Note for Americans : There is no suburbia as you know it in France. The suburbs (banlieues) of Paris are huge bedding communities built after the war and thru the 70's.
Don't generalize that much. Paris suburbs are of an extreme diversity, and in land area, individual housing sprawl still dominates (though not necessarily in population, that depends of locations).
It's true that in France the expression "jeunes de banlieue" is widely used by journalists to specifically mean someone having been raised in a housing project, but that doesn't mean that "la banlieue" is only about housing projects.
It's true individual housings in Paris are generally of a different kind of the one in the US though. Generally, houses are closer to one another, and there are fences on streetside to close the property from the exterior. I find this rather sad but that's the way it is.
We can still find copycats of US suburbs in Paris, predominantly in the outer ring:
But anyway, even in portraying Paris suburbs this way, I charicature them. The diversity of landscapes in the Paris suburbs is just huge. Insanely high urban density as in Levallois, bourgeoise "old town" as in Versailles, skyscrapers in La Défense, collections of rich villas in Le Vésinet, suburban Chinatown as in Lognes, popular dense neighbourhood as in Montreuil, rich condos as in Neuilly... Well, all this to say that the 8 million Parisians living in the suburbs are not all in housing projects.