The project of a social housing museum in Saint-Denis, carried since 2014 by the Association for a Museum of Popular Housing (AMULOP), aims to document and enhance the history of the popular districts of North Paris through an immersive and in situ approach. The stated objective is to reconstruct in vacant apartments the life of the inhabitants of large complexes, highlighting the phenomena of migration, deindustrialization and social cohabitations within the HLM park since the end of the 19th century.
Since 2023, the initiative has benefited from reinforced support from the Seine-Saint-Denis department, which has committed to accompanying the search for a lasting place in Saint-Denis or Aubervilliers. Several stages have marked out the development of the project: implementation of multidisciplinary surveys on popular housing, signing of objectives agreements with local authorities, and, above all, life-size experiment during the exhibition “LA VIE HLM” organized in 2021-2022 at the Cité Émile-Dubois in Aubervilliers.
This exhibition, designed as a prefiguration of the future museum, proposed the reconstruction of several interiors of different decades from testimonies, archives, everyday objects and iconographic documents collected from residents. “It was a big public success. We had 6,000 visitors over the year, by guided tours of 12 people. It was a lot of school audiences in Aubervilliers, 93, and also Paris and even a little nationwide ”reports a researcher involved in the project. The team had benefited from easy access to dwellings promised to demolition, which allowed a temporary establishment and an immersive scenography, based on the confrontation of family micro-history and contemporary urban issues.
Amulop mobilizes researchers, teachers, archivists, mediation professionals, in particular from the territory and institutional partners, including the city of Aubervilliers, the Department and the Center for Social History of Contemporary Worlds. The inhabitant participation is central, whether it is the collection of objects for the collection or co-construction of visit courses.
The history of social housing in France, and specifically in Saint-Denis, structures the museum line of the project. The multiplication of homes at cheap from the 1920s, followed by the strong housing construction of the HLM during the Thirty Glorious Years, led to the constitution of large sets which today symbolize the mix, precariousness and the history of internal and international mix. On the scientific level, the AMULOP project targets in particular “ordinary” habitat, in order to deconstruct the stereotypes linked to popular suburbs and to patrimonialize a long invisible pan of urban history.
Several obstacles remain: need to preserve the intimacy of current residents during the rehabilitation of occupied housing and vigilance with regard to gentrification effects linked to the heritage of the premises. On the financial aspect, the model would be based on public subsidies, institutional participation and patronage, with the aim of not weighing the charges on social landlords and the inhabitants.
The project is inspired by other comparable international experiences, such as the New York Museum Telement which offers guided tours of reconstituted apartments and community co-mediation.
