At 70, the Grand Ensemble de Sarcelles is resisting

Built over nearly 20 years, from 1955 to 1973, the Grand Ensemble, located 15 minutes by RER north of Paris, is one of the largest in France. Spanning 2 km2 next to the historic village of Sarcelles (Val-d'Oise), it represents only a quarter of the commune's surface area but accounts for two-thirds of its population, with 40.000 residents.

Along the straight streets, slender, long residential blocks interlock with each other, interspersed with green lawns in the heart of the blocks. Punctuated by a few towers, the complex resembles a giant Tetris game when viewed from planes landing at the nearby Roissy airport.

"The overall plan for the Grand Ensemble de Sarcelles is quite remarkable and has remained a rare good example of what was achieved in the construction of large suburban housing projects after the war," Patrick Haddad, Socialist mayor of Sarcelles since 2018, told AFP.

Whereas the urban renewal policy of the last 20 years in the suburbs has largely consisted of knocking down tower blocks to rebuild neighborhoods on a more human scale, the structure and architecture of the Grand Ensemble de Sarcelles have generally remained preserved, with greater emphasis placed on improving existing buildings.

"We demolish wisely. We don't touch the stone buildings, we only demolish the poor-quality buildings, the plastered ones, the interlocking blocks. And, to diversify housing, we demolish social housing to create alternative housing," explains Patrick Haddad.

Because with 75% of social housing, in which the original middle classes have been replaced by new arrivals in more precarious situations, the Grand Ensemble suffers from a general impoverishment of its population, which extends by capillarity to the private co-ownerships of the district, many of which are dilapidated.

Limits of architecture

The work of architect Jacques-Henri Labourdette, this grid-like city sprang from the ground on commission from the Société centrale immobilière of the Caisse des dépôts, in a context of acute housing crisis in France in the 1950s in the midst of a demographic boom.

A 51-year-old kindergarten teacher, Maria Santos Baltazar was born and has lived her entire life in this global city that her father, a Portuguese mason, helped to build when he arrived on the Sarcelles construction site in 1964 to flee the Salazar dictatorship.

"We must preserve this memory of what the large housing estates were, of the people who lived there, but also of the workers who came to build them," she confides, seated at a table in front of a café on the Slabe des Flanades, the failing commercial complex that serves as the town center.

The homogeneity of the buildings meant that the Grand Ensemble suffered from a poor image from the outset, to the point that the press of the time coined the neologism "sarcellitis", referring to the spleen of the inhabitants of the dormitory suburbs.

But at 70 years old, an anniversary the town celebrates from May to July, the Grand Ensemble de Sarcelles has proven to have stood the test of time better than many suburban housing projects, built far from public transport and closed in on themselves. Here, the fluidity of traffic allows one to move freely from one neighborhood to another.

"It's always the same buildings, but it's never monotonous. You can have a 14-story tower next to a four-story building. We were lucky that it wasn't a ghettoization of housing projects. Every time, you cross a street or an alley and you're somewhere else," describes Frédéric Bride, co-founder of the legendary Sarcelles rap label Secteur Ä.

In Sarcelles, "we feel that everywhere, on the scale of housing, offices, galleries, there is a material. After all, architecture can't do everything," notes architect Patrick de Jean, working on the energy renovation of towers on the main avenue du 8 Mai 45. "But I think that here it is a bit at its maximum power."