Paris

Paris is known for its diversity, and is the largest city in France by a significant margin. Paris is the capital of France, with a population of 2.2 million. There is an estimated 10-15% of the population that is Muslim, around 220,000 living in Paris. There are an estimated 350,000 Jewish peoples living in Paris, about 16% of the population. Roman Catholics make up an estimated 50% of the population, about 1.1 million peoples.

Dominant narratives describe the majority of French Muslims, especially in Paris and its metropolitan area, as living in suburbs, or banlieues, outside of the city, which are comparable to public housing projects in the United States. The French media often portrays living on the outskirts of the city as proof of the failure of Muslims to integrate. This project aimed to explore the spatial locations of Muslims in Paris. Because of the data constraints, the decision was made to create maps of the religious institutions in the city, for Islamic structures, as well as Catholic and Jewish. Without access to precise data on the living areas of Muslims, Catholics, and Jewish peoples in Paris, this map attempts to visually show areas with those respective religious institutions.

All of the maps include the locations of the public transport sites in the city, as a means of measuring how accessible the various institutions are. This project relies on the assumption that accessibility has a correlation to integration in society.

The map below shows the Catholic Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, and Private Islamic Schools of Paris, along with all public transport sites in the city:

For Paris, the mosques are distributed along the outer edges of the city, with many of them seemingly inaccessible from public transport. Interestingly, the synagogues are also distributed along the outer edges, but with the synagogues concentrated in the Northwest and the mosques more in the Southeast. The only mosque that could be described as centrally located in Paris is the Grand Mosque of Paris, which was opened by the French government as a token of appreciation to the colonial Muslim subjects who fought in the First World War. The case of halal restaurants and markets is particularly interesting. In Paris, the bulk of the halal restaurants are centrally located and easily accessible by public transport, contrasted to the halal markets which follow a similar pattern to the mosques. Zabihah includes any restaurant that has halal options, thus the restaurants represented are not necessarily exclusively halal, which could explain this disparity. Further explore the mosques of Paris here.