Making the Temporary Become Chronic: The Transit City

When the French authorities resolved to dismantle the Parisian bidoville, the new dispositif they resorted to was that of transit cities, a programmatically provisional solution that still today, however, awaits to be completely overcome. In Nanterre, for example, the definitive reconversion of the cité des Potagers into a district of rent-controlled housing will only be completed in 2025, but in the meantime the entire history of these complexes will have resulted in the chronicisation of an “unfinished urbanity”, as Abdelmalek Sayad defined it, determined on the border between the dimension of the temporary and the more implicit one of the class, gender and race hierarchies that the reference to the temporary allows to eternalise.