On French assimilation and British multiculturalism

Reflections on 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe', Part Four

Part One: Europe’s absent-minded revolution
Part Two: Welcoming the stranger
Part Three: Leaving behind the history written in blood

Migrants often moved into run-down areas of European cities riddled with drugs and crime, and cleaned them up. In Kreuzberg in West Berlin, Turkish parents organised groups to get rid of the needles littering the pavements, helping to build increasingly safe neighbourhoods.

In Turin, novelist Younis Tawfik turned a crummy bath house into a beautiful Centre culturale Italo-arabo, with a restaurant, Turkish bath and interfaith library. In Bradford and Birmingham, local Pakistani families drove kerb crawlers and prostitutes off the streets by taking down car registrations.

Elsewhere, migrants moved into post-war public housing schemes built by utopian planners, and which the natives often shunned, such as Sweden’s ‘Million Program’. These ambitious socialist housing schemes - grands ensembles, as they were called in France - were influenced by the anti-human philosophy of Le Corbusier, and many turned out to be what French politician Pierre Cardo called architecture criminogene, almost perfectly designed to ferment lawbreaking and alienation.