Making the Temporary Become Chronic: The Transit City

When the French authorities resolved to dismantle the Parisian bidoville, the new dispositif they resorted to was that of transit cities, a programmatically provisional solution that still today, however, awaits to be com￾pletely overcome. In Nanterre, for example, the definitive reconversion of the cité des Potagers into a district of rent-controlled housing will only be completed in 2025, but in the meantime the entire history of these complexes will have resulted in the chronici￾sation of an “unfinished urbanity”, as Abdel￾malek Sayad defined it, determined on the border between the dimension of the tempo￾rary and the more implicit one of the class, gender and race hierarchies that the reference to the temporary allows to eternalise.