La Petite Ceinture (The Small Belt)
Paris, 2005
La Petite Ceinture is a photographic survey of an abandoned railway line in the city of Paris. The railway was a circular connection between Paris's main train stations within the fortified walls of the city, occupying the XII through the XX Arrondissement. Since 1934 it has laid a forgotten pathway through present day Paris, in its abandon, a scenic and mythical greenway has emerged with most of the rails and stations still existing. La Petite Ceinture mostly runs in trenches or overpasses, with a few tunnel segments. Access to the unused rail tracks is forbidden. The photographs document the railway over the span of four seasons.
Introduction
When I first arrived in Paris I was both enchanted and unsettled. Beyond the city’s celebrated architecture and manicured gardens, I felt the pull of another Paris, hidden, rough-edged, quiet in its decay. I found it not in the formal symmetry of the Jardin des Tuileries or the opulence of the Palais Garnier, but along the rusted remains of La Petite Ceinture, a railway that once encircled Paris, now largely silent and forgotten. Most people walk past the old tracks without noticing, just a rusted rail line buried beneath weeds, hidden behind chain-link fences, or swallowed by ivy and concrete.
Built between 1852 and 1869, the railway was designed to link Paris’s main train stations, supporting freight and military logistics at the height of France’s imperial ambition. It aligned with Haussmann’s grand urban reforms, his boulevards, his grids, his logic. Initially vital to industrial Paris, La Petite Ceinture was embedded in the city’s fabric with cuttings, viaducts, tunnels, and bridges. But the very infrastructure that once connected the capital became, over time, an overlooked scar.
By the early 20th century, the line had already begun to fade. Passenger services declined with the rise of the Métro, leading to the closure of most stations by 1934. Freight persisted but dwindled post–World War II. The line fell into partial disuse as road transport took over. What remains are the fragments: overgrown tracks, crumbling platforms, viaducts lost among vines, tunnels echoing with emptiness. In many areas, especially in the 18th and 20th arrondissements, these ruins became informal zones outside municipal oversight. A physical void, but also a social one.
Walking its length, I saw more than decaying infrastructure. I saw the lives that had taken refuge in the margins. Makeshift shelters built from tarps and pallets. Graffiti in Arabic and Berber. Signs of undocumented migrants, men and women like many from my own community, seeking safety in spaces the city had turned its back on. La Petite Ceinture had become a zone of neglect and exclusion, a refuge for the unseen. Its lack of lighting, security, and maintenance only heightened the sense of abandonment. These disconnected spaces, yet embedded within dense neighborhoods, came to symbolize the spatial inequalities of late 20th-century Paris.
My photographs didn’t just dwell on the beauty of ruins; through my lens, La Petite Ceinture revealed itself as a landscape quietly shaped by displacement. In the 20th arrondissement, while I was searching for an entry point to the tracks, I met a twelve-year-old Arab boy named Hadi. His expression held a quiet knowledge, a subtle awareness of being an outsider. He knew the tracks. He directed me to a point of entering. And then: a warning. “Mesh laṭīf,” he said. “Not friendly”. Skinheads. Like the trains once on the rails, they are ghosts of Europe clinging to the past. I pushed on, drawn to the forbidden image. But the warning gnawed at me. Suddenly, they appeared, figures moving fast with intention. I immediately retreated, heart pounding. The next morning, fresh graffiti read: Arab Danger. Written on the tracks. Power lies not only in grand pronouncements but in these small acts of marking territory.
I had left the U.S. believing I would find solace from racism and xenophobia in post-9/11 New York, only to realize I was wrong. The 2005 riots, which unfolded during my time in Paris, shattered that illusion. Zyed and Bouna, two teenagers fleeing the police in Clichy-sous-Bois, hid in an electrical substation, where they were electrocuted and killed. Their deaths exposed the raw truth of systemic neglect, the marginalization of the banlieues, communities largely composed of immigrants and their descendants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
From behind my ground glass, I witnessed a different kind of war veiled in silence. I learned that even the most objective image carries the weight of history and ideology. The act of seeing, of remembering, is never neutral. It is always, already, a form of resistance.
And yet, amidst this history of neglect and trauma, La Petite Ceinture also offered moments of beauty. In spring and summer, walking along La Petite Ceinture feels like stepping into a hidden garden. Wildflowers push through rotted wooden ties. Vines climb crumbling walls. The noise of the city fades into birdsong. Nature reclaims the space quietly, persistently. I walked the length of it through the seasons. Much of it was fenced off, legally forbidden to enter. But I entered anyway. There’s something melancholic and deeply human in those paths. When I found them, I felt I had found a kind of home, not geographic, but emotional. A space that reflected my own in-betweenness.
By the early 2000s, signs of transformation began to surface. Residents started planting gardens along the tracks. Artists and ecologists found inspiration in its wildness. Early adaptive reuse efforts, community gardens, informal green paths, hinted at a reimagined future for this linear, in-between landscape. While some saw only decay, others envisioned possibility. A new kind of public space, quietly emerging from below, shaped by resistance and care. Until 2005, La Petite Ceinture remained largely a forgotten fragment, suspended between past and future. But to me, it offered something vital: a kind of truth. A reminder that cities are not just shaped by architects and officials, but by those who survive in their shadows. As an Arab visitor, I did not come to Paris only to admire its monuments. I came to listen to its ruins.
Perhaps it was a desperate desire to believe in the myth of Parisian enlightenment that brought me here. But the city, however romanticized, however beautifully ruined, revealed its undercurrents of exclusion. Prejudice flows through every society, in its own distinct and insidious ways. In the end, I learned that home is not a place but a condition, one of acceptance, of understanding, of resistance.
- Anthony Hamboussi