The Belair quarter of Saint-Denis looks a lot like North Africa - bars on windows, plywood over broken panes of glass, laundry hanging from windows and satellite dishes clinging to balconies.
In 1965, the auto-route to Lille cut Belair in half. For 25 years, residents lived with the roar of an eight-lane highway, until the government built a sound-proof wall. "We don't know what to do with these neighbourhoods," Philippe Jacquelin, an architect and urban planner confesses. "It needs a lot of public money."
At the end of the street and across the canal, a huge silver elipse shimmers like a flying saucer 35 metres above the ground. The Stade de France, purpose-built for the World Cup, seats 80,000 people and has 50 bars and 17 boutiques. It cost Ffr2.7 billion (£321 million), but the residents of Belair and neighbouring Franc-Moisin are not pleased. On the opening night of the World Cup, two Brazilian tourists strayed from the stadium and were mugged at gun-point.
"Sometimes I feel very angry," Mohamed Ashkar (18), a trainee electrician from Pakistan who lives in Belair says, nodding at the magnificent stadium. "Look at it, and look at these buildings." Ashkar gestures towards the dilapidated street, which the city plans to raze to make way for council houses. "Sometimes they cut our water and electricity when we don't pay."
Leftists and intellectuals opposed to the World Cup say it is immoral to spend so much on football while there are poor people in France. But Patrick Braouezec, Saint-Denis's Communist mayor, disagrees. "These high-minded thinkers forget that we benefit from the infrastructure - new train stations and roads, bridges across the canal - these will serve the whole population.
"From the critics' point of view, people living in shit must have no luxury. But the construction site gave work to 1,000 people from Saint-Denis, and many have found jobs in the stadium concessions. The sports store Decathlon is the biggest in Europe, and they've hired 100 people from the area."
A former school teacher, Mr Braouezec (47) is a popular mayor and member of parliament who is trying to capitalise on his town's rich history. Around 250 A.D., Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was beheaded by the Romans and according to legend, walked north carrying his head in his hands to the spot where the basilica of Saint-Denis still stands. Begun in 1136, it was the model for all other Gothic cathedrals in France.
French kings were crowned there, and 46 kings, 32 queens and 63 princes and princesses were buried in the royal necropolis - until French revolutionaries ransacked their tombs and threw them into a mass grave in 1793.
With the industrial age, Saint-Denis became a steel and machine tool centre; the working classes invested "the red city". Since the French Communist Party was established in 1920, Saint-Denis has always voted Communist, as the map (Avenue Lenin, Yuri Gagarin Street) and the names of its housing projects (Allende, Cosmonaut) indicate.
Mr Braouezec says his town is "a concentration of French society, living through a profound transformation greater than that at the end of the 19th century". Unemployment shot up when local industries closed in the 1970s and 1980s. "It will never be the same again," Mr Braouezec says. "But we don't know what it will be."
A high percentage of Saint-Denis's 91,000 population are immigrants or their descendants. When you emerge from the metro, the city centre feels like Calcutta, Algiers and Ougadougou rolled into one, poor but proud, with pretensions to being a People's Republic. Saint-Denis has twinned itself with Tuzla in Bosnia, the Kayos region of Mali and Larbaa in Algeria. It is also increasing ties with Porto Alegre, the city in southern Brazil known as the Mecca of the French "red left".
But internationalism matters little to the young men in the slums where I am escorted by Mr Jacquelin and a guide from the town hall. Both young men wear jeans and runners and have several days' growth of beard, and I am asked repeatedly if they are my bodyguards. Beyond the Grand Stade, it is haves versus have-nots, and for all his hard work and good intentions, young men recently stole Mr Jacquelin's camera. The last time he accompanied a journalist to Franc-Moisin, they took the reporter's cellphone.
Until two years ago, there wasn't even a post office for the 11,000 residents of Belair and Franc-Moisin. The angry young men of the slums attack everything that symbolises authority, but the city cleans up immediately. "If you see broken things around you, you have no compunction about breaking what's left," Mr Jacquelin explains. The city government plans two new buildings for the area, but contractors are so frightened by the neighbourhood's reputation that they won't bid.
Groups of young men congregate outside Franc-Moisin's high-rises. "I like football but I don't like cops," Rashid, whose parents are from Morocco, says. "It's ethnic cleansing," he adds, referring to the Interior Minister's roundup of suspected Islamists before the World Cup. "Six of my friends are in jail."
"They've brought 7,000 cops in, to shut us up in the projects," an African in a track-suit adds. With tickets for the World Cup final selling for more than Ffr 15,000 (£1,786), these young men have no possibility of attending. "The World Cup is for rich people," Rashid concludes. We bid farewell, and as I walk away he shouts after me, "Watch your handbag."
