ryan panos

# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// Rue Sue (Part 1): A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris via The Funambulist

…Just like the Walled City has been associated for a long time with its own myth in which the police did not want to enter it and was hosting all kind of crooks, clandestine and other pirates – in reality it seems that this reputation was usurped – one could imagine a fictitious re-reading of Paris’ history in which this block could have functioned as an autonomous entity with its 10,000 inhabitants -during the bloodshed of the attack of the Commune by the Versailles troops in 1871 for example – and resists to the various forces of suppression by the use of this architecture’s defensiveness and labyrinthine organization of space. Unfortunately, the reality is somehow more prosaic and nothing like that happened. The Citadel is now subjected to Paris’ real estate (although the neighborhood is very far from being one of the most expensive in Paris), the density decreased and the blocks have been divided in individual lots, thus suppressing any form of potential community within it.