A few construction barges still ply its peaceful waters, but café terraces, architect buildings and contemporary carriage houses have replaced the factories and workers that populated its dusty quays: north-east of Paris, the Canal de l’Ourcq is reinventing itself . .
Wanted by Napoleon to improve the capital’s drinking water supply, it then became the main axis of industrial transformation and the transport of wood and coal for the Parisian market, the 108 kilometer canal inaugurated in 1822 turns this year its bicentenary.
Damaged by the deindustrialization of Île-de-France, this once inhospitable space has been integrated into the city for twenty years to become, for the first time in its history, an authentic living place for residents. A particularly noticeable change on the side of the 19th arrondissement of Paris and the neighboring town of Pantin, in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Sitting in the shadow of Magasins Généraux de Pantin, colonial food storage warehouses converted into advertising agency headquarters, Dolores and Miguel Julia idly enjoy the passing of barges laden with sand or rubble. Hats on, watch families in strollers take in the air, watch cyclists and runners exercise.
Although they have lived in Pantin since the 1960s, this retired couple discovered the delights of the Canal de l’Ourcq only by looking at the brand new neighborhood, which has recently replaced the old industrial structures. Now they walk twice a day, as regulars, the new promenade in the port of Pantini.
“It’s our Promenade des Anglais!” laughs Dolores, an 82-year-old former pharmacy assistant. “We couldn’t come here before. It was dirt, there were no cobblestones.”
With its freshness and its trees in this extremely urbanized area, its cultural barges, its new buildings with regular architecture, whose apartments have been snatched by the Parisian plagues, the Canal de l’Ourcq has become the showcase of Pantin, the city that remains differently. deeply popular.
– Ancient No Man’s Land –
The emblematic flour mill of Grands Moulins, with its faux medieval appearance, has been converted into offices, housing the services of the BNP Paribas bank. An early 20th century furniture factory has been converted into housing, a theater has taken up residence in a brick shed on the north shore.
“When I was elected in 2001, the city turned its back on the canal. It was experienced more like a fracture. We turned the city into a canal,” Bertrand Kern, the mayor (SP) of Pantini, testifies to AFP. “You would have come on a Saturday twenty years ago to the canal quays, there weren’t many people. There is so much hustle and bustle today that I have to negotiate between bicycles and pedestrians.”
The sometimes heterogeneous rhythms of the canal’s surroundings indicate, however, that its passage is not yet complete. Here an industrial laundry spreads a strong smell of clean clothes on the quays, there a concrete factory operates. Under the pedestrian bridge of the T3 tram, a migrant camp has appeared in recent days.
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Further downstream, after the canal has passed under the ring tracks, the same process of urban transformation can be observed in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.
Do the picnickers on the lawns of La Villette know they stand on the site of the old “city of blood”? Until its conversion into a park in the 1980s, the site hosted for a century the large cattle markets and slaughterhouses that supplied Paris with fresh meat.
At the rue de Crimée lift bridge, small tourist boats wait to pass. Young people smoke joints while listening to rap, couples dance the tango on a dance floor set up for Operation Paris Plages.
The revival of the Canal de l’Ourcq, the 19th-century socialist mayor François Dagnaud, the date for its division in the mid-1990s and the “bet” of the MK2 cinema chain to open a room in a former hangar of designed. by Gustave Eiffel, in the middle of what was then a “no man’s land”.
“We were in the middle of a period when the crack was already present,” he told AFP. In a neighborhood in trouble, marginalized, not at all frequented by residents, it was the beginning of an urban, cultural and social mutation.
