Friedrich --

The British doctor who writes under the names Theodore Dalrymple and Anthony Daniels is one of the best essayists since George Orwell. City Journal runs a new piece by him on the way crime is on the upsurge in Paris, here. Dalrymple doesn't avoid discussing the aesthetics of the Le Corbusier-inspired housing projects where most of the criminals live.

Sample passage:

The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris.

Best,

Michael