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Originally Posted by Beedok
That's tragic. So many awesome towers slated for destruction.
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Except for Les Damiers in La Défense, none of the pictured buildings are slated for demolition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I would wager that the majority of suburban Parisians live in single family homes. There are tons of single family homes, and they dominate the landscape. The highrises (which are generally ugly and rundown, except in affluent western suburbs) are hardly typical.
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I don't think that the majority in Paris suburbs' inhabitants live in single family homes.
It depends if we include or not the inner suburbs, the majority live in single family homes in outer suburbs, while inner suburbs and old town cores are dominated by small apartment buildings.
As the result, I think, that we would not find a majority in type of housing.
In the metropolitan area of Paris, a bit more than 30% of the population lived in single family houses in 2008, one of lowest ratio in France.
What is certain is that only a minority of people live in housing projects, even in the notorious Seine Saint-Denis department.
Using housing block to descrive Paris suburbs is wrong, even the majority of the ethnic minorities don't live there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hammersklavier
Holy crap, those buildings look like something straight out of Blade Runner *jaw drops*
Because they were built in what in French are called les banlieues, which is usually translated in English as "the suburbs" (although the American and European ideas of these are somewhat different, they are linked by a sense of peripherality).
Interestingly enough, the "ban" in la banlieue is etymologically cognate with the English word "ban"; before getting repurposed, it essentially meant "region in which edicts could be administered" and could be calqued as "ban-league", in which "ban" confers the legal element and "league" the geographical.
Incidentally, suburban high-rises do occur here too. Canada's Mississauga is perhaps the best-known example, but many Northeastern suburbs have residential towers-in-parks too, for example.
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Banlieues (suburb) means just one thing in France: urbanized land outside the city limits.
It has nothing to do with the urban environment but with the position in relation to the limits of the core city.
According to the French defintion, this dense and urban
Vincennes is a suburb while
this area in Toulouse is not.
This means that French don't use the term banlieue to describe housing projects inside the city limits.
It is only the foreign press who does this, believing the banlieue is synonymous with projects.
Housing projects are called "Cités" in French.
Note that Orgues des Flandres located in the 19th arrondissement can't be called suburban, because in both France and Northern America, it is not viewed as being part of the suburbs (except maybe by Australians who call suburbs everything located outside downtown).
It is not isolated either, it is located on a busy avenue with a lot of shops (Avenue de Flandre) and well served by public transportation.
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Originally Posted by M II A II R II K
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