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At the beginning of the 60s, it was decided to build a new university on a former army ground in the middle of the shanty towns of Nanterre. The campus was conceived as a copy of the American universities: sports facilities in the center. Classrooms, administration, libraries, restaurants all around... If the gymnasium and the swimming pool remained, the outdoor playing fields quickly deteriorated up to their abandonment. Outside of the campus, shanty towns were destroyed, diverse equipments were built. But the university has never made root, it remains essentially a soilless cultivation. For proof, the wide zones lining the university perimeter are white on the maps. If we venture into these zones where float the ghosts of shanty towns, we meet highways, rails, industrial parks, playing fields, park by the Seine riverside and the prison... Nothing very hospitable, anything which invites to go out of the world protected from the university. |