Farewell, Gagarin: Paris demolishes communist housing estate on the suburbs

For decades, a huge apartment complex on the outskirts of Paris has been a brick symbol of Communist Russia's promise of peace to workers, but on Saturday residents and local officials will gather to say goodbye to the building left behind in a backward neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying.

Russian space pioneer Yuri Gagarin attended the inauguration of the City of Gagarin in 1963 just two years after becoming the first man in space, and the complex underscored the appeal of the Communist Party in post-World War II France.

The bathroom, the spacious kitchen, the elevator - it was all new to us. We had never known such amenities!

- said Jacqueline Spiro, who along with her parents''was among the first generation of residents. The T-shaped, 13-story building in the suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine did indeed look like something from outer space among the rows of cramped workhouses in the so-called "red belt" suburbs of Paris since the 1920s.

It was a model of social urban construction pursued by the French Communist Party, which enjoyed huge support in the decades after World War II thanks to its role in the Resistance. "City of Gagarin was an international showcase for the French Communist Party," said Emmanuel Bellanger, a historian at the CNRS French Research Institute. "The party showed the world what it could do at the local level, to eventually make it to the''recession on the Paris region.

"There was a real problem in attractiveness, people didn't want to move here and turnover was high," admitted Romain Marchand, saying he wanted to "turn the page." Once the devastating 16-month-long work is complete, workers will work to create what they call a "green neighborhood" with energy-efficient buildings and parks.

Local residents fear, however, that middle-class families, attracted by the "Greater Paris" plan to unite the capital with its suburbs, will become''The latest blow to the social coherence epitomized by the City of Gagarin'. "With more Paris, we question whether we will have the means to live here," said Elizabeth, a local resident.

Critics point out that the new development will not be wholly owned by the Ivry Public Housing Trust, "but that won't stop us from keeping 30 percent of the new 'green neighborhood' as social housing," Marchand said. He said he was well aware of the "real estate forces" pressuring Ivry, which is likely to be a major issue in next year's municipal elections.

"Gentrification has long been seen as an electoral threat to the French Communist Party," said David Guare, a political scientist at the University of Toulouse in southern France,'''specializing in French suburbs. The Communists won 55 percent of the vote in the last municipal elections in Ivry in 2014, and "so far, the political currents are still on the party's side," he said. © 2019 AFP