Paris:- Wednesday, 5. March 1997:- The road comes in and loops around and goes back out the incoming way. In the 'neck' of this, some fellows are doing something with a van, in front of a house being renovated. Every time a car wants to leave the loop, they honk for the van to clear the way. The road is only six metres wide. The van moves into one side of the loop, and then returns to its former spot.

My problem isn't this van, it is the dirty white one, parked in the triangle between arms of the loop. It is not spring so the greenery is not in bloom and the sky is grey too, and I think it will wash the color out of the photo. But the dirty van is a stinker.

I try from in front of the bottleneck van, then from the sidewalk. I step back as far as I can go and still keep the van out of the picture. It is not good. Now a lady is coming along the right-hand 80 centimetre-wide sidewalk, popping in and out of view. I don't want to get her, so I wait. She is putting tracts into mailboxes.

As she arrives, the van is being honked at again. She talks to a man in a hurry and he goes back to get something. I ask her if she thinks I can get a history or a brochure from the Mairie.

She says, this madame, that she has documentation at her house and if I will wait until she's finished her delivery round, she'll give me some. The man in a hurry comes back, another car honks to leave; the van is moved, with grumbling this time.

Waiting, I look at the angle of houses from in front of the one being renovated. I think of asking if I can mount the scaffolding to get a good view, but do not do it.

Madame comes back and we go together into the left-hand of the loop, the rue Irénée-Blanc, and she stuffs a few mailboxes. The houses vary in details but are pretty much the same size, same height. They all have minuscule gardens in front; and one house stands out with its out-of-character mauve paint.

At Madame's house, she invites me in. Narrow entry, tile floor, door, and up narrow stairs and into a living room that runs from front to back. Monsieur, retired, is watching television, sitting in front of a ceiling-high space heater that is making heating noises.

They tell me about the small subdivision called 'La Campagne à Paris.'

Speculators, Walls and Quarries

Last fall, stories I was doing about certain Paris districts, kept popping up with the same cast of financiers and real-estate speculators - and I began to think there was a pattern to it.

It also made me think I should know more about life in Paris in the last century, and I am working on it. This is to find out about the causes that have effects, effects that are still seen all over Paris today.

A lot of this concerns the centre of the city. Long ago there were walls around it and the usual pattern was that when the inside was full, people would build outside, and then a wall would come down and be re-built further out. Each wall was in its way, a two-way barrier - there was generally a charge to pass through it. Farmers delivering foodstuffs to the city had to add the cost of the wall-toll to their prices, and workers were paid so poorly, that they had an economic interest in living within the walls. If they could afford it.

Starting around mid-century, Louis-Napoléon promoted the social idea of public health as a form of public benefit - and this health could be promoted through better living conditions.

The big-time downtown speculators and banks had no particular interest in this, as they had plenty of nouveau riche customers eager to buy status, and until the middle of the century little was done to create 'popular' housing. By then, social ideas were becoming current and some of these were executed - mostly in outlying arrondissements that had been annexed to the city in 1860.

In that year, eight new arrondissements were added, bringing the total up to that of today. Roughly speaking these were the outer ring, the 13th to the 20th; Reuilly, Gobelins, Vaugirard, Passy, the Butte-Montmartre, the Buttes-Chaumont and Ménilmontant. The wall of the Fermiers-Généreaux was knocked down and the limit was the Thiers wall - roughly where the Petite-Ceinture is today. Paris increased from 3,370 to 7,802 hectares and the population jumped by 800,000 between 1851 and 1864.

The earth underneath Paris is composed mostly of chalk, clay, gypsum and sand - with gypsum and sand being especially useful as building materials. For building Paris it was handy to have raw materials so close at hand, especially the famous 'plaster-of-Paris.'

Some of it was near the surface and it was taken out of open pits, and much more was taken from underground - to the extent that Paris' underground today is riddled with mining galleries. Sometimes the columns supporting these collapsed and whole houses were swallowed. At other times, various groups threatened to mine the columns and sink the whole city; and some of these galleries were used by both the resistance and the occupying forces in the last war, as bomb-shelters and as communications tunnels.

When the quarries were played out they were either turned into parks by Baron Haussmann - as at the Buttes-Chaumont - or they were used as dumps for the material extracted from the building of the métro tunnels.

The Country in Paris

One such dump, is the little-known 'Campagne à Paris,' near the Porte de Bagnolet, in the 20th arrondissement. This is where I am today

Most Paris maps do not show topography, but if you look closely you can see the symbol for stairs, and when you see this, expect them to be steep.

Right after coming out of the métro at the Porte de Bagnolet, the so-called 'rue' du Père Prosper-Enfantin, turned out to be 80 steep steps up. At first I looked up but after the 55th I looked straight ahead and concentrated on breathing, deeply. These stairs are of concrete, with a sort of a wood-grain to them - a little 'decor' for the eyes, but also non-slippery.

At the top, is the residential estate named 'La Campagne à Paris.' It is called this, because all of the 90-odd houses are single-family dwellings, and each has a small garden in front and a large garden in the rear. They are located on a six-metre wide street that loops around like the edge of a pork-chop. Most of it is named rue Irénée-Blanc and about a third of it is called rue Jules-Sigfried, and they were opened in 1911.

The idea was this: buy this useless quarry that was filled with excavation material from the métro tunnels and covered with acacias, for next-to-nothing and subdivide it into lots and sell them.

However, instead of the downtown speculators, a co-operative association was formed - with the purpose of selling the lots at the lowest price possible, and providing long-term low-interest financing for both land and building. The co-operative society was formed in 1907, under the leadership of Monsieur Orange, who arranged to buy the land for 10 francs the square metre from Monsieur Casel.

The initial shares were sold for 100 francs each - two weeks of a worker's salary - and 98 people bought the 250 shares. Just as they were ready to go ahead, Monsieur Orange died. After much back and forth with the various administrations and public finance institutions, the finance part was locked up in 1912; although the two roads had already been opened as had the access streets, all composed of stairs except for the entry-exit.

Two 'show' houses were built and 46 others were finished before the war broke out. The project recommenced after the war and the rest of the houses were completed and the whole subdivision was inaugurated 20. June 1926. Despite the large number of architects involved, the houses do not exceed a certain height limit, and since the lots are pretty much the same size, the whole effect is quite harmonious.

Compared to what you can see today in new subdivisions - all outside of Paris - the Campagne à Paris looks like a bijou of modest paradise.

One Franc for Half a Street

This living room I am in, is in one of the 'show' houses I believe Madame tells me. Her grandfather bought it new and the rent-to-own payments were completed in 1951. The booklet she has given me mentions another address as one of the 'show' houses, but a photo from the period shows three houses, two together and one standing alone. A second photo shows a construction crew in front of her - this - house, and if the adjoining house is in fact the 'show' house, this one was built not long after it.

The front living-room window, on the second floor, looks across 13 metres to the second floor windows of the house opposite. The back living-room window looks out at the sixth floor windows of an apartment building across the way, and down into a garden many floors below.

Unusual for the time, but in keeping with the idea of 'proper' lodging, each house was built with running water, toilets and bathrooms - which worker's residences rarely had.

While Madame is making café, Monsieur and I discuss the relative merits of Munich and Vienna and when she returns we have a lot of fun with me trying to guess how much Mayor Chirac paid to buy their section of the street in front, in 1991. The answer: one symbolic franc.

Before then, it was a private road, and every resident had the right to park one car in it. Now the city of Paris takes care of everything on it and under it - but anybody is allowed to park there, and it seems as if a good number of yuppies have chosen it as an ideal place to leave their BMWs during the daytime.

The cars are annoying but they can only park on one side of the re-cobbled road, and have to switch sides every two weeks to allow for proper cleaning.

It is pretty cool, this modest Campagne à Paris, on its modest plateau with fair views and gentle breezes. There are no shops of any sort, nor are any dentist's cabinets allowed; these are down the stairs and half a block away.

The Campagne à Paris is what progressives thought worker's housing should be like, before WWI. Low cost, low density and after a period of time, lots of greenery and flowers. In Paris there are other examples of similar projects, although they are rare. Others I have seen within the city are equally pleasant; little oasis' of calm and human dimensions, and truly attractive.

In the near suburbs, just beyond the city - known as the 'red belt' - there must also be some similar neighborhoods; but from what I've seen, they are extremely rare. The houses are individual, but the couple I've been in, had their bathrooms added after the Second War. Modern tract houses, far from the city, and mostly too expensive for workers - all look like they were designed by one architect with one cut-and-paste plan, and the materials using for building them look generic and basically resemble cardboard.

I mean, if you live in one of these places, do you really think your grand-daughter will like living in the same house? Yet in Paris, at La Campagne à Paris, which are not palaces by any measure, generations of the same family have been living happily in these houses built expressly for modest aspirations.

Again, like a lot of 'sights' in Paris, there is no entry charge and be sure to bring a camera if you want postcards because there are none on sale. At métro Porte de Bagnolet, take the exit for boulevard Mortier, turn left and look for a street with 80 steps.