Vive le village Community project turns Paris district into a party

It was a distinctly un-Parisian revolution although it began on an inner city street. No barricades were assembled to block the nearby boulevards and no radical students hurled cobblestones ripped from the pavement. Not a single monarch had their head chopped off.

- Peter Yeung

Instead, a 215-metre-long banquet table, lined with 648 chairs and laden with home-cooked produce, was set up along the Rue de l'Aude and those in attendance were urged to openly utter the most subversive of words: bonjour.

For some, that greeting led to the first meaningful exchange between neighbours. "I'd never seen anything like it before," said Benjamin Zhong, who runs a cafe in the area. "It felt like the street belonged to me, to all of us."

The revolutionaries pledged their allegiance that September day in 2017 to the self-styled République des Hyper Voisins, or Republic of Super Neighbours, a stretch of the 14th arrondissement on the Left Bank, encompassing roughly 50 streets and 15,000 residents. In the five years since, the republic - a "laboratory for social experimentation" - has attempted to address the shortcomings of modern city living, which can be transactional, fast-paced and lonely.

"The stereotype of a Parisian is brusque and unfriendly," said Patrick Bernard, who launched the project. "But city living doesn't have to be unpleasant and anonymous. We want to create the atmosphere of a village in an urban space."