In Aubervilliers, an association hopes to create a popular housing museum

The experiment which ends this weekend in Aubervilliers will have lasted almost ten months. Since October, the Amulop (Association for a museum of popular housing) has taken over several apartments in the Emile Dubois housing estate and presented an exhibition there in the form of a collective portrait of the inhabitants of this block of building erected in the 1950s.

Amulop brings together a certain number of history teachers working in Seine-St-Denis or more widely in the Parisian suburbs. Diane Chamboduc is the vice-president: “We found that when we presented the history of France to our students as it is covered in school curricula, they rarely made the connection with their own history. We wanted to show them that they are fully part of it“. Many of these teachers also do research, which led them to a second observation, explains Diane: “The work currently done on the French suburbs of the 20th century is not always transcribed in textbooks, nor in political speeches or in the media. We wanted to show a richer reality than what is often presented schematically“.

Reconstructed family paths

To achieve this, the members of the association have reconstructed the journey of four families who have lived here. It is told in period furnished apartments. The first example is that of the Croisilles who lived in Cité Emile Dubois from 1957 to 2012, the father being a worker at the Baccarat factory, near the Gare de l’Est. For them, moving into a fifty-square-meter apartment with a bathroom and a kitchen was real progress. Nicole, one of the last visitors, recognizes herself in this portrait. She has not lived in Aubervilliers for fifty years but it is here that her parents settled when she was a child. “For us it was a castle“, she confides.

Even today, better living conditions

For the Soukouna, of Malian origin, the arrival at Emile Dubois at the end of the 90s was also a mark of social ascent, they who had until then lived in hotels or in squats. The visit of the last apartment allows us to retrace their journey. “Access to an HLM is access to a certain comfort, the possibility of educating your children in a stable way, of receiving your friends, etc. explains Diane Chamboduc. Social housing is much decried today, it is associated with problems such as unemployment, delinquency and drugs and yet even today, for low-income families, it provides better living conditions, even if sometimes renovations are needed. It is this complexity that we wanted to illustrate“.

The exhibition “La vie HLM” was seen by more than 5,000 visitors. It closes its doors this weekend but the Amulop hopes to transform the test. It is currently looking for premises to house its future museum. She received the support of the department of Seine-St-Denis.