Albeit much better than Eastern Europe blocs.

living in these quarters isn’t optional for a lot of Muslims. Discrimination is so pervasise in French society that a lot, if not most Muslims are unable to find an appartment outside these quarters. Landlords won’t rent out places to them, and that is that. ‘Native’ Frenchmen won’t have any to do with them, least of all have them as neighbors. Under these circumstances the French state does have a responsibility to help solve the problem, especially because it designed those dismal housing projects in the first place.

I also wasn’t saying that the architecture alone would make all people bad.

When I wrote :

In fact, lack of privacy enhances the ‘territorial imperative’ so that the formation of gangs fighting over turf follows almost automatically.

I wasn’t saying that all people would go nuts, but privacy is a necessary condition for having enough people who act decently. The importance of being able to shut out the world whenever you wish cannot be overstated, especialy in your formative years.

Under the conditions I’m describing, there will be too many youths acting out their territorial imperative, meaning street gangs fighting over turf. That doesn’t mean that most are doing it, but still too many for the law abiding majority to fight on their own, when the police won’t do it. Violent youths also have nothing to lose, they have no way to ever get a job.

As to the police: While they mostly lack the courage to enter dangerous areas, they act extremely provocatively whenever they feel are more numerous than the ‘opposition’. In other words, they act like just another streetgang. That isn’t going to to incerase the Muslims’ respect for French state and laws.

I attended IIT for 4 years, and was the Frat Steward for a year managing the kitchen. I got to know the black couple who did the cooking. They lived at the 23rd & state complex, and even then, (1965,) asked us to finish up dishwashing etc so the wife could get home before dark in the winter. At night, the punks “owned” the turf.

Einstein described insanity as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

It’s about time planners understood that vertical ghettos don’t work.

Casey Stengal was right.

Well why don’t people just get a job, save their francs, and move?

I’m willing to debate the concept that the government has a duty to provide basic subsistence housing for those who can’t provide it for themselves. (I don’t agree, but I’m willing to discuss it.) To me that means a place where you won’t freeze to death in the winter and that’s about it. Movie theaters and community centers are a non-sequitur.

The baseline for the post and most of the comments is that the French gov didn’t do enough to head off the present crisis. I think that is self evident, but I sincerely doubt that the Islamic youth are running wild right now because their apartments weren’t big enough.

Ginny comes closest to the heart of the matter, but even she falls a bit short. If your circumstances don’t suit then work to change them. If the place where you live is a craphole then you work to afford a better one. Why does everyone assume that the government failed in providing for the rioters instead of thinking that the rioters failed by assuming that the government would provide?

James

I wonder if you know much about Le Corbusier.

“and the lack of of right angles downright maddening”

uh?! lack of right angles in a Le corbusier house bloc?

Corbusier didn’t plan any of those buildings I’m talking about here. Those architects were inspired by him, though, but they tried to get creative andused all kinds of weird angles in the layout of the indivisual flats.

I do not know about Cabrini-Green, but I do know that the high rises along South State Street are gone.

“and the lack of of right angles downright maddening”

uh?! lack of right angles in a Le corbusier house bloc?
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I also found the critique of appartments blocks strangely Western Centric because we are talking about an Arab population that have a much more close personnel space(read Edward T. Hall if you want know more about personel space primer:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall)
And generation of Europeans like Portuguese , Italians lived there.

—-
Now the critic that can be made to the apartments bloc is that they are very dificult to be personalised and some have bad quality.

Perhaps. My concern about this would be that it would turn into just one more form of entitlement: that is, the people from the affected areas would be offered “jobs”, but the jobs would not require them to actually do work, since it’s so hard to fire people in France (and probably even harder than usual in a politically-sensitive program)

Le Corbusier came out of the era of architects that puked out “manifestos” about how architects had it in their grasp to social engineer “better” people. He had an idea that humans needed certain precise things for living, in his analysis he trimmed out a lot of things he believed as being frivolous to living the ideal life so he built his apartments as extremely spartan affairs.

Where Corbusier has made his impact is in urban planning. It is in Corbu’s urban planning where his social engineering vision is most present. He had ideas about people living in huge superblocks of low winding apartment blocks and walking or riding the train to work in tall towers.

Unfortunately, not much of his urban planning designs were ever implemented as he intended. Instead, his designs were used by other architects and urban planners as a sort of pail of building blocks. One mistake followers made was to put the residential apartments in tall towers. Corbusier also designed his urban experiments in an era when cars were not everpresent. Fitting cars into a Corbu design afterthefact is a tremendous undertaking that ends up upsetting the way it was meant to “flow”. Rarely did urban planners build their projects like Corbu would want. Corbusier’s neighborhood designs weren’t as lifeless and cold as his followers’s imitations ended up becoming.

So while it is true as Ginny says with some sarcasm, it isn’t the architecture that makes people bad, Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is utterly convincing that neighborhoods are the life of cities and that the Corbusier-inspired neighborhoods built by those who came after Corbu have sucked the life out of cities and make people’s lives worse.

In America, Curbosier inspired a generation of low-income/no-income public housing that America is still suffering from. Cabrini Green in Chicago being one of the worst examples, but it is also an exageration of what Corbusier would have wanted for a neighborhood. Robert Moses in New York City built swaths of similar low-income housing apartment blocks.

Oy, that’s a bit of a tangent. Yeah, I’ve had more than a few urban geography classes in college… I’ll stop there…

“The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”

What ever gave you all the idea those were important? You are obviously too barbaric to recognize the transcendent nature of pure style.

“It was a Frenchman, Antoine de St-Exupery, who wrote:

“If you want men to be like brothers, constrain them to join in the building of a tower. If you want them to hate one another, throw bread among them.” (approximate quote)”

A good start might be a large social program, that brings people from the affected areas together with more prosperous areas to work side-by-side in planning and building communities that promote posetive social interaction.

Architecure can play a profound role in the community, specifically the facilitation of conversation. Edward Glaeser’s essay on the economics of New York highlights this. So the the last page of this article on organizational change methodology.

How are you these days? :)

It’s more than just the outside appearances though. The practicalities are awful; large high-rise towers like those need acres of parking spaces around them. And of course, such a concentration requires bus stops and other transportation clusters which are bound to be crowded.

I actually have good memories of those days; we left before things got bad. It was very much a mix of middle-class and blue-collar folks; many immigrants but a solid half were hard-working Italians and Portuguese. Our neighbors across the hall were Italians; we went there for dinners sometimes. They made their own pasta.

And then, beyond the ugly outside architecture, there are the apartments themselves. After seven years in the U.S., I went back to Europe in 2002 for about 18 months – to Ireland this time – and was shocked by the much smaller size of housing and apartments and the effects it can have on your spirit, however nice the place may be. It’s just suffocating.

Given a large family, there is no way the kids can stay in there and do anything. Forget homework or privacy.

Think old NY apartments. Except smaller.

Lastly and most importantly, there is the overall ‘social housing’ fallacy. You can’t take broken or unstable families, those with the kids most likely to get in trouble, mix them with poor uneducated immigrants and other long-term unemployed people, pile them all on top of one another and expect positive social externalities.

But Ralf is right. The architecture of the place is just plain murderous. Any architect who designs social housing should be made to accept living in his creation for five to ten years if the thing is to be built.

Deporting people of militant/separatist tendencies solves that problem.