In
France, a
banlieue is a
suburb of a large
city. Banlieues are divided into autonomous administrative entities and do not constitute part of the
city proper. For instance, 80% of the inhabitants of the
Paris area live outside the city of
Paris. Like the city centre, suburbs may be rich, middle-class or poor—
Versailles,
Le Vésinet,
Maisons-Laffitte and
Neuilly-sur-Seine are affluent banlieues of
Paris, while
Clichy-sous-Bois,
Bondy and
Corbeil-Essonnes are poor ones. However, since the 1970s, the phrase
les banlieues has been increasingly used in
European French to describe suburban low-income housing projects (HLMs) in which mainly
foreign immigrants and French of foreign descent reside, often in perceived
poverty traps.