Death of architect Roland Castro, activist for the “right to urbanity”

Roland Castro has always put his profession at the service of his political ideas. The French architect and urban planner, who died on Thursday March 9 at the age of 82, never ceased to forge links between the living environment and social justice, especially in the suburbs, where he is one of the pioneers of opening up .

A lifelong leftist, he owes his life to the Communist maquis of Limousin which protects his family, Jewish immigrant workers from Spain and Greece, during the Second World War. He was born in Limoges on October 16, 1940 and kept from his early years the idea that he had to pay “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. His journey is then a winding path, sometimes difficult to follow: Maoist, then socialist, again communist and finally macronist…

“Mao-Spontex”

In the 1970s, “I led an independent group, called Vive la Révolution, he told La Croix in 2005. We were called the ‘Mao-Spontex'”, a pejorative allusion to the cleansing power of sponge-scraper… “I don’t regret anything, even if I have the feeling that I said a lot of nonsense at the time”, explained this vivacious person, willingly using the slang of the Parisian titi.

“My job as an architect has surely been my way of implementing my convictions to give others the dignity they deserve. Especially in the suburbs and difficult neighborhoods. His “Banlieues 89” project, co-founded in 1983 with his friend the town planner Michel Cantal-Dupart, seduced François Mitterrand, who entrusted him with an interministerial mission on the question. From the boxes of the left, the idea, born in the 1920s, of a united Greater Paris, intended to break the “urban apartheid” of which the suburbs are victims, emerges.

More than 200 projects were submitted to Banlieues 89. But the operation came up against the financial reluctance of the government and the project was completed in 1991. It was also strongly criticized by the profession, which saw it as an “urbanism-gadget”. The architect Odile Decq, of whom Roland Castro was one of his teachers, said of him in Télérama, in 2017: “He did not build much, except more or less hazy theories. »

“With Greater Paris, the question of the suburbs disappears”

We still owe Roland Castro the renovation of the Cité de la Caravelle in Villeneuve-la-Garenne. He is also responsible for the vast Cité de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême and the Bourse du Travail in the city of Saint-Denis.

Roland Castro had created his own party, whose name seems to have been imagined by the facetious spirit of a Pierre Dac, the “Movement for Concrete Utopia”, with which he had launched himself in the presidential election of 2007, without collecting necessary sponsorships. He relaunched the idea of ​​Grand Paris.

He also participates in the ideas competition launched by Nicolas Sarkozy on this theme. “With Greater Paris, the question of the suburbs disappears,” he said in La Croix. This is an opportunity to put the republican state everywhere, to open up the cities, to embellish them. This is what the architect calls “the right to urbanity”. “This means that we live in decent housing, in a neighborhood to which we are proud to belong and that everything is networked. »

Roland Castro proposes a Grand Paris “in petals”, each relying on what he calls “events”, and connecting them by a mesh of concentric lines of transport. A track also retained. Like that of the densification of the city to fight against urban sprawl and the artificialization of the soil. For him, the city must be redesigned in height, while giving the feeling of lightness: the houses can be superimposed, the gardens placed in the air, the buildings completely vegetated…

Supporting Emmanuel Macron, he was entrusted with a vaporous and creative report on Greater Paris in 2018, in order to produce “a vision of the urbanity of tomorrow”, to “project himself into a sustainable, connected, attractive, and radiant”. With Roland Castro, the tomorrows often sang…

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