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In parallel, the transitions between key zones of the Paris region, observed at the inframunicipal level, reveals greater discontinuities in 2007 than in 1999. Such cases include the town of Colombes, close to the business district of La Défense, or, to a lesser extent, the towns of Aulnay-sous-Bois and Sevran in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the income gap between low-rise residential areas and high-rise social housing estates has widened. This increase in relatively brutal contact between areas of contrasting income profiles is principally linked to the presence of islands of poverty. It is true that such islands were rarer in 2007 than in 1999, and that certain neighbourhoods – such as La Butte Rouge in Châtenay-Malabry or Les Chênes in Ermont – have disappeared from this category altogether. However, where these islands of poverty still exist (generally the larger and more populated areas, e.g. in Chanteloup-les-Vignes, Clichy-sous-Bois/Montfermeil or Bagneux), they typically contrast more violently with their immediate surroundings, which, conversely, are subject to gentrification and homogenisation. Elsewhere, the gentrification process, highly visible at inframunicipal level, can temporarily blur pre-existing local discontinuities. If we set aside these exceptional cases, the picture at the end of the 2000s is one of much less socio-residential diversity between adjacent neighbourhoods than 10 years previously, leading more often to significant spatial discontinuities, which underpin the spatial restructuring identified at municipal level.
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