“We are looking for a territory emblematic of the great socio-economic transformations of popular suburbs during the 20th century”detailed Diane Chamboduc, history-geography teacher and vice-president of the Association for a popular housing museum (Amulop).
This association, which brings together around fifteen teachers, researchers and archivists, mostly from Seine-Saint-Denis, promotes the museum project to tell history through the experiences of the inhabitants of the suburbs. The approximately 5,700 people who have come over the past nine months to visit the exhibition in the Emile-Dubois housing estate in Aubervilliers – between show homes, documentary wealth and family stories – encourages him to continue.
Next step: finding a suitable place to house a permanent museum, by 2024-2028. The association calls on landlords, public housing offices and public authorities to unearth the rare pearl. “A relatively old building, at the turn of the 19th-20th century” ideally, for “historical depth”and served by public transport to facilitate its tourist influence, said Diane Chamboduc.
Its industrial and working-class past, its population “made up of different waves of migration”, its major urban changes but also the “great socio-economic fragility of part of its population” font of Seine-Saint-Denis “the ideal territory to tell the social history of the Parisian suburbs”assures the Amulop.
The future museum wants to embody the life paths of the inhabitants “in a participatory approach”, diverging in this from the examples of the Cité radieuse in Marseille or the Familistère de Guise (Aisne), to get closer to the model of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East. Side of New York. “I want this first French museum to be in Seine-Saint-Denis”said Stéphane Troussel, president (PS) of the departmental council, who himself grew up in towers.
“It is French specificity to have social housing as an element of the common heritage, in particular for those who precisely have no heritage”, he insisted, reaffirming the financial support for the association. The museum will tell “a history of France certainly, but also a universal history” and especially “proud to be here”far from clichés, pointed out Emmanuel Bellanger, director of the Center for Social History of Contemporary Worlds, associated with the project.