The hidden side of politics

Spellbinding Photos of the World’s Most Boring Neighborhoods

Reported by WIRED:

Photographer Marc Vidal grew up in the 1980s in a leafy suburb of the French city of Lille. He remembers an idyllic childhood spent playing soccer and other games with the neighborhood kids, many of whom would become lifelong friends. So Vidal was dismayed when he returned a few years ago to find the neighborhood almost unrecognizable. The houses and streets looked the same, but something was missing: people.

“I met nobody—now it’s just an area where people go to sleep and eat,” he says. “There was a lot of life in the ’80s, but that’s all over. Now there are no children, just a few people walking their dogs.”

Vidal began documenting this suburban malaise with his camera, capturing images of neatly manicured lawns, carefully tended ivy, and picture-postcard ranch-style homes. Although signs of human activity were there, humans weren’t; Lille had become an antiseptic world barren of feeling or context, like the all-too-perfect set in The Truman Show. As Vidal explored other suburbs, he found much the same uniformity.

In one suburb, the streets were named after famous artists: Allée Raphael, Rue Michel-Ange. Vidal saw this as a futile attempt to breathe life into an otherwise airless neighborhood. “Perhaps it’s to inject some magic feelings,” he speculates. And except for a distinctively European-looking car in one of the shots, there is little to suggest they were taken in France; they could just as easily have been shot in a suburb of Manchester or Chicago. “The area is just a succession of similar houses,” Vidal says. “There’s no history.”

But what most disturbs Vidal is the isolation and social anomie he sensed as he explored these suburbs—a far cry from the vibrant neighborhood spirit he remembers from his childhood.

“I think people are looking for a pragmatic situation near their job,” he says. “They just want their house with all of the modern conveniences. There are nice houses, you have all the comforts. But you don’t have a relationship with your neighbors.”

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Source:WIRED

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