Chinatown - Neighborhood - Paris

You are walking through a neighborhood that owes its existence to a failed urban planning project. In the late nineteen sixties, the French government launched a massive development scheme known as Italie Treize, which aimed to line this corner of Paris with high-rise apartment towers for young professionals. When those professionals refused to move into what they considered to be cold and unattractive concrete buildings, the project stalled. The gap was filled in the late nineteen seventies by thousands of refugees fleeing the wars and political upheavals in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Many of these families were of ethnic Chinese descent, and they saw these empty, modern high-rises as an affordable place to build new lives. By occupying these unwanted towers, they transformed what was meant to be a sterile urban experiment into one of the largest and most vibrant Asian communities in Europe.