s first skyscraper, the Tour de Montparnasse, and of course the expressway, an alter to the automobile, the périphérique. Here’s Françoise.
FRANÇOISE 4:06
[Translation]
These were the projects of the 60s in Paris. We went from a traditional historical urban fabric, which was something that was new, and it is now associated with important social problems with poor or immigrant populations.
There is an association between these places and the sense of a radical break, which was both social and physical. Many people associate that break with a sort of insecurity, because it was a break with things that in one way or another, were perceived as a continuum, even though that's not necessarily an accurate historical representation.
“…sont perçues comme une continuité. Voilà.”
Jess 4:48
This rapid slingshot into the future left some residents at the mercy of Pompidou’s vision of a modern city. As Jean-Claude explains some were not seen as being a part of that vision.
JEAN-CLAUDE 5:01
“Ça a été une politique forte dans les années 1970, 1980…”
[Translation]
In the 70s and 80s, there was a really important series of political measures, which we called urban renovation back then. [The working class] was expelled from the center of Paris, from the city of Paris itself, in the name of transforming neighborhoods.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th arrondissements were almost entirely torn down during the 50s, 60s, and 70s in order to replace them with more modern urban planning. Those were populaire areas, that's where the working-class was. These workers were sent to the Grand Ensembles and social housing projects built by Paris Habitat in the banlieue. None of this happens anymore. But back in the day, sociologists said the working-class was being deported to the banlieue.
Jess 5:45
The word deportation was thick with meaning at the time. Deportation meant stripping away a home, for some the only one that they had ever known. “Deporting the working class from Paris” was used a rallying cry for workers being removed from homes that some had been in for generations. So as bright as Pompidou’s vision seemed it did not come without push back.
For example, when the Tour Montparnasse was completed, the building was so widely hated that skyscrapers have been exiled to the city’s periphery ever since. This zoning policy paved the way for constructions like La Défense, the Parisian business district on the city’s western limit. Its construction cleared away war-time shanty towns, farmlands, and old factories to make room for a new brand of business.[4] It was built as a means of competing with London, New York, and Tokyo as a major global financial center.
{[4] Alain Rustenholz, De la banlieue rouge au Grand Paris: d’Ivry à Clichy et de Saint-Ouen à Charenton, 2015.}
Although many criticized the gaggle of skyscrapers as being so generic, that they could be anywhere in the world.[5] La Defénse was playfully mocked by filmmakers like Jacque Tati for its obvious global striving.
{[5] “The Glory That Was Paris,” New York Times, June 23, 1971.}
[MUSIC from Play Time by Jacque Tati]
However, the idea of a district where no one lived, that was completely abandoned after working hours lead some to feel insecure there. As a teenager, Alice was told to stay away from La Défense but it became a thrilling but terrifying playground for her and her friends.
ALICE 7:19
“En fait je me souviens par exemple d’une fois où…”
[Translation]
I remember one time, one of my friend's mothers was really angry because we'd gone to La Défense without telling her. It must have been at the beginning of the 90s. In 1990, I was 14. We'd gone to La Défense when it starts to be dodgy. Back then it was kind of sketchy There were high rises, tunnels and dark places at night.
I don't know if you've seen this movie called "Irréversible" by Gaspard Noé? In a nutshell it's a horrible movie where a woman gets raped in a tunnel below the street. You can meet the wrong kind of person and here's no way out. You might not be able to call someone for help because there's no one. You're kind of trapped. There's this place underground, and then there's the La Défense square, where no one lives, it's only offices and it's only people working there and so there's no one to hear from their windows. It's very dehumanized, especially at night.
Those high rises are faceless, there's no balcony, the windows are often opaque, you can't see what goes on inside. You don't see people. That's why it gives me this impression of being dehumanized.
Jess 8:15
For Alice, La Défense was both attractive in all its newness and worrying for how impersonal and empty it becomes. So different from the Paris she knew as a kid. For Franck, who moved to Paris to work in La Défense, the area has really improved but the rumors of its past still influenced the way he felt about it.
FRANCK 8:37
“…j’avais pas d’appréhension négative…”
[Translation]
I didn't have any negative apprehension about La Défense and safety there. But when I started working there it's true that at night when you get back on the subway or the RER and it's absolutely empty. You can end up alone on a [train] platform with “gangs” and of course I've been told about the gang wars in the square in front of La Défense, but that was almost 20 years ago.
Now it's nowhere near that but I've been alone in the metro with gangs of pretty tough young men and sometimes they'd shout at me. It's true that I never felt very comfortable. I have co-workers who are women and they're very afraid. Well at least they feel unsafe after 8 or 9 o'clock at night.
“…partir de 20 heures ou 21 heures.”
["Irréversible"/Gaspard Noé – MUSIC/SCENE]
Jess 9:15
La Defénse isn’t the only district marked by its past and its rapid modernization. One grand utopian vision that I heard about over and over again in my interviews, has been an infamous district in Paris since the 12th century.
Once a centuries old municipal food market, le ventre de Paris, the stomach of Paris located in the heart of the city, the market of Les Halles was moved to the southern banlieue Rungis. What was left of Les Halles-Chatelet was redeveloped into a mall and transit hub in the 60s.[6] Ever since the central district called Beaubourg has been a lightening rod for utopian dreams in the city.
{[6] Norma Everson, “The Assassination of Les Halles,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32, no. 4 (1973).}
[INA Les Halles – MUSIC]
BERNARD 10:11
“Bonjour je n’ai pas connu les vraies Halles…”
[Translation]
I never knew the real Les Halles, I mean the atmosphere, the heart of Paris. It was unlivable because there were kilometers of trucks parking or driving in the streets at 3 AM. Things had to change. They moved it all to Rungis. I saw the end of les Halles, there was still the meat market, the flower market. I saw a bit of what it must have looked like, and it was really nice.
There were those beautiful buildings, built by Baltard. The iron architecture was beautiful, and I think the people of Paris wanted to keep them. It was squatted by art collectives for one or two years. By real artists without any money, by theater companies, dance companies, by squatters. The idea was to keep the building.
We fought to keep les Halles. There were terrible fights with the police. I was 19 or 20. One evening there was a huge party. All the owners of the bistros nearby were giving out free drinks. They took the tables out on the streets and put some barrels of wine or beer on them. There were dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who were there in the streets, participating in a protest saying "Les Halles is ours, you will not tear it down."
It was a huge populaire protest to save Les Halles and it was all useless. Les Halles was destroyed to build this underground mall, this horror. And so obviously, the physiognomy of the area completely changed. It became a place for consumption, not really a place where people live.
Jess 14:11
In a way, like La Défense, Les Halles, that was really a living workspace. A network in the center city where all kinds of people mingled together was destroyed for the sake of the modern city. Now Les Halles is an underground space, four stories deep with global brands that you might know like H&M, Zara, McDonalds and more. Here’s Bernard.
BERNARD 12:08
People from the banlieue don't know Les Halles. They only come for the underground mall. Sometimes they don't even go outside. There are four stupid floors with stupid stores that are packed on top of one another and millions of people from the banlieue coming there, packs of young people just hang around in there, like they would hang around a mall in the banlieue, probably not even going out in the area. They wander around the stores because they're like mosquitos attracted to the light of consumption. When you talk with young people from the "populaires" areas, to them Paris means to be bourgeois.
FRANÇOISE 12:44
“Et aujourd’hui, ce qui vient aux Halles, c’est beaucoup de flux de population et en sous-sol…”
[Translation]
Today, Les Halles is mostly a flow of people and it's below ground, which changes everything. Back when it was a market it was unsafe. It was a very populaire neighborhood, with bad boys, prostitution, illegal trafficking, a lot of rats. It was pretty dirty, not heaven by any stretch of the imagination. It was a real working space with all that that entails.
It was completely eradicated during the great transformations of the 60s and 70s. Since then, new insecurities have developed. You wouldn't go there at night because there were people hidden in the bushes who wanted your wallet.
JACQUELINE 13:35
“…alors quand on a reconstruit le centre Pompidou…”
[Translation]
When they built the Centre Pompidou, they destroyed some streets that were very old fashioned, and they rebuilt other things. Now you have this beautiful square. It's a good thing. I mean you like it or you don't, but it was the first modern museum in Paris, and of course there were people yelling that it was horrid, but it was current and now everybody thinks it's great. If you take the escalator all the way up, it really is remarkable, if the weather is nice, you can see all of Paris. There's history behind all of this, there's life for hundreds of years.
“…y a une vie depuis des centaines d’années hein oui.”
Jess 14:14
When the market houses of Les Halles were destroyed, the identity of Beaubourg radically shifted. It shifted from a neighborhood where the working class and the well to do were often at each other elbows to a commercial and cultural hub flowing with tourists headed to the Centre Pompidou, as Jacqueline just mentioned, another contentious construction, or the four stories deep underground mall and transit hub.[7]
{[7] Pierre Schneider, “Paris Starts to Heal the Gaping Wound Left by Les Halles,” New York Times, September 9, 1979.}
Les Halles connects four subways lines, three commuter rail lines, and moves over half a million commuter on any given weekday.[8] For some this meant long awaited connection between the center city and the banlieue but for others like Evelyne it made the heart of Paris clogged and congested, welcoming the wrong kinds of people to a once historic district. [9]
{[8] “Il Y a 50 Ans : Que Faire Du Quartier Des Halles à Paris?,” Le Figaro, May 1, 2015, http://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/archives/2015/05/01/26010-20150501ARTFIG00166-il-y-a-50-ans-que-faire-du-quartier-des-halles-a-paris.php.
[9] “Where Les Halles Stood: Culture Center and Shops,” New York Times, September 4, 1979.}
[RER Train sound]
EVELYNE 15:09
“…les Halles Châtelet c’est quand même la station parisienne qui…”
[Translation]
Les Halles Châtelet, it’s the biggest train station. I think it's even one of the biggest stations in the world because there are so many connections at Les Halles, and this station is so dense with people moving everywhere. They still haven't finished the renovation work but it's very gloomy and it really isn't pretty. So everybody avoids it. People in Paris walk very fast and it's always very crowded, so you need to know where you want to go when you're in Les Halles.
Yeah, it's sketchy. Because it's overcrowded. There are people who stay there all day maybe and it smells bad too. The platforms are very old and there haven’t be any renovations, it's one of the dirtiest stations. No one's ever liked Châtelet.
“…donc c’est vrai que personne n’a jamais aimé la station Châtelet.”
AURÉLIE 16:00
“…je trouve que c’est un endroit où y a tellement de passages avec les gens qui viennent de banlieue...”
[Translation]
I think it's a place where there’s a lot of traffic, so lots of people come from the banlieue who take the RER, it's where everyone who lives in the banlieue come to hang out. So there's always a crowd, always a lot of people whether it's inside or outside and you can't feel safe even if there are police. It's true that I have a special relationship with Les Halles because I got my purse stolen there. It's the first and only time I’ve had something stolen in Paris and it was in Les Halles.
“…c’est la première fois que je me suis faite voler à Paris et la dernière, mais c’était aux Halles.”
Jess 16:35
For Aurélie her discomfort with Les Halles comes from a bad experience but some Parisians are primed to fear Les Halles Chatelet before ever setting foot there. From a young age Dania’s mom told her to avoid it.
DANIA 16：49
I just remember her saying “Oh, don’t go to Les Halles and it was like a thing that Les Halles was sketchy.” But then I went when I was like older and it's, it's like fine.
I think there's a lot of… um, I don't know the word, I mean in French we call it like a racaille. It's like people who kind of try to pickpocket you or try to like talk to you. You know, it's like not the it's like a little bit of sketchy I don't really know how to explain.
Jess 17:15
For many Parisians Les Halles – Châtelet is a place to avoid, crowded and dirty with racaille, which you might remember from episode 5 as a thug, someone who people imagine might pickpocket tourists and commuters. You can compare Les Halles to Times Square for New Yorkers, it’s that place you just don’t go.
But many people from the banlieue especially as teenagers saw it as their first foray into Paris proper, since so many RER, the banlieue commuter trains, passed through Les Halles-Chatelet. For Eric and Steffi, the new Les Halles did something similar to the old one, made a vibrant space where you could meet anyone.
[Club/Techno MUSIC]
ERIC 18:07
“Alors les Halles. Les Halles, moi j’ai connu dans les années 80, donc quand il avait été refait.”
[Translation]
Les Halles, I knew the area in the 80s when it was renovated. It was a very very modern place with all kinds of different stores behind a glass wall, especially with the Fnac which was a huge cultural center. All the CDs that came out were there. So it attracted musicians, young people and the whole area around Les Halles was very trendy, with small bars like le Père Tranquille, le Père Fouettard, and there were models and photographers who would come there to have drinks and network. There was this famous place called Les Bains Douches and so all that made the area one of the trendiest and busiest in Paris. Then what happened? I can't tell you, maybe it was a victim of its own success.
The RER made the area very accessible, it made it a too populaire. People notice when there are too many stores, it really kills the place. So the place became a little has-been, trendy people left the area. And I don't go there anymore. Thankfully it was saved because Etienne Marcel is not far and it’s authentic. Maybe it's those places that will save Les Halles. In fact maybe the older neighborhood will save the modern one.
“…c’est peut-être ces quartiers-là qui vont sauver les Halles quoi.”
STEFFI 19:17
“…y a pas mal de banlieusards qui se retrouvent à Châtelet.”
[Translation]
There’re a lot of people from the banlieues who meet up at Châtelet. Since I’m from the banlieue I think that a lot of people don't want to admit it, but they see people from the banlieue as a danger. I don't really know why. I just see people from the banlieues as people who are profoundly bored, they're bored and they're stuck, they have very little freedom. The only freedom, when you live on the RER A or D is to go to Châtelet. There you can buy a pair of tennis shoes, you can dance hip hop, you can meet people from everywhere. Ok there are people who get into trouble, but really, what people want is to escape the reality of their lives in the banlieue because nothing really happens there.
“…où en gros il se passe pas grand-chose quoi.”
Jess 20:03
Since les Halles – Châtelet in very central in Paris its design takes on a symbolic importance. It signals to residents and tourists alike how Paris is modernizing, how it’s keeping up as a global city.[10]
{[10] Meredith TenHoor, “Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 73–92, doi:10.3167/fpcs.2007.250206.}
This symbolism made Les Halles – Châtelet very important to city hall which was just a stone’s throw away and changing as rapidly changing alongside the city itself. Paris had eliminated the position of mayor in the mid 19th century but reinstated it in the 1970s.
For the first mayor Jacque Chirac, who would later move on to the presidency, the redesign of the center city was also litmus test for the mayor’s office. Les Halles- Châtelet has remained a gambit for city hall ever since. In 2002 then mayor Bertrand Delanoë organized an international contest for the redesign of Les Halles. Famous architects like Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas submitted proposals but a local team of architects won, with a proposal to open the underground mall area up to the central district of Paris.[11] For Léopold and Jennifer, the proposals missed the true strength of Les Halles.
{[11] Franck Beaumont, “L’architecture Du Forum Des Halles - Evous,” accessed December 2, 2015, http://www.evous.fr/Le-Forum-des-Halles-architecture,1180748.html.}
LÉOPOLD 21:14
I think the four propositions that had been selected were all anonymously bearing the signs of this sort of aesthetic of the shopping mall as we know it and not really seeing Les Halles for what it is which is this incredible node where all residents of Paris as understood as metropolitan area collide and meet. So I think the reason that was the result was opened a few months ago is very much the result of this sort of favor towards the brands that wanted to open again at this location rather than the potential encounters of people.
JENNIFER 22:04
“Est-ce que Châtelet représenter pour moi et mes amis…”
[Translation]
For my friends and I who lived in the banlieue, Châtelet in Paris, represented a way to get out of what we knew without going too far. So, for our parents, it was the only place that was close enough so that we could go on our own. And at the same time for us it was already good enough because it was Paris.
What drew me to Châtelet for a very long time was the very cosmopolitan aspect, not only in terms of where people came from of and what they looked like. It seemed to me like a place where anyone could meet. It’s a platform to go from one place to another. So a lot of people, who might live in the Marais, who might live in Etienne Marcel or who live in the banlieue, might have to go through Châtelet to get somewhere else.
I like that very universal aspect. You could see a man in a suit leaving work, people hanging out who come from the 9-5, but also young Parisians going out for a drink. To me Châtelet is really that, and I think people only realized this recently with the renovation, now that it's become more presentable.
But when I was younger I already saw this potential. You could go shopping, you could have a drink, you could go to the museum, and you'd have to go through there to get from one place to another.
“…passe par-là pour aller à un autre endroit.”
Jess 23:20
Ever since Les Halles Châtelet first opened as a commercial center, there was always debate about who should be there. In the 70s and 80s, teenagers from many different subcultures would hang out there. Skin heads, punks, goths as well as black and brown teens from the banlieue.[12]
{[12] Stephane Degoutin, “Trou Noir Urbain (Nostalgie Du Forum Des Halles)” (Propositions/spéculations, 2009), www.nogoland.com/wordpress/2009/11/trou-noir-urbain.}
This, along with suspected drug trafficking in the area, led city hall to try and reshape Les Halles – Châtelet. As this new proposal finally nears the end of its construction, is the utopian ideal for Les Halles Châtelet meant make the area more welcoming or remove unwanted to people? Here’s Françoise
FRANÇOISE 24:00
“…c’était un fantasme chez les parisiens de dire…”
[Translation]
It was fantasy for Parisians to say things like "we don't go to Les Halles because it’s a place where there’s drug trafficking, it's a dangerous place." It's a place where there are people from the banlieue, little thugs and homeless people go there. It's a slum in the heart of Paris.
One of the priorities with the new renovations was to upgrade, to bring stores above ground so that the mall would emerge and to keep the area under surveillance. Also, to make the stores a lot more chic in order to attract wealthier people. Safety is good for business. That's a very important aspect of renovating les Halles, in my opinion,.
In Les Halles. The border isn't horizontal, it's vertical, above and below. Speaking as an architect that means the ground in the city is artificial. It's no longer real ground, but the roof of the mall that's below. And the border is really between the public transportation and Paris.
“…et puis la surface de Paris quoi…”
[Music]
Jess 25:16
Utopias carry in their plans, inherent borders and inherent outcasts. As much as they wish to control the environment, in the end the ultimate goal is to control residents in some way or another, whether that control is viewed as positive or not. Utopias are designed in the hope they will encourage certain behaviors and dispel others. But as all the utopia to ever dream their way into Paris have come to learn, in the en,d the people will out.
Although the destruction of Les Halles, the market place, may have deported one group of low-income people, a new class still took their place, claiming a space in the city for themselves. As in any city a huge part of making it your own and so making it a place of safety is claiming space. In the last episode of the series, we will talk about how residents do just that, reshaping the city to their own wills.
Thanks for listening this has been Here There Be Dragons, I’m your host Jess Myers. I’d like to say a special thank you to my sponsors at MIT Council for the Arts who made this season possible. This is the second to last episode of the series, if you have a comment or question we want to hear from you. If you have a recorder on your phone, record your message for us to play in the last episode. Email that to us at htbdpodcast@gmail.com. Be sure to subscribe and rate us on iTunes, Soundcloud, and Stitcher. Check out each more HTBD on our website htbdpodcast.com and follow us on twitter at dragons_podcast. Thanks! Join us next time for more stories of fear, identity, and urban life.
[1] Cesare Birignani, “The Police and the City: Paris, 1660-1750” (Columbia University, 2013), http://oatd.org/oatd/record?record=handle%5C%3A10022%5C%2FAC%5C%3AP%5C%3A20567.
[2] Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
[3] Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies : Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1995., 1995).
[4] Alain Rustenholz, De la banlieue rouge au Grand Paris: d’Ivry à Clichy et de Saint-Ouen à Charenton, 2015.
[5] “The Glory That Was Paris,” New York Times, June 23, 1971.
[6] Norma Everson, “The Assassination of Les Halles,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32, no. 4 (1973).
[7] Pierre Schneider, “Paris Starts to Heal the Gaping Wound Left by Les Halles,” New York Times, September 9, 1979.
[8] “Il Y a 50 Ans : Que Faire Du Quartier Des Halles à Paris?,” Le Figaro, May 1, 2015, http://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/archives/2015/05/01/26010-20150501ARTFIG00166-il-y-a-50-ans-que-faire-du-quartier-des-halles-a-paris.php.
[9] “Where Les Halles Stood: Culture Center and Shops,” New York Times, September 4, 1979.
[10] Meredith TenHoor, “Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 73–92, doi:10.3167/fpcs.2007.250206.
[11] Franck Beaumont, “L’architecture Du Forum Des Halles - Evous,” accessed December 2, 2015, http://www.evous.fr/Le-Forum-des-Halles-architecture,1180748.html.
[12] Stephane Degoutin, “Trou Noir Urbain (Nostalgie Du Forum Des Halles)” (Propositions/spéculations, 2009), www.nogoland.com/wordpress/2009/11/trou-noir-urbain.