La Campagne à Paris:
The Village Inside the City
That Nobody Knows

I discovered La Campagne à Paris by accident. I was taking an unfamiliar route through the 20th arrondissement late one afternoon when the street I was on stopped feeling like Paris. The buildings shrank. There were front gardens with actual grass. A cat was sitting on a low stone wall. I had driven into La Campagne à Paris — a cooperative housing development of 82 individual houses with gardens, built on a hillside in the 20th arrondissement between 1907 and 1930. I had lived and worked in Paris for years and had never heard of it.

How It Came to Exist

La Campagne à Paris was built by a workers' cooperative at the height of the housing reform movement of the early 20th century. The concept was radical for its time: individual houses with private gardens, sold to working-class families on long-term cooperative loans, in a city where most workers lived in cramped apartment buildings with no outdoor space.

The site chosen was a disused quarry on the steep hillside south of the Porte de Bagnolet — land that was unusable for conventional apartment construction because of its topography. The cooperative's architect, Jules Julien, designed a neighbourhood that worked with the terrain rather than against it: winding streets that follow the hillside's natural contours, changes in level navigated by short staircases and sloping paths, houses built individually rather than in terraces.

The result, completed over several decades, is something that has no equivalent in Paris: a neighbourhood of individual houses, private gardens, winding lanes and complete silence, seven kilometres from the Eiffel Tower.

What You Will Find

The entrance to La Campagne à Paris is on the rue Jules-Siegfried, in the 20th arrondissement. There is no sign. There is no tourist infrastructure of any kind. There is a gate, which is usually open during daylight hours, and beyond it a lane that descends into the neighbourhood.

The houses are small — many of them are bungalows, or two-storey structures with garden plots barely larger than a generous terrace. But they are individual houses, in Paris, with gardens. The improbability of this is impossible to fully communicate until you are standing in a lane surrounded by front gardens with roses and kitchen herbs and children's bicycles, with the city's roofline visible above the surrounding buildings in every direction.

The neighbourhood is still a functioning residential area. People live here. They are not, in my experience, hostile to visitors who walk through quietly — but this is not a tourist site and should not be treated as one. Walk slowly, speak quietly, and remember that you are a guest in someone's neighbourhood.

How to Get There and What to Combine It With

La Campagne à Paris is a fifteen-minute walk from the Gambetta Métro station, or a short drive from central Paris. It is not easy to find without directions — the entrance on the rue Jules-Siegfried is genuinely unmarked.

I would combine a visit here with a walk through the nearby Père Lachaise cemetery — the largest cemetery in Paris, and one of its most extraordinary spaces. Père Lachaise contains the graves of Chopin, Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison and dozens of other figures from the history of European culture. It is also, on a weekday morning, a place of remarkable calm — shaded paths, elaborate mausoleums, cats sleeping on stone monuments.

Together, La Campagne à Paris and Père Lachaise make one of the best half-day itineraries in the city for visitors who have already seen the main monuments and want to understand Paris as a place where people actually live.