There is an almost-religious certainty in a map, whether they are ones that tell you about the food you absolutely must eat or the buildings you need to see. Some of them, usually based around diasporic restaurants or Brutalist buildings, have the unique power of being able to draw out a certain kind of (white, middle-class, male) traveller from their home and into urban terrains they feel unfamiliar in. As a map-maker myself, I often worry about who these maps are really for — those looking for treasure or those who already know the way? Because of this ambiguity, I feel strongly that all maps must be treated with suspicion.

One such map is Brutalist Paris, the first full-length book from the team at the London-based map publisher Blue Crow Media, which attempts to map out the other Paris, whose representation in the media is usually confined to being a shorthand for suburban misery and neglect. As a project formed from an earlier, more literal, map, it must be read not just as a remote treatise but as a guide to something living. The map must be completed by the map reader, and it is in the using of it that this other Paris reveals itself, while also highlighting the problems of the map-maker.

The very title — Brutalist Paris — poses two tricky problems from the off, which are half-solved over the course of seven short essays by the architecture theorist Robin Wilson and through the crisp black and white photos by Nigel Green. The first is a matter of pernickety categorisation: what is Brutalism within the context of Paris? If you wrote an equivalent London guide, the choices would be obvious, building on decades of alternately derisory and enthusiastic use of the term, as well as mid-life-crisis-dads with Trellick Tower mugs and paper models of the Barbican. In the UK, there is a shared assumption that, whether we hate it or love it, we’re all clear what we’re talking about when we natter on about Brutalism. In France, however, the word ‘Brutalism’, despite (or perhaps, because of) its relationship with the French béton brut, is held with deep suspicion. ‘When you use the term “Brutalist” to describe architecture, it’s a criticism,’ said Serge Renaudie in the 2021 Iain Chambers documentary Concrete Paris.

As well as its admirable attempt to ‘transfer’ the language of Brutalism to Paris, and claim it as part of the city, another of the book’s strengths is its refusal to see these buildings in isolation; they are seen, rather, as symptoms of and solutions to the political and urban environment they were made in. Which leads to the much bigger question: to what extent is any of this really Parisian? Of the fifty-two choices, only eight are within the city proper that would be recognised by Parisians as being Paris. The rest are scattered in clusters around the banlieue — in Ivry-sur-Seine, Bobigny, Clamart, Creteil, and Nanterre — a legacy of the Grands Ensembles projects that built gigantic, imaginative housing (as well as a lot of gigantic, boring housing) that Paris proper was too conservative to accept. Paris stays Paris because it sweeps everything un-Parisian out of its field of vision; on a recent trip to Bobigny, my companion remarked that seeing its town hall is like ‘spotting your teacher on their day off wearing their civvies’.

Brutalist Paris is at its strongest when it feels these buildings on a granular scale. Each building comes with gnomic sentences about what the observer felt or saw (‘moped repairs in the communal gardens’, ‘imposition of a new regime of gated access’). The entry on Les Orgues de Flandre doesn’t shy away from the tent city of homeless migrants on the street outside, which contrasts so jarringly with the comfort of the building’s apartments; the entry on the derelict Nanterre School of Architecture notices that someone has put a bullet through the sign saying ‘Allee Le Corbusier’, an observation I was able to confirm, putting into mind the idea of an anti–Le Corbusier ultra taking revenge, like Elvis shooting up his TV. The exclusion of Ricardo Bofill’s monstrous and extraordinary postmodernist housing estate Espaces Abraxas, ostensibly on a technicality but seemingly more because Wilson dislikes it, opens up questions of whether these buildings need to be humane to be included. More of this opinionatedness would have served the book well.

Yet Green’s dour, monochrome photography, which emphasises hard lines, ruthless geometry, and static arrangements, has the effect of making many of these buildings seem like relics of the past or ruined artefacts, which most of them are emphatically not. The towers of Les Olympiades look empty on the page but sit at the centre of one of the busiest ‘Chinatowns’ in Europe; Oscar Niemeyer’s Bourse de Travail looks like an abstract elliptic curve from afar, but up close the weathering makes it moving. It’s hard to appreciate Laurence Aillaud and Fabio Riéti’s extraordinary tiling work on Émile Aillaud’s Tours Nuages in black and white; they’re buildings that need something closer to technicolor. In person, you see how the buildings’ fenestration allows each resident, by choosing a curtain or putting out their washing, to turn each building into a living mosaic.

Recently, when I was walking around Tours Nuages, observing a woman carefully clean one of the huge windows that look out onto La Defense, the calm silence was suddenly broken by shouts from les chouf — the look-outs who scan the horizon for the police — and then the sounds of scarpering, with les flics on motorbikes ludicrously riding around the tiled snake that sits in the centre of the towers, which turned an armed police invasion into something comical. In each case, the built environment was a part of a much more human story. Reading the book in these places — in the columns at Abraxas where teenagers were making music videos, outside Bobigny’s Town Hall where kids were playing improvised ball games — brought into relief how little we hear of that story from the interior, not the exterior; from those who know it intimately and not those who can only hold it from a distance. Brutalist Paris is a thoughtful, provocative, and often beautiful intervention into the exterior life of these very un-Parisian buildings, but its abstractions ultimately highlight the problem with so many maps — of Brutalist buildings or otherwise: the disjuncture between those who get to write about it and those who live it.