Final Blogpost

Jon Phillips
December 15th, 2009
Hybrid Spaces and Identities in Paris and Elche
The “Les Olympiades” building in Paris, France and the home-based shoe manufacturing process taking place in Elche, Spain both blur the relatively solid border between work and home, place and geographical location (for example, city and building for Les Olympiades and factory and residential area in Elche), but more importantly dissolve the established concepts of identity in relation to these new, relatively undefined concepts.
The residents of Les Olympiades are, for the most part, political refugees from Southeast Asia who emigrated to Paris in the mid 1970s, and over time have taken over the building (among others) and transformed it into a new centralized hub of commerce and residence. What was previously a rundown low-rent building complex has now become a home and workplace for a group that defines its own cultural border by the grit and hard work of these Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and north African refugees.
Much in the same way, the community in Elche has defined its own cultural niche focused around the decentralized concept of a shoe factory, with the entire city being generally defined by its residents employment within the shoe-making industry. The article mentions one of the primary benefits and/or reasons for this change is because of womens reluctance to have to decide between choosing to be a homemaker and dealing with the domestic issues of the living space and having to become fully dedicated to a career.
As one of the employees stated, referring to this situation, “Well, when my first daughter was born, I worked at home and I kept the baby close to me. She did not sleep very well and cried very much. So, with one foot I moved the cradle and with the other foot I sewed...”. By doing this, the line is blurred between the home space and the work space, transforming the entire city, residential areas and the places of employment, into a borderless factory-state. Indeed, there is even an entire new layer of economy that springs from this arrangement, as the various workers-from-home need intermediaries (who work for a “percentage”) to carry the raw materials to and from their homes.
Ultimately, it is the sheer uniqueness of these locations which cause them to cause any sort of conflict of cultural boundaries or preconfigured ideas of border. If there were “cities in buildings” in every city, it would simply be considered a variation on the ubiquitous Chinatowns (including the preexisting one in Paris, Belleville). If there weren't laws in place to keep factory-work out of the home, surely many factory towns like Elche would spring up all over the globe. While these cities and groups of people challenge our concepts of borders and statehood, they only do so because of their uniqueness.