Justinien Tribillon's "The Zone": crossing the Paris belts

What is the Zone? “A border margin, an intermediate space that separates the outer limits of Paris from the inner limits of the suburbs, creating a brutal demarcation between the “inside” and the “outside,” “us” and “them,” Paris and the Other,” writes Justinien Tribillon, an urban planning researcher and lecturer at the Arts Déco school. It is around the Zone that the opposition between the capital and its suburbs crystallized, between the City of Light and its surroundings melted into the gray. Its existence has given rise to decades of urban planning projects, sources of division. It is fascinating to see how the politics that creates a space then determines uses and representations, for better or for worse.

In the beginning, there was Thiers and his desire to protect Paris with fortifications 400 meters wide and 34 kilometers long. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, the capital was surrounded by a rampart, which would prove useless in 1870, and which would be almost entirely razed by the Vichy regime. The protection would make way for traffic, and the ring road would be inaugurated in 1973. Justinien Tribillon, author of a thesis on the ring road, chose to tell this story in as many rings as there are approaches. The first, the black belt, corresponds to a familiar imaginary, that of the margins and its "zonards" that the sociologist Jérôme Beauchez described in Les Sauvages de la civilisation (Amsterdam editions, 2022), a world populated by rag-pickers, workers and artists (the Puces perpetuate these margins today), and immortalized by Eugène Atget . These were the populations rejected and "cleansed" by the city, driven out by Haussmann, by hygienization and racism, and who had found refuge on this strip of land.

The urban planning researcher also sees other dominant themes defining the Zone: the "green belt" or tree planting and green space projects that "have mainly served as a device for urban segregation, separating Paris from its outskirts and excluding its subordinate populations: suburbanites, immigrants, workers, Roma, Jews, etc." . Making the ring road "a new green belt" is also an ambition displayed in 2022 by Anne Hidalgo. The "pink belt" refers to that of social housing, and the "red belt" refers to that of the communist municipalities around Paris (there were 126 in the 1970s), "two proletarian cordons encircling a bourgeois Paris." And there is also the asphalt belt of the ring road and the concrete belt of the housing projects. Each belt deepens the antagonism. The Zone, an alternative history of Paris, thus shows how the center pushed the "Other" to the periphery, in a strategy of exclusion and control.