What Does This Mean?
In French urban slang, « la cité » is the housing estate or neighbourhood, typically a collective housing complex on the outskirts of a large city, and by extension the people who live there and their way of speaking. The word also has older, ordinary senses (city, old town centre, workers' housing).
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"J'ai grandi dans la cité, tout le monde se connaît."
LORE & ORIGIN
Wiktionnaire lists many senses of « cité », from the Latin « civitatem » via Old French « cité » (c. 1100). The relevant ones are a group of houses forming a unit (company workers' « cités ouvrières », built around 1860 at the Papeteries Mougeot), the suburbs of a large city, and a collective housing complex such as « la cité des Minguettes », which by metonymy can also mean its young residents (« Le langage de la cité est très fleuri »). The online slang use rests on this housing-estate sense.
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