In 1961, American critic Jane Jacobs wrote of cities with “amputated areas” that “develop galloping gangrene”, and of housing projects that were contributing to the death of US cities.

In France, as elsewhere, these places were built as oases of green, Le Corbusier’s famous streets in the sky, the diametric opposite of the tight lanes and lightless slums from whence the working class emerged blinking into the light of social policy.