Jean-Pierre Lévy and Sylvie Tissot have just published the collective book Montreuil: Still a Working-Class Suburb? with Presses universitaires de France.
“On the outskirts of Paris, Montreuil epitomises the contrasting transformations taking place in the inner suburbs. For several decades now, young middle-class households have been leaving the capital to settle there, fuelling a visible process of gentrification. Does this mean that these former strongholds of the ‘red suburbs’, long governed by the Communist Party, have lost all their working-class character and are dissolving into a homogenised ‘Greater Paris’?
Nothing could be further from the truth. Drawing on thirty years of research into the city, this book argues for the idea of a unique trajectory. With its political roots on the left, a long-standing immigrant population, a significant proportion of social housing, and the rise of alternative forms of housing, Montreuil combines social transformation with strong elements of continuity.
Far from the clichés about the ‘suburbs’ or the ‘bobos’ who have come to take them over, this book shows how a working-class heritage, new residential aspirations and local activism coexist. It offers a nuanced interpretation of metropolitan dynamics and examines the capacity of these areas to remain spaces characterised by social diversity, conflict and political innovation.
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Jean-Pierre Lévy is a geographer and a research director at the CNRS. His work focuses on issues relating to housing and settlement at national and local levels, urban mobility and the use of domestic spaces. He is notably the author of From the Sustainable City to Nature in the City (Septentrion, 2015).
Sylvie Tissot is a sociologist and lecturer at the University of Paris 8. She has researched the emergence of urban policy and the phenomenon of gentrification in the United States and France. She is notably the author of Gayfriendly. Acceptance and Tolerance in Paris and New York (Raisons d’agir, 2018).