In A Visible City
I wrote this piece about Paris, in December 2016. Very little has changed over the past 12 months, except for the appearance of more invisible cities and more invisible people across the Continent. The photograph above shows people sleeping outside, in the snow, in Calais. Welcome to Europe, December 2017.
This Christmas, as you sit warm and sated with family and friends, please take a moment to think about these invisible people. Don’t wallow in guilt, but promise yourself that next year, you will do something, whatever you can, to make them visible.
If you can, please donate. If not, at the very least keep informed about what is happening.
Alongside Paris, inside Paris, a second city has appeared. A parallel city of temporary structures, inhabited by those without papers or permanent homes. To an extent, this second city has always existed, inhabited by the unfortunate few who found themselves pinned to society’s margins. Until now, however, this city had remained in the shadows, on the fringes, only visible to those with a sharp eye and a strong social conscience. But over the past few years, it has encroached so far upon the original city, the picturesque Paris of postcards, that it can no longer be ignored.
Street corners, squares, metro stations and sheltered shop doorways have become places of refuge for those with nowhere else to go. The city’s native homeless have been joined by a wave of new-arrivals. Syrians, Afghans, Eritreans and Sudanese. Foreigners, migrants, refugees; attach whichever label you so wish. Arbitrary categorisations cannot obscure the fact they are people, without a home, without a place to lay their head.
The urban landscape is punctuated by evidence of their existence. In the gutters, alongside the customary detritus of the city, one finds tents, quilts, blankets and pillows. These items, symbols of domestic warmth and comfort, are horribly out of place on damp tarmac or cold concrete. As are the people who bed down for the night beneath neon signs and railway bridges, next to lanes of traffic and sacks of rubbish. Men, women and children. Families. Sometimes several, lodging together on a mattress or a thick wad of foam, wrapped in whatever they can find to protect against the biting cold.
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Since the closure of the Jungle camp in Calais, the number of people sleeping on the streets of Paris has exploded. The largest of the makeshift camps, situated beneath the railway bridge in the Stalingrad quarter, was cleared by police at the beginning of November. Precise figures are hard to come by, but it was estimated that between two and four thousand people were living beneath the arches. Conditions were tough. Tents had been erected on every scrap of unoccupied concrete, sometimes overlapping, sometimes jutting out into the road. Clothes were washed using pirated drain-water, and then dried on the station railings. Every few minutes, from dawn til dusk, trains thundered overhead.
Finally, in November, a humanitarian camp opened on the Northern fringe of Paris to ease the worsening crisis by providing beds for between 400 and 600 men and day services for women and children. Unlike the ‘Welcome Centres’ located in other regions of France, the camp is not intended to provide medium-term accommodation for migrants; the maximum stay is around ten days, enough time to dry off or warm up and undergo a basic medical check-up if required. A short respite, and nothing more. The centre is mainly staffed by volunteers working with NGOs who distribute donations, basic provisions (such as sanitary towels) and warm drinks. These volunteers, who donate a few hours or days of their lives to help those who need it most, are a glimmer of brightness in a bleak Parisian winter.
Meanwhile, tourists stand and happily snap away at the jewels of Old Paris, seemingly untroubled by this second city. Businessmen rush past, schoolchildren jump onto buses or duck into metro stations. Teenagers smoke and chatter. Even mothers pushing infants appear to have exhausted their care and attention upon their own offspring, and have nothing left for the children of others.
We, collectively, stroll, stride, wander and walk past, unable to engage with this second city that has invaded the first. Either we look without seeing, or we avert our eyes entirely, because to see would be to recognise this absurdity. Instead, we relativize, we normalise, we incorporate it into our everyday routine. We distract ourselves by the pressing concerns of everyday life. We try to find some explanation for this state of affairs. We cannot care for everyone, we tell ourselves. Someone else will look after them, we hope. Sometimes, not often, when our conscience demands, we throw a few coins in a hat, or offer a sandwich or a takeaway coffee.
Somehow, we convince ourselves that there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that in the twenty-first century, in the heart of Europe, a family with two young children live next to a bin, and sleep beneath bare sky.
That there is nothing strange about a family living on a sodden mattress, just metres away from the Champs Elysée, or in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
That it is normal to walk past a row of breathing sleeping bags and blankets when we alight from the metro at ten o’clock at night.
The last fifty years have shown that we are quite capable of ignoring human suffering so long as it occurs in far-flung lands and forgotten continents. It would seem that our capacity to close our eyes and ears has become so developed that even when such horrors occur on a daily basis, on the streets outside our homes, we instinctively perform a psychological shuffle that erases them from both our field of vision and our conscience.
