This paper explores the relationship between interactive online technologies and the shifting material and imaginative environments of the Paris banlieues. In the last decade, governmental and corporate interest in the cultural ‘rehabilitation’ of the suburbs has presented scholars with the need to rethink the social and symbolic spatialities of the Paris ‘zone’. In this debate, the lives and afterlives of one particular building provide a lens via which to unpack some of the issues pertaining to the reterritorialization of real places in the public fora of digital interaction. Situated on the Canal de l’Ourcq in the eastern suburb of Pantin, the imposing edifice of the Magasins Généraux, shelter for local homeless and playground to taggers, lay ruined until the spring of 2014 when global advertising agency BTEC began work on the building’s refurbishment. Embracing the global reappropriation of graffiti and street art as valid cultural expression, since 2012 the building known locally as the ‘cathédrale de graffiti parisien’ has formed part of the cultural programme of the commune’s urban renewal project, featuring in its summer festivals and as part of the ‘journées du patrimoine’. Prior to its refurbishment, BTEC commissioned the ‘translation’ of this building into an online interactive graffiti website, ‘graffitigeneral.com’ (fig. 1), where users can ‘tag’ images of the crumbling walls and explore the virtualized traces of street art by other taggeurs. Analysing the building’s function as heterotopic lieu de mémoire, this paper explores the implications of this interactive site for the politico-aesthetic reappropriation of the banlieues post-industrial territories. The questions giving shape to the argument concern the translation of street art’s haptic relationship with urban space and the performance of virtual lieux de mémoire in providing sites of ‘orderly disorder’ that facilitate the ‘smoothing’ strategies of corporate urban renewal in public places.