Creation of a city center, conversion of a huge wasteland, completion of the renovation of the “city of 4,000″… the town is looking for a facelift.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, La Courneuve is multiplying major projects intended to improve its incongruous town planning, battered by industrial history and experimentation with large housing estates.
A popular second-line commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, the former market gardening village has developed over the decades through an accumulation of disparate constructions, which have come together to form a city without overall coherence or real centrality.
The opportunity for a makeover
To the gigantic factories born since the end of the 19th century, attracted by the availability of land and the proximity of a Paris-Soissons railway station, the public authorities of the mid-20th century juxtaposed the immense blocks of buildings of the city of 4,000, a project emblematic of the failure of the policy of large housing estates.
Added to this are the scars of two highways – the A1 and A86 – and railway tracks that cross the city from side to side, a large business area and a departmental park that eat up nearly two thirds of the territory of the community of 45,000 inhabitants.
But with deindustrialization and factory closures, rights of way are now freed up in the heart of the city and offer La Courneuve the opportunity for a makeover.
“For thirty years, we have been in the repair of the city”, declares to AFP its mayor (PCF) Gilles Poux, in charge of La Courneuve since 1996. “There we have the possibility of thinking it, of projecting it , with the desire to rely on its roots”.
New face
The most notable project: the creation of a town centre, between the town hall and the RER B station. whose presence had hampered urban development for more than a century.
However, the latter closed its doors in 2018. It left behind impressive disused cathedral halls, with overhead cranes still in place, the destruction of which should begin shortly.
By the start of the next decade, a thousand housing units, artists’ studios, a place of worship, a pedestrian mall and a school should rise on this site. The investment is estimated at 30-35 million euros, says the mayor.
There is “a desire to make the city with all that this entails: housing, breathing spaces, but also small business, commerce and the connection between neighborhoods to get out of these urban ruptures “, describes Gilles Poux.
A place of life and culture
Another monumental wasteland, another building site. An essential factory in La Courneuve, from which several of its mayors come, Babcok manufactured boilers on a large site in the south of the city, until it ceased operations a few years ago.
The departure of the company left huge brick industrial halls abandoned, which are now mainly used by lovers of urban exploration and graffiti artists. These will now be rehabilitated to convert the old factory into a place of life and culture.
There are plans for a cinema, an event hall, art galleries, a school for cultural trades, a space for sports activities, coworking, etc. The set should see the light of day around 2025.
“Culture and enhancement of heritage must be at the center of the project. This site must be anchored in its immediate environment (…) and at the same time it has the potential to have metropolitan influence”, considers Emmanuelle Pouchard, director of the urban development and housing of the municipality.
The last of the “monsters”
At the same time, La Courneuve must complete over the next few years the urban renovation of the city of 4,000, which began… in the mid-1980s.
The destruction of buildings allows spaces to be reorganized, with the creation of alleys, sports fields or the installation of stalls, in order to create more human-sized neighborhoods. The last of the “monsters”, these endless bars of accommodation which symbolized the “4,000”, must fall around 2025-2026.
“In ten or fifteen years, the city will have partly changed its face and a priori the situation will be really improved”, predicts Emmanuelle Pouchard. But “we have to fight so that these improvements benefit the inhabitants of the territory”, and not exclude them, she warns.
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