Hovels to Highrise

State Housing in Europe Since 1850

Anne Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415089357
  9780415089357
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134878536
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Hovels to Highrise traces how governments in five European countries became involved in replacing industrial revolution urban slums with mass high-rise, high density concrete estates. As the book considers each country's housing history and traditions, and analyses the contrasting structures and systems, it finds convergence of problems in the growing tensions of their most disadvantaged communities.
Anne Power underlines the continuing drift towards deeper polarization, a problem that the European Community will not be able to ignore with the interlocking but multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, urban societies of the future. The book's detailed coverage of the historical, political amd social changes relating to housing within the various countries make it an important text for students and practitioners concerned with housing, urban affairs, social policy and administration.

Part I

France

The state was king—popular French saying

France has a prominent place in the Europe that is unfolding. The French Revolution overthrew the old order of rigid privilege and exploitation, and generated a shift towards egalitarianism that created strong international waves. The rise and fall of the Emperor Napoleon built on the French sense of a grandiose international role and a preoccupation with state power and state-driven development. The rebuilding of Paris in the latter half of the nineteenth century gave France a uniquely planned and beautifully laid-out capital. France offered a model of civic development to the world.

The long-standing tensions with other European powers—Britain as well as the emergent Germany—made the French both proud, involved and aloof. The traditional neglect of housing for the growing urban populace in favour of civic and industrial works of great significance created a legacy in France which set her apart from the rest of Northern Europe.

France in the 1960s and 1970s built more high-rise, peripheral, mass housing estates than any other country in Western Europe. There have been more extensive violent disorders in French cities than elsewhere on the Continent. Racial tensions have often been intense. French housing experts are more outspoken about the problems of social segregation and polarisation that have resulted than any other national body.

The French have gone out of their way to foster partnership between central, local and regional government, stressing the vital role of the elected mayors of the local communes in which the difficult social housing estates are located. In spite of the still immense power of the state, they help create local civic pride and strongly defended local initiatives.

French housing policy since the war has advanced in three main directions: limited state support for private renting, as a result of which one-third of French households still rent from private landlords, although many of these are in furnished rooms and some in hotels; generous support to owner-occupation, offering grants as well as low-cost loans to households of modest means, leading to a dramatic increase in the construction of pavilions—single-family, detached surburban and semi-rural houses—and resulting in over half the population now owning their own homes; continuing ambitious social housing programmes which are still running at 50,000 units a year or more to help meet growing demand from more needy groups and indirectly to help the economy, as well as to create higher-quality, smaller-scale urban housing.

The major housing preoccupation of the 1980s was the grands ensembles, the social housing estates usually built as dense, high-rise blocks on the edge of cities. These troubled housing areas caught the headlines in 1981 as disorders broke out in a number of them, often between young people of North African origin and the police, generating support for renovation programmes. Renewed outbreaks of urban disorders in 1990 and 1991 led to a further expansion of government initiatives. The French experience of urban segregation and regeneration offers a wide canvas of very mixed experiences.

France today faces similar problems to other countries in this study of European housing: a high level of unemployment, particularly among young people of immigrant origin; strong social dislocation, stemming in part from very rapid urban expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, and continuing thereafter; increasing problems of cost, of loan default, and of urban sprawl in the owner-occupied sector; decline of the private-rented sector through inner-city renewal and renovation; intense polarisation in the society as a whole between the affluent majority and the large minorities of immigrant origin, of one-parent families, and of socially and economically marginal households; growing demand for social housing from lower-income groups; severe decline in large, peripheral estates where social and economic problems are most starkly and intensely exhibited.

Post-war France was the most serious protagonist in the evolution of the European Community, insisting on ever-closer relations with her most powerful ally and erstwhile enemy, Germany; engaging in active partnership with other members and potential members of the Community; and constantly pushing the pace on ventures like the Channel Tunnel and highspeed rail links across Europe. These international links belie her reputation for defending a strongly independent national identity and hark back to her historic role in forging the future of Europe. Her current pioneering approach to the wider social and economic problems surrounding mass housing is a microcosmic reflection of this ambitious role. The aim is to explain France’s rapid post-war urbanisation and provide the history behind some of today’s tensions.

Chapter 1

Background

BACKGROUND FACTS ABOUT FRANCE

While France is similar in size of population to Britain, with 56.4 million people, it has less than half the density, with only 102 people per square kilometre (Economist Pocket Europe, 1992). It has more young people and fewer old people than any other country in the study except Ireland, and a higher birth-rate than Germany or Denmark, though its birth-rate has fallen significantly. It has higher unemployment than Germany or Denmark, and about the same as Britain. France sits in the middle of the income range with higher income per head than Britain or Ireland (World Bank Development Report 1991).

France has experienced major waves of population immigration. French population statistics do not show French residents originating from French ex-colonies that became overseas provinces of the French Republic as they are considered indistinguishable from mainland French inhabitants and enjoy full French citizenship. Thus, many ethnic minorities from the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands are not counted and their numbers can only be guessed at. There are also growing numbers of second generation naturalised French citizens of ethnic minority origin. Therefore, official French immigration figures only reflect a part of the picture. None the less, 7 per cent of the French population is officially classed as of immigrant origin, with the largest group originating from North Africa. There are estimated to be a further 6 million French residents of recent foreign origin (Superior Council for Integration 1991). The French housing stock is shown in Table 1.2.

In the thirty-five years from 1955 to 1990 France moved from having some of the worst housing conditions, the grossest overcrowding, and an extremely low rate of building to having a massive level of production over the 1980s, totalling about 300,000 units a year. How this remarkable shift came about, and the unique forms that it took, constitutes the core of France’s housing history.

Table 1.1

Basic demographic facts about France, 1985

Size of population	56,400,000
Density of population (inhabitants per km2)	102
Proportion of under-15-year-olds	20%
Crude birth-rate per 1,000 population	13.8
Unemployment	10.1%
People over 65	14%
Household size	2.5
Immigrants	7%
Population in urban areas	74%
Sources: Commission des Communautés Européennes 1987; Economist Pocket Europe, 1992; Eurostat General Statistics, 1992.

EARLY HISTORY

For many centuries France dominated Europe politically. French history was marked by Republican fervour, and international and sometimes imperial ambitions. The French Revolution of 1789 shook Europe and made France a pathfinder in a new, if sometimes cruel, social order where the populace was swift to exercise its power and where dictators like Napoleon could rise on the back of its acclaim. The storming of the Bastille goaded European governments, through fear of uprisings, to address urban conditions, if in a piecemeal way, well into the twentieth century.

France experienced three revolutions in less than a century but, ironically, French governments avoided significant housing responsibility for longer than any other country in the study. French social movements articulated demands for political rights and freedoms but appeared willing to tolerate urban conditions that were feared elsewhere.

Table 1.2

Distribution of French housing stock by tenure, 1991

	Millions	%
Total occupied units	20.83^a	100
Owner-occupiers	11.23	53
Private-renting (including furnished and tied accommodation)	6.00^b	30
Social renting	3.54^c	17
Total stock (including vacant and secondary residences)	25.00
Sources: INSEE Housing Survey, 1988; Tableaux de l’Economie Française, 1991–92.
Notes: ^aThere are 2 million empty dwellings and over 2 million second homes in France in addition to these figures (INSEE 1988). ^bThirty-one per cent of private-rented units are either furnished accommodation, hotel rooms or tied flats; figures for this category of accommodation are not consistent and may be underestimates. ^cEighty-seven per cent of these units are owned by HLMs.^1

The Napoleonic legend, based on conquest abroad and a new civic order within France, helped bring Napoleon Bonaparte III, nephew of the great Emperor, to power in the mid-nineteenth century by popular plebiscite, making possible the modernisation of France. Rapid state-led industrialisation was facilitated through the building of an ambitious national railway network. Government was strengthened through the extension of the power of state-appointed prefects to control France on behalf of a highly centralist state. Napoleon III’s ambition was to retain his country’s precarious but dominant position in Europe by modernising France through the powerful alliance of the masses, the growing middle classes and the state. He also demonstrated concern for the impoverished urban dwellers.

Paris was at the hub of state-led change fuelled by colonial expansion. It grew...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Definitions
• Introduction
• Part I France
• Part II Germany
• Part III Britain
• Part IV Denmark
• Part V Ireland
• Part VI Summary and conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index