Adding Fuel to the Fire.(World Affairs)(social unrest; car fires)

Byline: Tracy McNicoll

Thousands of vehicles are set ablaze each year in France. Blame the urban planners -- and the media.

The spark was a collision between a motorbike and a police car in a neighborhood north of Paris. Two teenagers died, and for days afterward the world once again turned its gaze upon France's troubled suburbs. Two nights of intense rioting left 119 police officers injured, and two schools and a library in flames. The images called to mind the 2005 riots, which spread to 300 neighborhoods across France over three weeks. Yet despite reports from some of the foreign press that the riots were raging for a third night, a police-union spokesman explained that only 138 cars had burned that night. And that, he said, is normal.

Car fires are among the most enduring symbols of urban unrest in France, yet torchings are routine in some parts of the country. Last year some 44,000 vehicles were set ablaze, compared with half that figure in the United States. What explains this strange phenomenon? As far back as the late '70s joyriders in the rougher suburbs torched their stolen rides after they were done with them. Elsewhere it's part of festivities. The first morning of 2007 revealed 396 smoking wrecks nationwide, and the offense is so common that when the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced the figures, he boasted there were "no notable incidents."

But intriguingly, the burning car is also a clue to understanding the dynamics of France's more troubled banlieues -- and how best to change them. When the housing projects were conceived in the 1960s, they were utopian marvels meant to encourage docility, says Jacques Donzelot, a sociologist at the University of Paris X-Nanterre who specializes in urban planning. To an extent greater than anywhere else in Europe, they followed the ideology of Le Corbusier's 1943 Athens Charter, which argued that housing, commerce and industry ought to be compartmentalized into separate zones linked by highways.

Housing was placed far from the cities, and new cities were built in fields far from old city centers. Everyone had work, and transport was an afterthought -- there was busing to the factories.

At first, different classes mixed in the projects. But middle-class families left once they had saved enough for a house with a garden. Laborers soon followed, and immigrant families were invited to fill the large empty apartments. But then work dried up. "People needed initiative, had to go get the jobs," says Donzelot. "It was no longer ...