Gilets Jaunes Act XXI: Occupy La Défense
April 6, 2019. The turnout for the Gilets jaunes was estimated by the ministry of the interior to be about 22,300 throughout the nation, with 3,100 in Paris itself. Barred from the Champs Elysées, the protestors instead went to La Défense, the financial center to the west of central Paris. Twitter accounts captured the stages of the long walk and then the arrival on the broad esplanade.
https://twitter.com/SimplyBeautific/status/1114499444781744129
La Défense began to be developed in 1958: both welcoming and forbidding, beautiful but disquieting, the ambitious new plan for a financial district was born of a postwar determination to rush headlong into modernity and leave the memories of defeat and Occupation behind. There was a certain genius in the decision not to allow the area to blend with classic Paris, but rather to make of it a visually and architecturally separate entity.
The area that became La Défense bordered three suburbs–Nanterre, Courbevoie, and Puteaux. Aging shops, apartments, barns, bidonvilles (shantytowns) were cleared to make way for it. This 1967 footage of a section of Nanterre shows a contemporary bidonville with immigrants mostly from North Africa as well as other European countries (France drew European immigrants notably from Italy, Spain, and Poland). At the very beginning there is a glimpse of tall buildings–not La Défense itself, but rather the tower block HLMs (Habitations à loyer modérés), or public housing. Many people hoped desperately to get into the HLMs when they were new, but they were alienating and poorly maintained; a number of towers have been torn down (or rather, blown up), beginning as early as the 1980s.
The first notable building in La Défense was the sloped roof CNIT (Center of New Industries and Technologies, built in 1957-58.
The first tall towers were built in the 1960s, and the instantly iconic Great Arch (the open cube) in 1982. The Arch is on the same axis as the Arc de Triomphe; their proximity is visible from the sky, and the route between them is known as the Voie triomphale, or Triumphal Way.
In 2006, under the Jacques Chirac administration, with Nicolas Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior but acting in his other capacity as president of the conseil général des Hauts-de-Seine, the local municipal council (Libération), city planners drew up a new development plan that called for the refurbishing of some of the original structures and for a greater mixed-use balance, including space for apartments and retail as well as office buildings. (The place became a ghost town at night when the workers went home.)
It was also decided at that time to let the towers rise even further into the skies. Originally the buildings in La Défense were to be no taller than 328 feet, or 100 meters. In the late 1960s, the guidelines were revised upward to allow 656 feet, or 200 meters. Under the Sarkozy plan, the height limit was revised upward yet again, to 984 feet tall, or 300 meters. The plan also announced two new towers at the new height, Phare Tower (Beacon Tower) and Hermitage Tower, both to be built within the already-defined area. (The historical narrative of La Défense is drawn from Scicolone, pp. 18-23.) For comparison’s sake, the Eiffel Tower is 1,063 feet to the tip; the taller of the twin towers was 1,368 feet; the Khalifa Tower in Dubai is 2,722 feet to the tip.
The Phare Tower was soon cancelled, but nevertheless we can see where it would have been and how it would have looked.
The story of the Hermitage Tower, meant to be only a few meters shorter than the Eiffel Tower, has been more complicated; the space it wants to occupy already has a building, as well as tenants who live in it (though their story may soon be in the past tense), creating for the last ten years a David and Goliath tale that periodically flares into the news. Les Damiers, actually three buildings–Anjou, Bretagne, and Infra–were built in 1976-1978 in the Brutalist style (photos of Les Damiers here). Brutalism is hard to love, but in the midst of the visually similar towering structures the apartment buildings seem to be on a more human scale. They have terraces, were designed to get the sunlight, and are on the river. Many of the apartments are HLMs (170 out of the 230 units; Paquot, p. 14), built at a time when it seemed important to have a mix of classes in an area as well as a mix of uses. For the past few years they have visibly been allowed to deteriorate, likely as an additional means of forcing the tenants out.
One of the strongest selling points of the Hermitage Towers, from the very beginning, was their mixed-usage model, consisting of homes, retail, hotel, and office space. Even this forward-looking model was not enough to allay anxieties. A 2011 article in Le Monde covered the opening rounds. “The Damiers neighborhood is delapidated, obsolete, inaccessible, for example, to the handicapped. . . . I don’t understand the hesitancy of France on this project, two elegant towers of homes, with a hotel and a commercial center, designed by a renowned architect, Norman Foster. It will create 3,000 jobs, . . . [and will] modernize and increase the value of the entire quartier.” (From Emin Iskenderov, the developer.)
There was also a word in favor of les Damiers, an aging cluster of buildings that had seen better days, from a neighbor who acknowledged that they were in need of renovation but also found them “very agreeable to live in, with their large balconies and stepped terraces.” Thomas Gicquel, on the board of another building, pointed out the risk of “vertiginous” rises in the price of heating and security for the entire area. Numerous local elected officials of the Socialist Party (not otherwise identified) were outraged at the idea of evicting people from social housing units and replacing those spaces with apartments that were to be priced at 12,000 euros per square meter.(Le Monde)
Seven years later the situation was still in stasis. Sandrine, one of the 17 remaining tenants (as of her interview in March 2018), and by then entirely alone on her floor, had moved to Damiers-Anjou in 1978. She indicated the difficult conditions of the past few years–strangers wandering the halls, a man defecating on her doormat. The management denied this: the doors were locked, the building was patrolled, there were video cameras, the elevator was fixed and working normally. Alban Thomas, a Socialist Party member of the municipal council of Courbevoie, deplored the human cost: “Families have been moved out, businesses pressured to leave, and a neighborhood (quartier) has died, for an outsized project, for which one still does not know the financing” (Le Parisien).
Sibylle Vincendon, reporting in Libération on July 8, 2018, effectively summarized the decade-long chain of events. The saga began with the Sarkozy-directed new plan of 2006, and continued into his presidency (2007-2012). In 2011 a Russian businessman, Emin Iskenderov, bought les Damiers from Logis Transports, a company which has the mission of providing logements sociaux (affordable housing) for workers. Logis Transports was allowed to make this sale on condition that they use some of the profits to build affordable housing elsewhere. The unusual deal was eased, as Vincendon suggests, by the protocol signed by Sarkozy and then-president Dmitri Medvedov in June 2010. (Putin, who preceded him as president, remained as his prime minister; Medvedov is now Putin’s prime minister.) Vladimir Putin had even promised Sarkozy to come to Paris to lay the foundation stone (Le Monde).
Writing in mid-2018, Vincendon noted that Iskenderov had not yet come up with the cash for development; by this time, some 235 tenants had been moved out, and “mostly” rehoused. (The local Vivre à la Défense organization provided a copy of the announcement abruptly made in 2015 to the tenants of Infra, from the “Hermitage,” that their building was about to be subject to a lengthy project of asbestos removal.) The 15 remaining tenants still in the Anjou building in mid-2018 were accused by Iskenderov of holding out in order to extort more money from him. Thus there have been both financial complications (Iskenderov’s apparent inability to come up with the cash) and legal ones, on the tenants’ side: for in 2003, when Logis Transports was suddenly and without their knowledge announced to the tenants as their new owner, they had not been given the prior notice and opportunity to purchase their apartments, as required. This fact has provided a means to hold off the project in the courts.
Vincendon summed up the situation in 2018 as “hallucinatory” : “a megalomaniac building, carried through by an unknown and perhaps insolvent investor, still not financed, which has nevertheless resulted in the expulsion of 235 renters, by a social housing renter [Logis Transports] acting in an unheard-of way to create vacant apartments.” Iskenderov has not handed over the money, and won’t, until all the tenants are out; he has been paying Logis Transports the monthly rents of the vacant apartments since 2010. Worse still, Iskenderov had not yet, by mid-2018, come up with a viable, or at least sufficiently transparent, financing plan for building the Hermitage nor for buying the land needed around it (Libération).
Corinne Natinal, writing more broadly about French housing policy, has noted that the postwar government investment in decent affordable housing has given way in the twenty-first century to a distinctly privatized desire for real estate in areas, once wasteland or vacant, that are newly valuable but covered with HLMs. The December 2000 law of Solidarity and Urban Renewal set the local percentages for affordable housing; these have been widely flouted. The 2003 National Program for Urban Renewal proposed the demolition, by 2011, of 250,000 substandard housing units, to be replaced with more livable units, and the renovation of another 400,000. The demolitions have been carried out more enthusiastically than the renovation or rehousing; landlords of social housing have developed the technique of ending daily maintenance and roughly closing off parts of the building, as it is emptied, to drive remaining tenants out (Natinal, pp. 159-160).
In September 2018, Sylvie Vandenberghe, head of Logis Transports, defended the project by stating that the sale and destruction of les Damiers would result in the building of 1,000 new social housing units, with half of those in the area itself (South China Morning Post). That promise seems not, however, to be true. The plan originally submitted by Iskenderov for a building permit did not meet the required HLM percentages; as of January 9, 2019, the modified submission for the building permit still included the luxury apartments, the five-star hotel, the concert hall and the art gallery–and a new addition of 200 student apartments at affordable prices (La Gazette de la Défense). Enough to get over the legal HLM requirement; high turnover rates, as well. Not exactly family housing.
But the openly skeptical (not to say hostile) La Gazette de la Défense dug into the financing as well. It appeared that at the March 2018 meeting of MIPIM, the world’s largest property market (their description), Iskenderov had revealed his financing in broad strokes: the project, now up to 3 billion euros, would receive 180 million euros from un grand fonds européen (“a big European fund”), a loan of from 1.2 to 1.5 billion euros from “two big French banks,” and the rest would come from the pre-sale of the luxury apartments (La Gazette de la Défense). He assured his audience that the remaining renters of Damiers-Bretagne were about to be expelled; the renters of Damiers-Anjou would be expelled in six months (Libération).
Iskenderov had announced a press conference for January 30, 2019, that would reveal the final plans and financing. The day came and went. Silence. No appearance at the 2019 MIPIM. On February 27, 2019, the court of appeals of Versailles rejected the demand to evict the last eight tenants at les Damiers-Anjou. The three buildings remain, and the Courbevoie municipal council has reached the end of its patience with what is essentially dead space in one of the wealthiest areas in France. A possible future for les Damiers might well be renovation, refurbishment, and sale to new tenants, as “classic” Paris modernist apartments (La Défense-92.fr). They do, after all, have balconies and terraces. Or they might be torn down to make way for something else.
But the building of high towers goes on. For Paris, the stakes are high: the 2024 Summer Olympics, for which the Hermitage tower was promised. Even more important, however, is the prospect of Brexit. In 2017, and while still a candidate, Emmanuel Macron was pitching La Défense as a new hub for companies and financial institutions. France currently has seven towers under construction (dezeen), though that number includes the Hermitage towers.
Currently the tallest building is Tour First, formerly Axa, built in 1974 and renovated, and heightened, in 2011, to 738 feet, or 231 meters. (See list of towers here.) The views are magnificent on the top floor. The window shades go up and down automatically.
Tour Majunga opened in 2014 after three years of construction, at a reported cost of 377,000,000 euros. It sold on April 9, 2019, for a reported 850 million euros.
A decidedly different presentation approach was taken by the architects of the refurbished tower of CB21, a moderately tall office building.
The new Saint-Gobain tower took the place of the older Iris tower (see photo here). The Generali tower, originally destined for the spot, was scrapped in favor of this more modest structure, a smaller office building that is projected to come online in a few months.
And finally, the Tours Hermitage, the “twin towers” themselves. Iskenderov’s towers may well, at this point, be dead: this is a digital creation, from earlier days.
Did modernist creativity end with CNIT, the Great Arch–and yes, with les Damiers?
But to return to the gilets jaunes, who invaded this fantasy space: their numbers fell last week, in Act XXI, to their lowest point ever. But they were shouting “Revolution!” And this is, after all, France.
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The information on La Défense is taken from the following articles, as well as the newspaper and online sources linked in the body of the text:
Corinne Natinal, “The Politics of Housing under France’s New Right,” in GLYNN, SARAH, ed. Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World. London; New York: Pluto Press, 2009. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/j.ctt183p15k.
Scicolone, Maria. “Developing Skyscraper Districts: La Défense.” CTBUH Journal, no. 1 (2012): 18-23. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/24193047.
Thibaud, Paul. “Cité Pleine De Rêves Paris Et L’arche De La Défense.” Esprit, no. 152/153 (7/8) (1989): 91-108. http://www.jstor.org.exlibris.colgate.edu:2048/stable/24469089.
“Inauguration de Carpe Diem, un gratte-ciel écolo à La Défense,” Libération, September 18, 2013.
“Anthony Saroufim captures les damiers complex in France before its demolition,” Designboom, n.d.
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/les-damiers-courbevoie-awaits-demolition-09-14-2017/.
Isabelle Rey Lefebvre, “La justice paralyse le projet des tours Hermitage,” Le Monde, October 17, 2011.
Florence Hubin, “A La Défense, 17 locataires vivent encore aux Damiers, voués à la démolition,” Le Parisien, March 7, 2018.
Sibylle Vincendon, “A La Défense, des locataires victimes de la roulette russe,” Libération, July 8, 2018.
“ Note signée Hermitage, Logis-Transports et Epadesa,” Vivre à La Défense. March 18, 2012.
https://vivrealadefense2.wordpress.com/tag/logis-transport/
https://vivrealadefense2.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/cp-vald-24-06-20151.pdf
Guillaume Hamonic, “Tours Hermitage: un avenir toujours aussi incertain,” La Gazette de la Défense, January 9, 2019.
Sibylle Vincendon, “A La Défense, l’éternal retour des tours Hermitage,” Libération, March 14, 2018.https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/03/14/a-la-defense-l-eternel-retour-des-tours-hermitage_1635837/
“Dix ans après (presque) plus personne ne croit aux tours Hermitage,” Defense-92.fr, March 15, 2019.
Jessica Mairs, “Paris announces seven skyscrapers to boost post-Brexit business,” February 27, 2017, https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/27/paris-la-defense-business-district-seven-new-skyscrapers-brexit-fra
