“Les Olympiades,” the building in Paris that houses the Chinese city, greatly affects the urban landscape of a city like Paris. The existence of a place like Les Olympiades can have both a negative and positive effect on the city of Paris. For example, a building that was once deemed useless now holds a thriving population. A population that starts businesses and contributes to Paris’ economy. However, in some ways the building could be seen as having an economy all its own that contributes very little to the Parisian economy. Along with an economy all its own, it also creates a kind of in-between world for those living in Les Olympiades. With all the comforts of home, inhabitants can take advantage of work opportunities in Europe, but still have friends and businesses around them that speak their language and understand their culture. The living arrangement also offers opportunities to those Chinese immigrants who live elsewhere in Paris, but want to start a business with a Chinese clientele. Wong Shixiong is and example of this. He lives in the Banlieue, but started his restaurant in Les Olympiades because he wanted to cater to Chinese immigrants.
Because a structure like Les Olympiades houses not just apartments, but also businesses and distribution centers the spheres for work life and home life often merge. For some never have to leave Dalle Italie their work and home life all exist in Les Olympiades. Similarly in Elche, Spain, with the recent expansion of shoe making into at-home workshops, one does all the work within the confines of their household. This, according to Multiplicity, can have a negative effect on the household by interfering with workers’ life-patterns and the way we view workers in our communities. “In this zone,” Multiplicity says of the home, “the intimacy of the household does in fact absorb the repetitive gestures of manual work, transforming them into domestic rituals.” (Multiplicity, 152). Most of the people working in these at-home workshops are women, and many of them are underpaid and mistreated by the companies they work for. It could be argued that this mistreatment and disregard for their rights comes from the merging of the work and home spheres. By bringing the work into their home, they are, in a way, losing control of the one place they are supposed to be sole manager of. Because someone besides themselves are now allowed to oversee what happens in a female workers’ home, her whole family becomes associated with production, and the rituals once left behind after a day at work in a factory now constantly surround the family unit.
The global market has changed many urban landscapes, and greatly affected the lives of workers. For the residents of Les Olympiades, the merging of work and home spheres creates a community where Chinese immigrants can feel at home and culturally comfortable. For those working in the shoe-making industry in Elche, Spain, their domestic lives are turned upside-down, and the idea of the woman as a homemaker is turned on its head.
