Thriving On The Edge

After years of neglect, a Paris suburb has shed its no-go reputation to become a new centre of cool.

- Joshua Levine

There was a key moment when Bertrand Kern realised that the fortunes of his gritty little town were about to change. Kern is the three-term Socialist mayor of Pantin, just north of the Périphérique, or ring road, that marks the outer boundary of Paris intramuros —Paris within the walls. Pantin lies beyond that, in a landscape of run-down housing projects and abandoned factories that Parisians refer to as la zone. Almost exactly 11 years ago, disillusioned young men and women from around the city spent weeks rioting there, as a way of expressing frustration with their dead-end lives. Historically, it hasn’t been a place Parisians want to hang around in, for reasons of snobbery, fear, and common sense.

Kern’s revelation came during a meeting with Thaddaeus Ropac, an Austria-born titan of the art world who runs a gallery in the Marais neighbourhood of Paris. Ropac was looking for a cavernous space that could house monumental sculptures by the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Erwin Wurm . As Kern describes it, “Ropac said , ‘I’m hesitating between London and Pantin.’ London and Pantin! I had to rub my eyes. A guy like Ropac! London has Greater London, so I suppose this would be Greater Paris, if there were one.”

Alas, there isn’t. Paris—beautiful, tiny, perfect—can barely breathe inside its tight corset. There’s no place for it to go, and building upward is largely out of the question . It is already one of the densest cities on earth, even though it doesn’t always feel that way. Kern is right about Greater London. The metropolis can sprawl for years to come. Paris, on the other hand, is packed like so many exquisite chocolates into a tidy 40-square-mile box. There’s not much you can do to it, and, really, who would want to?