In conversation with Salim Djaferi 

EN The tower falls without a sound. No spectacular explosion, no cloud of dust like you see on the news. In Sevran, north-east of Paris, in the Cité des Beaudottes housing estate, demolition is now carried out by nibbling away at the structure. A huge mechanical jaw attacks the building floor by floor. “You can really see the flats being eaten away,” says Salim Djaferi. The scene is technically fascinating.

On that day, he had returned to Les Beaudottes to accompany his mother and aunt. It was here that he spent part of his childhood, in this large social housing estate dating from the 1950s onwards, known in Seine-Saint-Denis for its isolation, its high concentration of social housing, and, later, for receiving intense media coverage. The neighbourhood, long kept at a distance from the city, is currently undergoing a major transformation as part of the Grand Paris project. The metro is finally going to come here. Too late for many.

But Djaferi is not here merely as a former resident. An actor, writer, and director now based in Brussels, he has for several years been developing a form of documentary theatre informed by field research, archives, and personal encounters. Having made his name with Koulounisation, a production exploring French colonisation in Algeria through the lens of language, he has come to witness the demolition of his tower block; he listens and takes notes. What he observes at Les Beaudottes is feeding into a new production, Bâtir, a documentary project launched in 2023, which examines large-scale housing estates and what they reveal about French social and political history.

Normalising

“A representative from the Grand Paris project explained to me that they were in the process of ‘normalising’ the neighbourhood. I found that word incredibly harsh.” To normalise: to bring into line, to make presentable, to erase anything that stands out. For Djaferi, the vocabulary says it all. Normalising means demolishing a tower block, rebuilding something cleaner, more expensive, more ‘mixed’, but without the people who lived there. “Nearly 70% of the residents have been rehoused further away, where there’s no metro. Just when there’s finally access to public services, transport and sports facilities, they’re kicking everyone out.”

“When you’re living in social housing, you know that your flat can be treated however they like. It could be demolished overnight. You have to get out. And all your memories are wiped away without anyone batting an eyelid.” Worse still: this erasure is staged and justified by official rhetoric.

Recording the history of social housing

Since the shanty towns of the 1950s, he explains, there has been this notion that the places where people from immigrant backgrounds live, are, by their very nature, temporary and replaceable. “There is an urgent need to record the history of these places. To ensure that their physical disappearance does not erase everything else.”

In 2019, at the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles festival, he visited the exhibition dedicated to the work of Fernand Pouillon, the architect behind numerous housing estates. “Those photos transported me back to my childhood.” The art world is taking an interest in large-scale housing estates. In this kind of architecture. In these ways of living. “In a sense, it was interested in ‘us’.” Except that the images on display did not depict the Parisian suburbs but large housing estates constructed in Algeria, on the outskirts of Algiers. “I didn’t even know there were housing estates there. And that they looked so much like the ones I’d known here.”

This discovery troubles him all the more because he knew little of Algeria during his childhood. In the summer, the housing estate would empty out. He stayed behind. It was ultimately the writing of his first theatre performance, Koulounisation, that brought him back there, years later, as part of his research. 

As a child, he was surrounded by lots of Algerians. It was a homogeneity that, at the time, he never questioned. “As a kid, I never dreamed of leaving the estate. It was full of love, full of sharing. You’d go out and meet up with your mates. You didn’t feel the inequalities. The questions came later. Why was there such a divide between us and the rest of the city?”

Over time, and through research, an intuition has taken shape. “There is a certain notion of living that architects and prefects brought back from colonial Algeria. A manner of imposing a way of life on others. And above all, of living without the other, at a distance from them. We need the immigrant, but we don’t particularly want to come across them.” Initially, in the 1950s, he recalls that the large housing estates in France were seen as good news; they brought modernity and comfort. But they were intended for a white, middle-class population. People from the former colonies, meanwhile, remained in the slums or passed through temporary accommodation.

His mother went through that. “She used to say to me: ‘I get the feeling this block was built just to tide us over.’” Officially temporary, these homes were here to stay. Temporary, too, because the residents were supposed to transition into French culture. When Salim asks his mother why she lived in this or that housing estate, she replies: “It just happened.” Yet the archives tell a different story.

This hunch was confirmed for Djaferi as his research progressed, particularly following a meeting with Janoé Vulbeau. The French social scientist is working on the history of social housing in Roubaix, where he has uncovered the rehousing mechanisms of the 1960s and 1970s. What he demonstrates is the existence of racial segregation at work in the allocation of accommodation, without it ever being explicitly stated as such. In Roubaix, slums are being cleared, people are being rehoused, but they’re also categorised. “Grades are assigned from A to D, based on distance from French culture. It’s a sleight of hand by the French state. We talk about culture, never about race.” summarises Djaferi in a few words.

The cité is everywhere

In Les Beaudottes, in the 1980s—the period when Djaferi was growing up—this process was already well advanced. “The level of segregation was very high.” Then came the ‘deconcentration’ policies, which continued to categorise people differently: by presumed nationality or by type of housing. “They’ll say that F5s [four-bedroom flats, Ed.] encourage social problems. It’s still about race, but in disguise.”

Even when you leave the cité, it doesn’t disappear. In Brussels, where he now lives, Djaferi observes different urban layouts: housing estates are often integrated into the fabric of the city, not cut off by motorways or expressways. “From an urban planning perspective, it’s much more posi-
tive.” But very quickly, his research takes him elsewhere. “I realised I couldn’t limit this to a question of architecture and urban planning.”

In the lower part of the Forest district, where he lived for a while, he met teenagers who did not live in the housing estate. Rather, in terraced houses, with façades similar to those in the more affluent neighbourhoods of Saint-Gilles, just a few streets away. A discussion ensued about police violence. “It was glaringly obvious that it was exactly the same phenomenon of stigmatisation, identity checks, and daily arrests,” says Djaferi. “These young people are going through the same thing as those in the housing estates: what’s at play here is racialisation.” Bâtir also stems from this realisation.

• Excerpts from an interview conducted by Sophie Soukias, published on 28 January 2026 in BRUZZ
• Translated by Jodie Hruby