A decaying vision of the future on the outskirts of Paris...

Almost 80% of the population of Paris don’t live in Paris proper, they live in les banlieues or suburbs. The photographer, Laurent Kronental's photo-essay ’Souvenir d'un Futur’ (Remember a future) highlights how many of these housing projects are now forgotten areas of this great city, symbols of economic decline, social divides and a decaying vision of what the future would hold. Today I visited the most architecturally striking of them, Noisy Le Grand in the east of Paris, to see for myself. These monumental post-modernist structures, with vast columns and arches, were supposed to be a vision of utopia—in 2014, however, they were used as a vision of dystopia in the last of ‘The Hunger Games’ films. They were quite unlike anywhere I have ever been before. Though Kronental’s work has focussed on the forgotten generation who moved in when these buildings were going up, what I wandered most about was what it would be like to be a child growing up in these neighbourhoods—children were coming home from school about the time that I was there. In the end, I decided I could only like the buildings for their architectural oddity, like viewing curiosities in a museum, where the admission price is the cost of an RER ticket from ‘Paris proper’.