France: death of Roland Castro, militant architect against the "apartheid" of the cities

Photo taken on July 26, 1983, Roland Castro and François Mitterrand visit the new building of the Saint-Denis Stock Exchange.

AFP - PIERRE GUILLAUD

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Architect and urban planner famous for his social and political commitment, co-founder of the Banlieues 89 collective, he has worked to rethink large housing estates and improve housing in working-class neighborhoods.

He had been charged in 2018, by Emmanuel Macron, with a mission of reflection on Greater Paris.

It was his daughter Elisabeth Castro who announced his death at the age of 82, which occurred on Thursday March 9 in a Parisian hospital.

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We owe him the Labor Exchange of Saint-Denis or the international city of comics in Angoulême, but also the Cité de la Caravelle in Villeneuve-la-Garenne.

Born in Limoges on October 16, 1940, of Jewish parents, Roland Castro devoted his life to improving housing estates in large cities and particularly cheap housing.

A man of the left, a figure of May 68, Roland Castro never ceased to use architecture to materialize his political ideas.

Giving everyone decent housing was one of them.

The city of comics in Angoulême.

Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images - Marc DEVILLE

Visually, Roland Castro's projects often appear as additions to existing constructions with asymmetrical lines, combining wood with concrete, favoring white, with plant facades.

In

he said he had no regrets, but had " 

", aware that for some, he could be perceived as "

”.

suburban architect

In the 1970s, he won his first architectural competitions.

But it was in the 1980s that he managed to push his political ideas with Banlieues 89, founded with his urban planner friend Michel Cantal-Dupart.

François Mitterrand, enthusiastic about his ideas and projects, entrusted him with an interministerial mission.

This experience gives him a strong notoriety and highlights his fight for the suburbs which cannot, according to him, be "

 ".

But he also leaves, for this reason, the list of architects to whom we entrust more classic projects. 

François Mitterrand at the Banlieues 89 Congress with the architect Roland Castro, on December 4, 1990 in France.

Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images - Gilles BASSIGNAC

Victim of the financial reluctance of the government of the time, the Banlieues 89 collective disappeared in 1991.

In the 90s, he renovated the Caravelle, an emblematic district of the city of Villeneuve-la-Garenne which led to the opening of the 400-meter-long bar by cross streets. 

The architect Roland Castro walks in the Caravelle district, on February 3, 2006 in Villeneuve-la-Garenne.

AFP - JACQUES DEMARTHON

One of his main concerns was to make the constructions less rigid, aggressive and heavy, trying if possible to let some view of the sky pass. 

Throughout his life, politics and architecture were intertwined.

Sometimes Mitterrandian, sometimes a supporter of the PCF and Robert Hue, Roland Castro - who carried suitcases for the Algerian FLN - created his own party in 2004, the Movement for Concrete Utopia, a label under which this bulimic who wanted to revolutionize everything launched in the 2007 presidential election. 

In 2020, in Aubervilliers, the Emblématik tower, a 54-meter building with 88 apartments, designed as a vertical village, is inaugurated.

The project gives pride of place to the hanging gardens, present on all four floors: another hobby of Roland Castro who, from the Beaux-Arts, was passionate about the garden cities of the 1950s.

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