The changes that South Asian citizens enacted in the “Les Olympiades” building in Paris and the development of a clandestine shoe manufacturing industry in Elche, Spain, allows the respective parties to condense their economic and domestic activities into convenient spaces for themselves. They save time and allow for both parties to preserve more of their identity while making money. The residents of Les Olympiades seem to be a more tight-knit community, and more self sufficient. The housewives of Elche, Spain, are more apt to be exploited. It is interesting that a government space in Paris can be appropriated by South Asian immigrants, and the women of Elche have no such network, because the shoe companies keep the women separate. It is harder for them to negotiate wages and such when they never see or acknowledge their co-workers.
Y. Dubalin writes about the physical advantages a space like Les Olympiades lends to immigrants, saying “The great public and economic building complexes, often without services and intended to follow a rigid hierarchical functionality, find an unexpected redemption in the subverted functionality generated by the community of new inhabitants.” An immigrant living in Les Olympiades talks about the support system and the idea that he likes the physical space he lives in, as well as the city that contains it: “You can never imagine leaving at all. My restaurant is on the inside of the Dalle, but it would be better to work…on the outer part because there’s more movement. I think that I will stay here my whole life, because my sons and their families live here and I like France and French people.”
Where South Asians have utilized a huge space to fit their economic, religious, and social needs, shoe corporations in Elche have utilized women’s homes to fit their economic needs, as pointed out by Multiplicity: “The successive phases of a virtual production line are physically displaced and separated from the unique container of the factory, reappearing and recomposed as a plethora of residential locations.”
There is something inventive and refreshing about Paris’ vertical city that calls to mind an organism functioning for all its respective parts and workers, instead of for just one corporation. It is convenient that women and children in Elche can work from home, but it is a convenience that comes with a disconnection from fellow workers, and does not allow for economic advancement. The vertical city actually allows for vertical mobility; there is even the taxi driver who saves money and gets a loan from a friend to open a restaurant in Dalle. The “concrete dinosaur” offers more hospitality to immigrants than the households of Elche.