Zone: An Alternative History of Paris

A history of modern Paris, looking at how the construction of the city post WWII shaped the social fabric of the city

If you want to understand Paris today you need to go beyond the palaces and boulevards and discover the Perif. In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a walk around the Parisian edgelands. He shows how the city should be read from the outside inwards.

How can the history of a ring road tell the history of a city? Post-war Paris is the story of the Periferique, constructed in the aftermath of Word War Two to modernise the city. The ring road started as a dream of a new modern metropolis but soon became a dividing line: between inner and outer cities; between the bourgeois centre and the immigrant outskirts. Here the dividing line of the city, and of the nation, soon found their form within the liminal banlieu.

The Zone is a subject for urbanists everywhere who are interested in social housing, social engineering, the consequences of immigration and riots. This book is The City of Quartz for Parisians. The site of dreams as well as the realities of La Haine, the Zone so often misunderstood, is show to be the best way to understand modern Paris, and even France itself.