Nadira Achab looked out across the curved concrete blocks of her estate of La Grande Borne in Grigny, south of Paris, and sighed. “People here just want to be treated like normal citizens, not second-class citizens,” she said. “It’s sad that we’re still no,” reports The Guardian.
La Grande Borne, built as an architectural utopia in the early 1970s, is now one of the most notorious council estates in France: a byword for hardship and inequality where about half of the 13,000 residents live below the poverty line, and one in two children leave school with no qualifications. It is not so much the drug dealers, the lack of services – even the post office closed a year ago after repeated break-ins – the isolation of being hemmed in by motorways or the feeling of abandonment by the state that irks Achab and her neighbours the most, but the “stigmatisation and discrimination” against people who live there.
When it emerged that Amédy Coulibaly, the man who killed a policewoman and four people in a kosher supermarket siege during January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks, had grown up here, a spotlight was shone once again on the crisis engulfing French suburban estates. Locals condemned Coulibaly outright, saying his radicalisation had happened in prison, not on the estate. But they fear it has triggered more prejudice against the place.
It is 10 years since France’s urban riots of 2005 promised to be the wake-up call that would force an end to the inequalities of ghetto high-rises in the suburban banlieues. That year, the death of two young boys hiding from police in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris triggered weeks of unrest on estates. France declared a state of national emergency as more than 9,000 vehicles, dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire. It was the sign of the hopelessness of a generation of young people stuck in dismal suburbs, marginalised and jobless because of their address, skin colour or their parents’ immigrant origins.
Now, a decade on and despite years of emergency assistance plans, the banlieues remain in crisis. And the Socialist president, François Hollande, who came to power promising an end to the ghettos, is under increasing pressure to act. After the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks by French gunmen from poor backgrounds, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, made the most damning indictment yet of the country’s bitter social divide, saying there was “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid” in France.
When Hollande travelled to a northern Paris estate this week to mark the 10th anniversary of the riots and boost local entrepreneurs, claiming there were “no more forgotten neighbourhoods of the republic”, he was booed and asked by one youth: “When are things ever going to change here?” The housing estates voted overwhelmingly for Hollande but the sense that nothing has changed has alienated many and cast a shadow over his term in office.