Byrne-ing down the house

"It’s sort of ridiculous for me to presume to have insights here — but I assume that any citizen has the obligation to muse about the mess, wherever it is, as it is always closer to home than we think. Possible quick action — a way to take immediate action rather than forming a committee: begin running 24-hour public transport to and from the city to the banlieues. To all parts, from all parts. Immediately begin job programs and job training for unemployed youth. Require employers throughout the country to hire on merit and fine them severely if they discriminate. Show that this is being enforced.

None of these require large infrastructures or years of planning and construction.

The French bourgeois will hate all this — their whole idea was to admit cheap workers to France but confine them to the outlying areas and shut down any access they might have to the City of Light after a certain hour, effectively isolating them. To preserve their idea of what it means to be French.

Long-term solution: Tear the damn things down. Admit that Le Corbusier and his legions of pseudo-followers were wrong, and fund people to build human-scale communities. THE SAME SHOULD BE DONE EVERYWHERE. N.Y., St Louis, Boston, London, Glasgow, Manchester, Brussels."

(...)

"Some articles have suggested that Le Corbusier has been unfairly maligned, and that his one well-realized building of this type is now a coveted residence in Marseille. Living proof that this sort of housing can work. The implication being that if done right these vast utopian “machines for living” are light, clean, and efficient, and that people actually like them… and that it was the subsequent developers and politicians who perverted the great Corbu’s ideas, and THAT is why they don’t work — it’s NOT that the ideas were bad. Just as communism’s supporters claimed that it was never properly implemented when they were confronted by its perversions and excesses. And every demagogue claims that if his policies were given just a little more time and weren’t always compromised by those damned do-gooders their true worth would be evident. “Let me just finish the job and you’ll see.” (How many times will we hear that said about Iraq?)"

(David Byrne, Suggestions for France)