The town planner is notably at the origin of the Labor Exchange in Saint-Denis or the international city of comics in Angoulême.
The Labor Exchange in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), it’s him. The International City of Comics in Angoulême (Charente) too. The famous architect Roland Castro died at the age of 82. “He died peacefully very surrounded by the family in a Parisian hospital”, said his daughter Elisabeth Castro to AFP on Friday March 10.
The architect, who wanted “remodel” the concrete cities of large cities, has never ceased to highlight the link between town planning and social ties, wishing to “convince his fellow citizens and those who represent them that the suburbs are not a catch-all for the excluded from society”.
A “Legend of Architecture”
On Twitter, Emmanuel Macron salutes the memory of a “Ilegend of architecture and town planning”. “He leaves an indelible mark on our urban landscape. To the citizens, an inspiration”writes the President of the Republic. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, pays tribute to “A warm friend”, “this talented, visionary, audacious architect”.
Born in 1940 in Limoges, a few weeks after General de Gaulle’s call on the BBC, Roland Castro lives his first years in the Limousin hinterland, in one of the first maquis of the resistance. Of these four years, he will keep the idea that he must fulfill“a debt of existence to France”.
After entering the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1958, he carried suitcases for the Algerian FLN, before joining the Union of Communist Students. He will end up embracing Maoism and the revolutionary struggle, a banner under which he will militate in May 68.
In 1983, he co-founded “Banlieues 89” with his friend, the town planner Michel Cantal-Dupart. The initiative goes back to François Mitterrand, who entrusts an interministerial mission to Roland Castro. More than 200 projects are submitted to Banlieues 89. But the operation is confronted with the financial reluctance of the government and Banlieues 89 disappears in 1991.
Sometimes Mitterrandien, sometimes supporter of the PCF and more recently of Emmanuel Macron, Roland Castro had created his own party, the “Movement for Concrete Utopia”, with which he had launched into the presidential election of 2007, without collecting sponsorships required.