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by Abdelbaseer Mohamed

Greater Cairo, which includes the city of Giza, is spatially fragmented and heavily oriented toward private transit. Low-income residents are disproportionately isolated from essential infrastructure, services and job opportunities. Segregation is especially acute on Gezirat Al Warraq and Gezirat Al Dahab, large islands several kilometers from central Cairo. Efforts to solve this problem have encountered resistance from proponents of sustainable development.


Dahab Island. Image source: Fouad GM


Warraq Island. Image source: Ester Meerman

The islands’ fertile land and rare bird species coexist with informal settlements, where thousands of people have lived since the construction of Aswan Low Dam in 1902. Links to the mainland are starkly insufficient. To access Cairo and Giza on old ferries, many residents leave home before dawn and return late at night. Lack of transit infrastructure has effectively barred them from economic opportunities as well as quality healthcare, education and law enforcement.


Spatial accessibility map showing the extent to which large river islands Warraq (top) and Dahab (bottom) are isolated from the rest of Cairo and Giza. Red indicates higher transit connectivity; blue indicates lower connectivity. Image source: Abdelbaseer Mohamed

In a recent Al Kahera Walnas news feature, island dwellers expressed frustration with the lack of infrastructure and services. Sanitation and crime were especially urgent concerns. “I have to use the river’s contaminated water to wash my dishes,” said a Warraq resident. “Liver disease and kidney failure are normal.” Another woman reported, “drug trafficking and thugs are overwhelming.”

So why not build bridges linking Dahab and Warraq to the mainland? Based on a 1996 decree, these islands are “natural protectorates” that must be cleared of informal settlements. Municipal officials argue that bridges threaten biodiversity by encouraging more unplanned development. According to one local official, since the islands are natural protectorates, higher authorization is needed for the city to provide more than basic administrative services. Island residents, many of whom live in communities established by their ancestors, remain despite government neglect and exclusion from decision-making processes.

Ironically, the Cairo 2050 and Giza 2030 master plans envision high-end residential and recreational development for the islands. Planners hope to resolve chronic traffic problems by adding 15 metro lines and 1,000 streets by 2050, but these projects wouldn’t meet the needs of people now living on Warraq and Dahab. The plans focus on attracting tourists and wealthy citizens, along with eliminating informal settlements.




Plans for new development on the Nile islands. Image source: Giza 2030 Master Plan (pp. 145)

In a 2009 survey for Cairo 2050, over 60 percent of island residents voiced discontent with the development plan. One man reported to Al Kahera Walnas that “the governor of Giza doesn’t care about us.” Instead of helping to solve the problems of isolated communities, policymakers are making these problems more difficult.

Master plans without resident input are problematic, to say the least. Island dwellers should be able to reach the mainland safely and efficiently. Their present segregation contradicts visions of social justice that inspired the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

Responsible management of island ecosystems is needed to avert the harmful consequences of new development. To this end, it’s important to reject exclusivity. A more equitable approach would assure that islanders have the right to contribute meaningfully to new plans while sharing land ownership with the municipal government. Deep concern for the places where they live makes them natural partners in sustainable development.

Abdelbaseer Mohamed is a visiting scholar at American University in Washington, D.C. He recently completed a doctorate in urban design at Ain Shams University and Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

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by Cristiana Strava

London's East End needs little introduction. Though nestled between the largest financial hubs in Europe (Central London to the west and Canary Wharf to the south), it has traditionally been one of the city's least affluent areas.


Central London viewed from Clichy Estate in the East End. Image source: Will Faichney



The East End is home to places like the recently refurbished Ocean Estate in Stepney, known for many years as one of Europe's largest and most deprived housing developments. It is also home to vibrant Brick Lane and Whitechapel Road, the East London Mosque and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.





There have been many waves of migration to the East End since the 17th century — including French Huguenots, Ashkenazi Jews, Irish Catholics and Bangladeshi Muslims. The northwestern zone is now gentrifying into a habitat of hipsters, yuppies and "yummy-mummies."



Imran Jamal, an ethnographer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has worked in the East End's Bangladeshi community for many years. He gave an unorthodox tour of the area in November 2012, which I attended and Thalia Gigerenzer recorded for CoLab Radio. The audio track is embedded below.



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by Javier Arbona

Gentrification doesn't need to be something that one group inflicts on another; often it's the result of aspirations everybody shares. All over the city, a small army of the earnest toils away, patiently trying to sluice some of the elitist taint off neighborhoods as they grow richer. When you're trying to make a poor neighborhood into a nicer place to live, the prospect of turning it into a racially and economically mixed area with ­thriving stores is not a threat but a fantasy. As the cost of basic city life keeps rising, it's more important than ever to reclaim a form of urban improvement from its malignant offshoots. A nice neighborhood should be not a luxury but an urban right. – Justin Davidson, 2014

An aura of fascination suffuses all of these accounts. The adulatory tone was engendered by a group of writers who continue to build their careers on regular updates of East Village art developments. These "East Village critics" — who are, in fact, not critics but apologists — celebrate the scene with an inflated and aggressive rhetoric of "liberation," "renewal," "ecstasy." – Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, 1987

According to recent literature, the word "gentrification" appeared fifty years ago in 1964. It describes a historical shift after World War II — the unmaking and remaking of cities along new class lines, although it has previous historical precedents, of course. Scholars attribute its coinage to British sociologist Ruth Glass. Its everyday use could predate her writing and Glass herself may have used it in an unpublished draft before the 1960s.

Working on research about London, Glass wrote: "One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class — upper and lower." She then adds, "Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed."

At the initial moment of introducing this concept into the research on cities, Glass shows its inherent critical charge. Note the kind of language she uses (emphasis added): "working class quarters have been invaded," "working class occupiers are displaced," "whole social character of the district is changed." Invaded. Displaced. Changed.



Some years after the concept appeared, the first attempts to divorce it of its critical tone came along. In the early 1970s, architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt introduced the term in the pages of the Washington Post for the first time, according to an analysis by Rob Godspeed. Von Eckardt described gentrification as "the best thing that has happened to American cities since ditches were turned into sewers." Addressing these very sorts of revisions of the word, Neil Smith once remarked, “Precisely because the language of gentrification tells the truth about the class shift involved in the 'regeneration' of the city, it has become a dirty word to developers, politicians and financiers." But because the word seems resistant to being swept up with other taboos, then, gentrification periodically has advocates like Von Eckardt who attempt to retake it and absolve the very same unjust processes originally labeled with it.

Can gentrification refer to something opposite to its coinage (while cognizant of the numerous academic variations on the theme)? In other words, can it be divorced from its initial charges of spatial colonization and class segregation? To hear some recent voices in the media, it can.



A National Public Radio (NPR) journalist tweets that "yuppies can stop feeling guilty" because —based on a cursory glance — gentrification also benefits longtime residents. NPR ran her story with a URL extension that gives away the slant: "long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma." Another reporter — looking at the same neighborhood as NPR — asks rhetorically, "is bemoaning the gentrification of Washington, DC, a genre past its prime?" (File this one under: Writing by the Victims of Moaning About Gentrification.)

And in the latest salvo from the world of architecture criticism ("Is Gentrification All Bad?") Justin Davidson ventures: "gentrification can be either a toxin or a balm." It's vital to recall, for context's sake, that Davidson recently invested time and energy defending Michael Bloomberg's mayorship as a virtuous period for public spaces — with no mention of the mayor's dismal record on homelessness, free speech and civil rights. Davidson comments in a radio interview, "We need to define gentrification as separate from the process of displacement." Nevertheless, Bloomberg's tenure itself might indicate that the two (the word and the displacement) can't be as separate as Davidson would like. All in all, these reports, and more appearing almost every day, start to resemble the writing of The San Francisco Chronicle's sports-turned-law-and-order-disciplinarian columnist, C.W. Nevius, which is cause for great concern — for writing and for cities both.

One government study cited by NPR said, "while [gentrification] does not have a precise definition, it is commonly associated with an increase in income, rising home prices or rents and sometimes with changes in the occupational mix and educational level of neighborhood residents." But gentrification does have a precise definition that goes back to its roots. (Invaded, Displaced, Changed). Whether or not the word applies to a specific case could be quibbled over, but its linguistic precision shouldn't be obfuscated. More importantly, "In any area where residents feel under attack they will be using a word like gentrification, it is not the job of a researcher or anyone else for that matter, to impose a formal definition of what gentrification means on a neighborhood," as Sam Barton cogently argues. He adds, "If we are not to dispose of the word in its entirety, we should adopt its colloquial usage." I agree.

Federal Reserve economist Daniel Hartley (author of the study cited in the paragraph above) concludes that, when gentrification occurs, all residents benefit from — unsurprisingly — a higher credit score associated with their zipcode. This is a mixed blessing, to say the least, when issues like steady employment, health care, food or stable housing probably take a higher priority, but I digress. Another article mentioned in the NPR piece — missing exact dates to situate the economic effects — "found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn't."

Is gentrification happening without gentrifiers and without the gentrified? Apparently, yes. No one loses. Everyone wins. Gentrification. Just. Happens.

But gentrification, as a word, is incapable of projecting the benign "balm" that some in the media and academia make it out to be. Does anyone identify as gentry? Hardly anybody (though some people do, certainly). But do any of the gentrification-friendly journalists self-identify as gentry? The gentry are generally understood to be an over-advantaged lot. In the history of literature and art, the gentry hoard property and privilege as much as they can, yet they obsess over their manners and style in order to disguise their rapacity. These are the basic reasons why gentrification carries with it the power of biting satire. Glass (a Marxist) was well aware of this. It's precisely because no one likes to reveal themselves as such shameless climbers that periodic efforts emerge to revise the definition of the word and deaden its force. In reality, using the word without its satirical edge is a surefire recipe for sounding like a member of the gentry oneself.

Indeed, urban dwellers (or their scribes) are free to identify as the entitled members of a rigid caste system if they like, but that doesn't mean they can salvage the term gentrification for the better. One can't have it both ways. Either there is gentrification or there isn't. Period. And recalling Barton, I'd venture to say that the locals experiencing it have a better sense of what's going on. To give it any positive spin implies denial of the stratifying wave the process begets. In short, gentrification doesn't just happen.



One must be equally alert to replacement words spoken to camouflage gentrification — and sometimes to advance its course in the very same breath. Neighborhoods don't "evolve," passively "change," or get "discovered." "Transition" and "transformation" can also be added to the pile of evasive vocabularies. David Madden points out how these kinds of words, in effect, stigmatize and denigrate past neighborhood history as a primitive state before the gentrifiers. In a demagogic offshoot of the same revisionist-colonialist vocabulary, Jerry Brown once asserted, as mayor of Oakland, that staving off gentrification was to invite "slumification."

Or take, for example, the following: “What will this transformation mean for Oakland? [Gentrification] should produce a bigger tax base that can help improve city services and maybe even create a more effective police force." These are the words of Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times Magazine — while conceding that gentrification produces few jobs (except for police, apparently) in the very same article. He concludes: "The utopian vision for a post-capitalist Oakland clung to by (rapper and activist) Boots Riley and the rest of the city’s revolutionaries will soon be dead." ... Dead? Due to what cause of death? A vision killed by some divine plague — the wafting, mysterious airs of gentrification? All of these twists reveal the bizarre contortions of turning a charged word into a bland euphemism.

Here is another way to look at it: for these studies and articles to be on the mark, their authors must unfortunately be using gentrification wrong. If everyone's lot is improving, then we're not speaking of gentrification, or are we? Perhaps this is the case and the word has been poorly chosen. But NPR's Laura Sullivan and the scholars she cites do stress gentrification time and time again. They seem to celebrate what they see changing. She writes, "every other shop is a new restaurant, high-end salon or bar. The neighborhood is gentrifying." Whether this cohort realizes it or not, it takes gentrification to usher in the gentry, and vice versa. And even if some legacy residents stick it out, that is not evidence of gentrification's benevolent gifts trickling down to these folks.

To be fair, a short piece on the radio or in a magazine hardly has the room to tease out the effects of gentrification — although the NPR reporter should have sought out at least one countervailing study. Likewise, one of the two NPR citations forms the bedrock of Davidson's New York Magazine piece. (Is the evidence so slim that they all call the same scholar? Did they realize his study has also been retorted? And that, in addition, "The unfortunate paradox is that studies showing low mobility rates among the poor are being used to vindicate gentrification and to dismantle precisely those policies that help to cushion its worst impacts.")

My aim here isn't to directly agree or disagree with these writers, even though I nevertheless suspect that these pieces are inaccurate and take a very short view of urban history. (It's easy to deny displacement as part of gentrification when it happened in "the past.") For an example of much deeper journalism, see a recent story by Rania Khalek examining the longer historical pattern of neighborhood neglect, displacement and elimination of public housing in Washington, DC. But more to the point at hand, the re-branders of gentrification are blinded by their operating theory of "gentrification without gentrifiers" — and blinding others along with them. And that's a larger issue with the discourse: a colonization of language itself.

Gentrification, at its root, refers to something different from the commonplace assumptions I have mentioned here. If one is writing articles, one can do better than to leave the word itself unexamined in plain sight. (Besides, how many of these writers can claim to know gentrification from the perspective of those who have experienced urban disenfranchisement?) Countless vernacular opinions mirror the same assumption in the media of "gentrification without gentrifiers." But the suffix "-ation" implies that someone is doing something, that is: gentrifying.

The core problem with these stories reflects a turning away from what gentrification precisely means, perhaps out of fear that one is, or could be, complicit in the process. And yet, at the same time, the classist anxieties over gentrification's Other — Brown's "slumification" comment, for example — show how phobias of the poor and "other" rank higher than a concern over one's own role in the process. This hardly makes for good research or journalism.

I, for one, would be thrilled to read that gentrification is not happening — that we all misidentified one of the most significant urban restructuring processes of the past half-century. But if gentrification is taking place — and it certainly is (and has) — someone must be practicing it. Moreover, even among studies that acknowledge the detrimental effects of gentrification, there is a pattern of focusing on the seemingly independent decisions made by individual homebuyers (and, sometimes, renters). These housing consumers are in a putative "market" devoid of actual power brokers. Realtor groups, homeowners associations, business improvement districts, employers, public and private police forces, government policymakers, planning consultants, politicians, marketing agencies, banking and insurance firms, and the news media all cooperate, in different ways, to gentrify.

So the constant focus on the homebuyer/renter as the sole gentrifier can have a detrimental effect on anti-gentrification efforts. The consumer doesn't act alone. The usual hero or villain central to gentrification narratives — the consumer (if such an abstraction has any meaning) — is more likely to be the last ingredient in the mix. Therefore, the concerted pressure of gentrification suggests that communities should not cede possession of the term itself.

Javier Arbona, geographer and founding member of the Demilit collective, gathers gentrification links here. He can also be found on Twitter: @AlJavieera.

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by Tony Roshan Samara

There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over the past two decades has been the systematic demolition of affordable housing stock. To understand this upside-down world of housing politics, at least as it collides with the lives of the urban poor, we have to understand the moral panic that has developed around the concept of concentrated poverty. Over time, this panic has hardened into a consensus among the urban policy elite. For its members, most if not all social ills associated with cities and poverty stem from too many poor people being gathered in one place.


Cochran Gardens in St. Louis, demolished 2008. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As a result, poverty deconcentration has become the public policy hammer that defines as a nail virtually every problem related to urban inequality. And nowhere has this hammer been wielded to more devastating effect than against public housing. Public housing has long served as a convenient boogey man in debates about racial segregation and persistent, concentrated poverty in low income communities of color. It has been evoked repeatedly by conservative and liberal administrations over the past twenty-five years as they raced to dismantle the welfare state, achieving the status of conventional wisdom: "You don't think concentrated poverty is a problem? Just look at public housing!" Importantly, influential strands of academic research have provided intellectual firepower for the policy.

As a highly racialized metaphor, "the projects" have a power to reshape the urban landscape that their residents can only dream about. Since the early 1990s, in city after city, the alleged failure of public housing as social policy facilitated demolition, even as the affordable housing situation for very low-income city residents grew ever more grim. Between 2000 and 2008 alone, over 99,000 public housing units were lost — a rate of 11,000 per year — primarily as a result of the HOPE VI program, a legacy of the first Clinton Administration. At the same time, the market forces that were nominally intended to make up for the destroyed housing units instead replaced the people they had once sheltered.

This scorched-earth policy did not go completely unnoticed. In 2009, congressional representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters called for a moratorium on the demolition of public housing, referring to the losses as "epic." One year later, after a special mission to the US, the United Nations rapporteur on the right to housing repeated the call. However, demolition continues and public housing projects have virtually disappeared in some cities. In Atlanta, for example, the last units were torn down in 2011.

While the loss of actual housing for very low-income residents is the most obvious outcome of demolition, policies promoting deconcentration, mobility and mixed-income developments have a much broader impact. Tearing down public housing and dispersing its residents, for example, has broken up entire communities and cleared the way for widespread gentrification in many inner-city areas.

After decades of research, the failure of these policies to alleviate poverty or even maintain existing levels of affordable housing is impossible to ignore. Yet the consensus around poverty concentration and, to a lesser extent, market solutions to urban poverty remains — apparently oblivious to the devastation for which it is responsible.

There is a growing backlash against these trends among urban scholars that dovetails with the growing awareness of just how bad inequality has become. As part of this response, I recently co-edited, along with Anita Sinha and Marnie Brady, a special issue of Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning on affordable housing. The issue, in turn, is an effort to engage with a report on public housing released in 2010 by the Right to the City alliance. [Disclosure: Each of the editors works or has in the past worked closely with the alliance.]



The Right to the City report is unique because it involved residents of public housing from seven metropolitan regions in both the design and implementation of the research. The result is arguably the most comprehensive study we have of what public housing residents actually think about the places in which they live — or once lived. The picture that emerges challenges the widely circulated racist, sexist and classist stereotypes that underpin the myth of public housing as a policy failure.

Against the view that public housing is the social and spatial epitome of an urban pathology, the report presents the views of residents who believe that public housing does and can continue to work, that repair and upgrading are preferable to demolition and that demolition destroys communities along with homes. It also argues that, to the extent public housing has fallen into disrepair, this is the result of decades-long neglect and disinvestment.

The idea behind the special issue of Cities is to advance a debate about urban poverty and inequality that has grown stagnant, even as it continues to provide ideological cover for ineffective and destructive policy. While we hope it contributes to an effort to put deconcentration advocates on the defensive, our real interest is in simply leaving behind the distorted framework it offers and participating in the more vibrant intellectual and political work being done by researchers, community activists and others to address the intertwined challenges of displacement, poverty and political marginalization.

Debates over the outcomes of deconcentration and mobility programs are important but, in our view, largely settled. Our introduction to the special issue of Cities refers to many related studies for those interested in exploring them in detail. We see deconcentration policies, however well intentioned, as expressions of austerity politics that convert homes and communities into real estate, driving former residents into a hostile and discriminatory market to individually chase "opportunity." We contrast this market-based mobility approach with a discussion of public housing and the right to place.

Our focus is on what is lost when homes are torn down and people are displaced. This view is largely absent from elite discourse, which reduces complicated communities to the policy-ready concept of the concentrated poor. The relentless demonization of public housing and its residents over many decades has made it extremely difficult to even discuss the positive social, economic and political histories of public housing, much less its potential for the future as the affordable housing crisis grinds on. In the distorted view that has come to predominate, the role of public housing in anchoring social relations and political mobilization for low-income communities of color is erased.

Articles in the special issue are part of an ongoing effort to reorient the research on poverty deconcentration toward the important history of public housing as a site of empowerment for people of color, especially for women. There is a relatively small but growing interest in crucial support networks that residents build over the years as a result, in part, of spatial concentration. From a research and policy perspective, these networks represent important challenges to the racist and dehumanizing rhetoric of "highrise hell holes" and other tired metaphors. Yet the centrality of public housing to these networks, and the consequences of its destruction, have elicited barely a whisper from deconcentration advocates in a rush to level the projects.

Contributors to the issue also analyze how the ideology of concentrated poverty works to obscure the relationship between demolition and neoliberalism, particularly the partnership between market and state that has been so effective in clearing neighborhoods of existing residents in preparation for redevelopment. Authors here and elsewhere have argued that popular and academic discourses on concentrated poverty, opportunity and mobility are heirs of older "culture of poverty" arguments deployed by conservatives and liberals alike to dismantle social welfare policy. Today, critical studies of market fundamentalism and social inequality reveal the extent to which the spatial politics of contemporary cities represent what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession."



In this context, individualism, choice and mobility become mechanisms of dispossession that hinge to a great extent on dismantling stubborn concentrations of poverty — or what some might call poor and resilient communities. Rather than attempting to strengthen these communities, dispersion policies scatter their members to other poor inner-city areas or to increasingly race- and class-diverse suburbs. Poverty and segregation are not reduced, but are rendered less visible from certain social and spatial vantage points.

In the end, a fresh view of public housing demolition and the deconcentration of poverty suggests that these policies do not create opportunities for the urban poor. Instead, they represent new cycles of accumulation and attempted management of resulting inequalities. From social and political perspectives, poverty deconcentration functions primarily as a form of disorganization, making it much more difficult for low-income people to collectively mobilize. Rather than increasing the upward mobility of marginalized communities, it decreases their ability to assert a right to place.

Tony Roshan Samara is an associate professor of sociology at George Mason University. He also chairs the Cities and Globalization Working Group and serves on the national steering committee of the Right to the City alliance. Tony welcomes correspondence via Twitter (@CGWG2) or email (samar495@gmail.com), and many of his publications can be downloaded free of charge at Academia.edu.

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by Alex Schafran

Virtually everywhere you go in the Parisian banlieue, you will find large signs drawing attention to "urban renovation" — major facelifts for large housing projects (cités), new public spaces in the centers of villages and towns, better integration with the myriad transit projects currently underway, entire blocks of housing.

Omnipresent construction, like most initiatives in France, is being done by a complex network of public, private and semi-public actors operating at every scale. Ideologues of either state or market would be incapable of understanding new development in France, for everything is a public-private partnership when you drill down deep enough. Regardless of who seems to be in charge of a project, there is liable to be a large billboard outside the construction zone with a celebratory rendering of what this space will look like — be it a revitalized public park, a downtown shopping zone or an eco-housing development built by a major developer. This, of course, is nothing unique — billboard-sized renderings have become part of the international language of city-building.



What is notable about these billboards is the people shown occupying the new space. It doesn't take a scholar of race to guess that the answer is not those who look anything like the population of the banlieue.


The actual center of Argenteuil (above) and the rendered version (below).



The shocking thing about the "whitewashing" of places like Argenteuil, Choisy-le-Roi, Villetaneuse, Drancy and Asnières is how thorough it is, and how little it matters if it is formally a public or private venture. For me, what started as a passing observation has evolved into a research project. Of the hundreds of people in what are now dozens of renderings I've encountered in housing projects across four districts (departments), there are only a few people of color. And not only are the white people everywhere, they are often particularly blond and bourgeois or seemingly part of the vast "bobo" class that has started to gentrify places like Montreuil and Pantin. At times it feels like a bad joke: in a major poster for the T8 tramline — which will connect Épinay-sur-Seine with Saint-Denis — the only black person, among over 50 people, was playing basketball.



Although I can't prove quantitatively that this is a false rendering — France doesn't collect data on race, based on a tenet that since race exists only in theory, in theory it doesn't exist — not only do these cities have significant communities of color, I'd bet my bike and camera that many are now majority minority. I'd also be willing to wager that in many communities where these renderings have been tacked up in public space, they have been false for a generation now. Moreover, these renderings belie the fact that people in the public spaces of metropolitan Paris are strikingly diverse, both in the banlieue and in the city itself.



There are a few exceptions to the many disingenuous billboards on display, including the group picture (above) from Argenteuil. But even this one, clearly intended to promote the harmonious vision of a multicultural and inclusive society, erases one of the most visible aspects of life in metropolitan France: Muslim women with head scarves. Spend five minutes on a busy street, in a park, on transit or outside a school at dismissal, and you will realize that women with their heads covered are part of the firmament in contemporary Île de France.


A couple on a bench in Parc Lefévre, Livry-Gargan. (The woman's hair is not red.)

Head scarves are a lightning rod for controversy in theoretically secular France. The urbane nation where James Baldwin felt so at home will surely be aghast at this whitewashing; but even much of the progressive wing of the French establishment would likely sit on their hands at the failure to show women in head scarves occupying public space, even if they are an undeniable presence.

Credits: All pictures by Alex Schafran.

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