Created in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as the solution to Western European society’s housing shortages and growing immigrant populations. Located purposely on the peripheries of most major European cities, mostly prevalent in Paris, these were utopian mini-cities, idealised fantasy landscapes, based on initially, the ideology of Le Corbusier ‘Unite De Habitation’ utopian vision of high-rise city living and designed to house the cheap and ready source of manpower for local industries.
Present day, these ‘Cites’ or ‘Banlieues’ are considered failed social experiments and are now dumping grounds for society’s unwanted, alienated and ever growing immigrant populations.
My images try to seek out these places as a specific locality. The photographs look for the physical structures and codes in city’s geography that stand for the specifics of this place that symbolise the physical dystopia of capitalism’s failures, the crumbling half worlds of no go areas of social deprivation and dysfunction.
