He even had a go at re-drawing the city plan. To Debord, “The lessons drawn from dérives enables us to draft the first surveys of the psycho-geographical articulations of the modern city”. So off they went down back streets and through deserted parks, clambering over walls to see what they could discover. He and his comrades invented the dérive as an antidote to the commercialisation of the city.Ī dérive could involve breaking into a derelict building, exploring an abandoned hospital or wandering through Père Lachaise cemetery. Guy Debord, their leader and prophet, was drawn to the remnant spaces of Paris. While they failed to make a breakthrough in 1968, their ideas outlived them.
#ABANDONED RAILWAY WASTELAND 2 TV#
The Situationists recognised we were in thrall to the spectacle of mass media, and tried to convince us to stop living vicariously through TV celebrities and films from Hollywood. The Situationist International promised a revolution of everyday life: the last great, imaginative attempt to find an alternative to consumer capitalism. At exactly that moment, a movement emerged from the hype and slogans of May ‘68. Since then much of it has lain unused and overgrown. The development of new Métro lines put paid to that second life: the Petite Ceinture stopped carrying passengers in 1934, and by 1969 it was hors service. The line switched to passengers instead, and by the turn of the 20th century its trains circled the city several times an hour. It soon carried 750,000 tons of freight each year, but as Paris expanded, lines radiating from the great railway termini grew busier while traffic on the circumferential Petite Ceinture fell away. La Petite Ceinture stretched for 35 kilometres and was built in time for the 1867 World’s Fair. Today its abandoned tracks run along a backdrop of graffiti, construction sites and industrial wastelands. The city’s transport system and green spaces come together and clash where a railway known as La Petite Ceinture, or Little Belt, encircles the city centre. Its continued density makes places like Louveciennes precious and the railway network vital. Europe’s population has grown inexorably, yet city density tended to decrease during the 19th and 20th centuries once railways, trams and finally private cars enabled people to commute from the outskirts. Paris is twice as dense as New York and five times denser than Berlin or Edinburgh. There are over 20,000 Parisians per square kilometre. Later, as the day’s heat dissipated, I wandered along the riverbank to sit under the trees beside the Machine de Marly. I stayed at Louveciennes, a five minute walk from the point where Sisley painted the Seine, and explored the city using the RER system of suburban railways. In July 2018, the Île-de-France was also in the grip of a canicule and temperatures reached the high thirties. Covid wasn’t even a gleam in an epidemiologist’s eye and the gilets jaunes hadn’t got into their stride – but it was the 50th anniversary of the événements of May 1968, protests which for a brief moment promised to upend French society. It turns out that 2018 was a good time to visit Paris. Leading the way is the city of Paris with La Petite Ceinture, a circular railway that is being brought back to life as the world’s longest urban park. Disused urban railways have long been obvious candidates for bike paths but a new generation of projects inspired by the success of the High Line in Manhattan are taking the idea up a level by incorporating urban farms and linear parks.
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