La Campagne à Paris

You are walking toward an unexpected oasis that sits atop a small, wooded hill in the twentieth arrondissement. What you see here was once an abandoned gypsum quarry, a jagged scar in the landscape that seemed unlikely to become a quiet residential sanctuary. In 1907, a Protestant pastor named Sully Lombard founded a cooperative with the radical goal of helping working-class families escape the crowded, stifling tenements of central Paris by owning their own homes on this reclaimed land.