Banlieue

A banlieue in France is the name for a suburb of a large city or all its suburbs together. Most of them are outside the cities' official boundaries. The suburbs are now mostly full of low-income housing projects with large numbers of immigrants and have high levels of crime and unemployment. Not all suburbs are full of poor people, but the term usually refers to those ones.

There have been several riots in banlieus about police racism.  In recent years, communitarianism has become more prevalent in France. Some suburbs, such as La Courneuve, Sarcelles, and Toulouse-Le Mirail, are almost exclusively populated by people from Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. Those housing projects, built by architects such as Le Corbusier, Émile Aillaud, and Georges Candilis, have become communal ghettos.

References

Category:Geography of France