One morning in April 2016, 27 private security agents arrived on the grounds of a rundown warehouse in Vitry-sur-Seine, a Parisian suburb, to evict the 29 people living there. All of them were Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity. The agents came with three dogs and no judicial mandate.<\/p>\n
Daniel, a 25-year-old migrant, his wife, and their baby were among the residents who were told to leave the premises immediately.<\/p>\n
The warehouse was a 20-minute walk from the centre of Vitry, and the site of a train\u00a0stop on the future line 15 of the Parisian metro. Vitry is just one of 45 towns that will be served by the Grand Paris Express, the first metro line connecting all Parisian suburbs. The southern branch, where Vitry is located, is\u00a0expected<\/a>\u00a0to be the first to open, at the end of 2025.<\/p>\n The warehouse belonged to real estate firm SCI Aten, whose owner had filed a request for the residents\u2019 expulsion a week earlier. The court hearing was pushed to May, and the owner took matters into his own hands to remove the squatters. Before then, Daniel and his family had already been evacuated twice \u2013 in October and January 2015 \u2013\u00a0to make way<\/a>\u00a0for the metro line 15.<\/p>\n The case of Daniel, who requested to change his name for security reasons, is not an exception. In \u00cele-de-France, the greater Paris region, the past decade has seen an increase in expulsions with the rapid urban expansion transforming the landscape. According to the Defenseur des Droits, the French constitutional human rights body, Roma communities living in slums and squats are disproportionately threatened by the construction. Experts and activists say that the Grand Paris Express, a 40-billion-euro infrastructure project, exacerbates the social exclusion of people living in shanty towns around Paris. An investigation of nearly 50 evictions of Roma families in the southern suburb of Val-de-Marne revealed that the pattern of expulsions matches urban development and transport projects of Grand Paris Express, notably along metro line 15.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Grand Paris Express is a project that develops with the construction of new train stops, but also with real estate speculation,\u201d said sociologist Anne-C\u00e9cile Caseau, who wrote a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on Roma people\u2019s access to adequate housing in Europe.<\/p>\n \u201cMarginal spaces are seen as potentially attractive in the future, and that puts pressure on the near and far suburbs [of Paris]. This pressure turns terrains that are vacant and forgotten into lucrative investments. So there are more expulsions from these terrains,\u201d explained Caseau. \u201cThis ceaselessly pushes people farther. Evicted people are then displaced towards terrains which are densely polluted or significantly farther away [from the city],\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The cycle of eviction creates lapses in administrative support, employment, education, and medical services.<\/p>\n Large\u00a0bidonvilles,\u00a0<\/em>or slums, started cropping up around France in the 1930s, largely populated by Spanish, Portuguese and Italian workers. By the end of the 1970s, slum living was mostly\u00a0eradicated<\/a>\u00a0in metropolitan France. The vast social housing programs developed over the \u201870s facilitated the relocation of these populations into permanent homes. But as new waves of migrant workers, from Eastern European and African countries, came in the late 1990s, they were relegated to improvised living conditions in\u00a0bidonvilles<\/em>,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to the Abbe Pierre Foundation. Today, city halls and regional administrations are still evicting people living in slums, offering them few alternatives afterwards.<\/p>\n Like many slum residents, Daniel wished to integrate into French society. By 2015, he had already been living in France for seven years. He worked as a metal scrap seller and construction worker. Moving from one slum to another for nearly a decade, each time having to start over.<\/p>\n In a police report filed two months after the eviction from the Vitry warehouse, Daniel recalled the security agents grabbing women and pushing children out into the street, including a crying baby in a stroller. Daniel demanded they be let in to collect their belongings, but the agents blocked the entrance.<\/p>\n Their official documents, 600 euros in cash, car keys, clothes, silver jewellery, and other personal belongings were inside the building. After leaving in a hurry, Daniel returned hours later to try to retrieve the items, only to watch the security agents put them into a dumpster.<\/p>\n Chantier station, Mairie de Vitry-sur-Seine metro, Paris, France. Image via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the poorer suburbs in the North, East and South of Paris, near former warehouses, train tracks, and the Seine riverbanks, communities of Roma people from Eastern Europe have settled since the 1990s.<\/p>\n Roma people are Europe\u2019s largest minority<\/a>\u00a0and have origins on the Indian subcontinent. A historically marginalised group, Roma people are confronted with high levels of housing, education, and employment discrimination in France and the rest of Europe. According to the National Consultative Commission of Human Rights of France (CNCDH), Roma people are among\u00a0the most stigmatised minorities<\/a>\u00a0in the country.<\/p>\n According to official data from 2021, there are over 430 shanty towns across metropolitan France, with over 22,000 people living there; half are European citizens, mainly from Romania and Bulgaria. While French census data is not broken down by ethnicity, the EU citizens living in shanty towns are largely understood by associations, authorities and researchers to be people of Roma ethnicity.<\/p>\n The\u00a0social exclusion<\/a>\u00a0caused by urban development projects has been\u00a0well documented<\/a>\u00a0in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department to the north of Paris, which has the highest rate of people living in poverty in metropolitan France. The research shows that social inclusion projects suffer from \u201cinstitutional inertia and contradictory policy goals\u201d and that the most vulnerable populations are directly impacted by urban development.<\/p>\n Constructions related to the 2024 Olympics have also\u00a0accelerated<\/a>\u00a0this process for migrants and Roma living in informal housing (squats in abandoned buildings, slums, makeshift shacks, etc.). In April 2024, riot police squads\u00a0evicted<\/a>\u00a0the biggest squat in France, located in the south of Paris, and housing over 400 people of African origins, many of whom had refugee status. Half of those evicted in April had come there after a previous eviction from a squat near the Olympic Village in the French capital\u2019s northern suburbs.<\/p>\n Le Revers de la Medaille Collective estimates that the number of evicted people\u00a0increased by 38.5 per cent<\/a>\u00a0from one year to the other in the areas of Olympic sites. In its June 2024\u00a0report<\/a>, the collective says that Paris and \u00cele-de-France authorities have led \u201cone year of social cleansing\u201d of \u201cundesirable\u201d people in preparation for the event and its spectators.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the Olympic Games (\u2026) that\u2019s just one other pretext for pushing out people,\u201d said Aline Poupel, president of Romeurope Val-de-Marne and a psychologist, who has worked with Roma communities in the area since the 1990s. \u201cAs soon as there\u2019s been the start of a Grand Paris Express project, that brings evictions (\u2026) especially around line 15. That line is going to pass everywhere, all the places where the Roma lived more than two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n In the 2010s, following the eastward expansion of the EU, the number of inhabitants in\u00a0bidonvilles\u00a0<\/em>surged. Around then, France started deploying aggressive campaigns of slum dismantlement, which included expelling EU citizens by taking Roma families to the nearest border and putting them on charter flights to Romania.<\/p>\n Around the same time, the greater Paris region was lit up with the promise of urban renewal, economic prosperity, and increased connectivity for suburban residents. The Grand Paris Express, Europe\u2019s \u201cbiggest infrastructure project<\/a>\u201d, was announced in 2012, and it aims to double the size of Paris\u2019 metro system on a rollout schedule for 2024-2035.<\/p>\n Since 2014, Aline Poupel has kept files detailing expulsions in Val-de-Marne. The folders contain hundreds of pages of printed biographical data, such as emails, legal correspondence, court eviction orders, and censuses of the slum inhabitants. From these documents, we mapped out where evictions occurred in the southeast of the Parisian region, the number of people affected, and who demanded the court-ordered expulsions.<\/p>\n While most of the files included expulsion orders, some did not. This is not uncommon: the Observatory of the Expulsion of Informal Housing (OEIH) found that 26 per cent of eviction cases between October 2022 and November 2023 occurred without a legal basis. These are still carried out by law enforcement, and only in exceptional cases, like Daniel\u2019s, private agents are hired by owners for an extrajudicial eviction.<\/p>\n A lawful eviction is not a mere deployment of police forces to a slum; it needs to be requested by a public or private actor in a court of law, which can then decide whether to issue an eviction order.<\/p>\n Our investigation reveals that, over the past decade, expulsions have persisted also to the South of the French capital, in a pattern that matches the Grand Paris Express construction sites. Our survey of the nearly 50 evictions in the Val-de-Marne department between 2014 and 2024 shows that 15 evictions from this period occurred one kilometre or less away from the trace of the southern branch of the future line 15 and the Southern expansion of line 14. One other evicted site is on the eastern section of line 15.<\/p>\n Seven other evictions occurred between one and two kilometres away from Grand Paris lines.<\/p>\n Note: for practical reasons this is a screenshot \u2013 Please<\/em>\u00a0consult the\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>map here<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Most of the expulsions were in state-run or state-owned structures, several of which are directly linked to the Grand Paris projects, such as the national railway company SNCF, Grand Paris Am\u00e9nagement, or DRIEA, the public agency tasked with studying the development of the neighbourhoods around Grand Paris Express train stops.<\/p>\nDecades of evictions<\/h2>\n
Olympic village over homes<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nEvictions trace future metro lines<\/h2>\n
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