A kaleidoscopic look at Paris’s ever-changing forms and people
"Since the disastrous Pompidou years, working-class Paris has been steadily nibbled away, either by destruction or more insidiously by a kind of internal colonization.
Take for example a small outlying district populated by Arabs, blacks and poor whites twenty years ago, the L’Olive neighbourhood north of La Chapelle The area is noted as pleasant, people frequent it and explore it, and as the rents are low some settle there. Others follow, first friends and then anyone else. Rents go up, buildings are renovated, bars open, then an organic food shop, a vegan restaurant... The earlier indigenous inhabitants are driven out by the rising rents and settle further away, in Saint-Denis if they are lucky, or else in Garges-lès-Gonesse, Goussainville or God knows where.
"But new neighbourhoods are emerging, for example the Chinese quarter of Bas Bel
