La Grande Borne
La Grande Borne is a housing estate, in the Essonne département on the southern outskirts of Paris, France. The estate is located in both the communes of Grigny and Viry-Châtillon. The architect Émile Aillaud designed this housing estate.
Built as a 1960s social utopia with winding coloured buildings, it was intended to become an ideal dormitory town. With 11,000 inhabitants, it has become a by-word for poverty, drug dealing, arms trafficking, youth criminality and attacks on police, as well as arson attacks on public buildings.
Malek Boutih, Socialist MP for the area. has called it, "One of the most difficult (sic) estates in France" […] “It has a big black population, who are often people who can’t find housing even when they’re working. There’s at least 40% unemployment, broken families, a high level of violence and decomposition. It’s not so much poverty that leads to it, it’s the decay of social order. There is extreme societal misery, but it’s the fact that it has just been abandoned by the state.”
During the 2005 French riots – the worst riots in modern French history, which followed the deaths of two boys who had been running from police on the other side of Paris – it was in Grigny where youths on the estate fired the first gunshots at police.
Coordinates: 48°39′9″N 2°22′32″E / 48.65250°N 2.37556°E
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