it’s a boo but… – Liberation

By land opportunism, industrial groups, artists’ studios, food shops and good restaurants settled in Aubervilliers, a city much poorer than the average Ile-de-France. Sometimes with intelligence, sometimes with less elegance, as noted by sociologist Anaïs Collet.

“In the northern suburbs of Paris there is a terrible and charming city. In it, the waste, the residues, the nameless filth produced by the life of a capital converge. There go the dead animals, the slaughter animals that the veterinarians refuse to eat, the horses that are dying on the public highway; there, in hot and smoking barrels, goes the blood of the slaughterhouses, goes the garbage.(1) Thus begins the story of the writer Léon Bonneff (1882-1914) about Aubervilliers, whose proletarian pen shows a city from another century: miserable, with deplorable living conditions. If Aubervilliers did not keep track of this open-air factory where workers poisoned themselves for a few piastres, neither did it become “the epicenter of creation» as the rather hasty title of the decoration magazine Living near Paris of February-March, which has chosen to highlight the “projects and perspectives of this city on the move“. Popular suburb of 90,000 inhabitants with a unemployment rate at 22% (compared to 12.5% ​​in Ile-de-France) and a poverty rate of 41% (2), Aubervilliers remains a much poorer town than the average in the Ile-de-France, where the rate is more like 15.6% .

For each food trade that sets up in a popular suburb, natives who had asked for nothing “se r