Collective Terms

Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

Beth S. Epstein

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857450852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The banlieue, the mostly poor and working-class suburbs located on the outskirts of major cities in France, gained international media attention in late 2005 when riots broke out in some 250 such towns across the country. Pitting first- and second-generation immigrant teenagers against the police, the riots were an expression of the multiplicity of troubles that have plagued these districts for decades. This study provides an ethnographic account of life in a Parisian banlieue and examines how the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their collective life. The book focuses on the French ideal of integration and its consequences within the multicultural context of contemporary France. Based on research conducted in a state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, the book also provides a view on how the French state has used urban planning to shore up national priorities for social integration. Collective Terms proposes an alternative reading of French multiculturalism, suggesting fresh ways for thinking through the complex mix of race, class, nation, and culture that increasingly defines the modern urban experience.

Chapter 1

URBAN PLANS

In 1960, President of the Republic Charles de Gaulle and Paul Delouvrier, who would become de Gaulle’s director of regional planning, surveyed Paris and its environs by helicopter. “Delouvrier,” de Gaulle is reported to have said, “give me some order in this merde” (Le Monde, 18 January 1995). Below them lay an unwieldy mass of poorly served suburbs marked by long, monotonous housing blocks built quickly after the war, congested roads and highways, and disorderly and hazardous shantytowns inhabited, for the most part, by foreign workers recruited to help fuel the country’s postwar modernizing boom. Acceding to de Gaulle’s request, Delouvrier took on one of the largest urban planning projects in France’s history. For the next decade and a half he razed and straightened, carved up space and organized its use, seeking to turn Paris and its outlying suburbs into a cohesive region, with Paris at the hub and five New Towns, interlinked by autoroutes and commuter rail connections, around its edges.¹

The origins of the city of Cergy² are most evidently found in this postwar period of urban growth and change. Built in the midst of the country’s celebrated years of economic development—“les trentes glorieuses”—the New Towns were part of a bold state-run initiative to control the ever-expanding Paris region. Since the close of the nineteenth century the Paris suburbs had been steadily pushing outward; as they grew, unregulated, so did the perception that they constituted an unwieldy problem needing to be fixed. The ambitious New Towns project that Delouvrier shepherded to completion was the most coherent, and audacious, of several state-initiated efforts to regulate that growth and by extension solve social problems and affect social reform. The New Towns were to be an extension of and a corrective to the problematic Paris suburbs; they were to put right what the suburbs had got wrong. Their history and that of the suburbs more generally reveal a faith in rational planning as a means to solve social problems, a determination to remedy social imbalances through correct urban form.

Paul Delouvrier has often been referred to as a latter-day Haussmann, the remarkable prefect of the Seine who in the mid nineteenth century undertook the extraordinary renewal of Paris that resulted in the transformation of the city into a fully modern metropolis (Ross 1995; Savitch 1988). A high-level functionary who used his connections to an authoritarian head of state to effect sweeping change, Delouvrier, like Haussmann, radically altered the existing landscape. He imposed order where he saw chaos, cut broad corridors through space to make it cohere, and cleaned up, in both literal and moral terms, slums that he viewed as both dangerous and unhealthy. More significant, perhaps, Delouvrier was able to build on the precedent that Haussmann set for future generations of urban reformers. Haussmann rationalized Paris, giving it order, structure, and form, and as he did so he provided stunning visual proof that social problems can find a rational response. Haussmannization also established, even as it was not entirely responsible for, the demarcation between Paris and its suburbs, in particular those to the north and northeast, that continues to this day. I thus begin this chapter with a nod toward Haussmann and his reforms as the establishing moment that set the suburbs in motion.

The Paris suburbs grew at a rapid pace following Haussmannization as a consequence of the capital’s ever-expanding influence and the industry growing at its edges. The suburbs did not receive the same kind of rational approach that Haussmann brought to Paris, however, until well into the twentieth century. Most particularly, the housing projects that today stand for all that is wrong with the allegedly difficult and dangerous suburbs were built as a rational response to an acute housing crisis following World War II. The projects were intended to “absorb” the thousands of people living in substandard conditions after the war, and also to effect moral reform by urging the new residents—who included, but were not limited to, immigrant laborers—to live correctly, as fully modern city dwellers.

In the case of the New Towns, modern technical experts, functionaries of the state, undertook what they viewed as a utopian experiment in urban and social design. Considered together, the five New Towns that sit on the edges of the region of Ile de France were to make the region cohere by treating it systematically as a whole (Fourcaut 1990; Savitch 1988; Voldman 1990a). Considered separately, each new city was to be a crucible of renewed democracy, where people of different regional and class backgrounds would come together to live and work and, with a “pioneer spirit,” forge a reinvigorated sense of community life. The New Towns were not, as many people would later assume, built to house (or “warehouse”) the new immigrant populations that in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were again swelling the region’s growth. Rather, like the suburban developments that preceded them, the New Towns were to help regulate this addition to the region’s mix and facilitate the new immigrants’ integration. A consideration of the region’s growth in the twentieth century thus reveals how integration has been articulated as a spatial concept, centrally bound up with efforts to locate the urban form that will generate improved social function.

The Capital

A study of the history of the development of the Paris suburbs properly begins with Haussmann’s transformation of Paris not least because his achievements remain the standard institutional reference for modern urban planning in France (Voldman 1990b). If ever confirmation were needed that the sordid and disorderly could be made majestic through rational design, Haussmann’s Paris would provide evidence enough. His achievements, moreover, were remarkable, and made all the more apparent the distinction that would divide Paris from its suburbs, and in particular the industrializing suburbs to the north and east of the city, to this day. In the space of less than two decades, from 1853 when he was appointed prefect of the Seine by the Emperor Napoleon III, to Napoleon’s fall in 1870, Haussmann succeeded in transforming Paris from a medieval city into a modern metropolis—the very embodiment, many would argue, of modernity itself.³

Up until Haussmann’s reforms, Paris was in large measure a medieval city. Narrow, winding streets, many of them without issue, ran through the city’s crowded neighborhoods, the result of centuries of growth and transformation. The city’s outer walls, originally fixed around the central Ile de la Cité during the Roman era, were pushed out over successive centuries as the city expanded beyond its limits. Since at least the eighteenth century, critics decried the city’s mass of dark and dirty streets. Voltaire described Paris as barely civilized. The center of the city, he wrote, with the exception of a few classically beautiful monuments, was “dark, hideous, closed in as in the age of the most frightful barbarism” (in Jordan 1995: 15), its “public markets established in narrow streets, parading squalor, spreading infection, and causing continual disorder” (in Pinkney 1958: 32). There were no accurate maps of the city, no census, nor even a clear picture of its shape and size (Jordan 1995: 14). It followed no rational plan and grew randomly as dictated by growing population pressures and shifting need.⁴ It was this lack of order, above all, that Haussmann would change. Not only did he commission the first accurate map of the city (Jordan 1995), he also looked on the city as a map: as abstract space, to be conquered and given form.⁵

Haussmann undertook sweeping changes in the city, building eighty-five miles of new streets, razing entire neighborhoods, nearly doubling the city’s surface size, and making the city amenable to the new demands of commerce, transportation, and industry. Out of the dense, unwieldy tangle of the city’s streets, he created an ordered complex of multiple hubs, or places, which he connected with the construction of wide, straight boulevards. Monuments, churches, and railroad terminals—symbols of industry and commerce, and of the city’s nascent modernity—were featured organizing principles of Haussmann’s design, the punctuating structures of his orderly sight lines. Everywhere he built, he was in search of the view. This was, for Haussmann, more important than the life of the street, and it was something he took pains to achieve: consider, for example, the Henri IV bridge, which nips off the tip of the Ile St. Louis in order to give the illusion of a straight boulevard from the July Column in the Place Bastille to the Pantheon at the top of the Latin Quarter; or the off-center dome on the Tribunal du Commerce located on the Ile de la Cité, that provides the perspective he craved when looking down the Boulevard Sepastopol from the Gare du Nord.⁶ With the exception of the more sparsely inhabited areas of western Paris, which afforded Haussmann the room to build,⁷ Haussmann literally cut his boulevards through densely packed medieval streets. Bludgeoning through an already existing urban fabric apparently gave him little pause; what mattered was the overview, which made the city an abstraction and allowed him to provide an objective assessment of its needs.

According to Haussmann’s own count, some 350,000 people were displaced by his reforms (Blake and Frascina 1993: 97). While his and Louis Napoleon’s sympathies certainly lay with the prospering bourgeoisie, the extent to which they purposefully sought to drive the poor and working classes out of the gentrifying city has perhaps been overstated. To the contrary, there is evidence that Haussmannization helped improve the quality of life for Parisians overall, while also making life more comfortable for those in the privileged classes, who saw their prospects soar as the city changed to accommodate their interests (Willms 1997: 277–287; see also Clarke 1984). Rather, as T. J. Clarke has argued, Haussmannization revealed more starkly the class divisions that an emergent capitalistic logic was bringing into view. This, according to Clarke, is what most disturbed opponents of Haussmann’s reforms: the moral and social changes made manifest by his plan. In the following “Report by the Chamber of Commerce and by the Prefect of Police on the question of workers’ wages and the increase in rents and the price of food,” for instance, written in 1855, the writers note with some alarm the change away from a form of “vertical” integration according to which the lower classes occupied a building’s small top-floor garrets while allowing the upper classes greater privilege in the larger apartments on the lower floors. Fearing the consequences for the working masses of the trend toward an increasing “horizontal” integration, they wrote,

the circumstances which compel workers to move out of the center of Paris have generally … had deplorable effects on their behavior and morality. In the old days they used to live on the upper floors of buildings whose lower floors were occupied by the families of businessmen and other fairly well-to-do persons. A species of solidarity grew up among the tenants of a single building. Neighbors helped each other in small ways. When sick or unemployed, the workers might find a great deal of help, while, on the other hand, a sort of human respect imbued working-class habits with a certain regularity. Having moved north of the Saint-Martin canal or even beyond the barrières, the workers now live where there are no bourgeois families and are thus deprived of this assistance at the same time as they are emancipated from the curb on them previously exercised by neighbors of this kind. (In Chevalier 1973: 199)

The cozy class relations of the “old days” of this report are, of course, suspect, given the early nineteenth century’s history of repressive class conflicts. What is significant, however, are the ideals and conjectures that such visions of class integration betray. Harmonious class relations could be fostered, this report suggests, by good urban form, and most particularly by a form of social “mixing” that Haussmannization was in the process of pulling apart. More to the point, “mixing” was to have a positive effect on the lower classes, who stood to benefit from the moral curb on their behavior exercised by their wealthier neighbors in the comfortable apartments on the bottom floor.

Confident in his zeal to build the imperial city, Haussmann was inured to such concerns.⁸ But the potential presented by such forms of “vertical” integration as a way of promoting social cohesion—and more, moral uplift—was already being considered in the mid nineteenth century in response to Haussmann’s reforms. This is an idea that resurfaces in multiple ways as the banlieue develops during the course of the twentieth century, and it is explicitly stated as a policy goal of the New Towns launched by de Gaulle and Delouvrier in the 1960s. Haussmannization helped give form to the geographic and economic transformations that led to the growth of the suburbs; the social consequences of those reforms would continue to be felt in the decades that followed as urban planners sought to regulate the construction of the Paris banlieue.

The Suburbs

The limits of the city that Haussmann redesigned have not changed since the outer arrondissements were incorporated into Paris in 1860. The tax wall that circled the city until 1920 (and that gave way to the multilane peripheral highway that circles the city today) marked the limits between the capital and its suburbs, and defined the zone, the no-man’s-land just outside the city limits that in the late nineteenth century absorbed the spillover of what the city could no longer contain. Central Paris sparkled, while the towns on its periphery became home to the city’s dispossessed. Nowhere was this more graphically displayed than in the case of the new underground sewer system, which solved the city’s waste problem and, as a novel tourist site, came to symbolize “the very essence of cleanliness, the triumph of reason over chaos, the progress of science … and of enlightenment over darkness” (Jordan 1995: 276). Much of that waste, however, simply spilled into the Seine further downstream, in the industrializing suburbs. There, according to contemporary reports, the river became “a cauldron of bacteria, infection and disease” (in Blake and Frascina 1993: 121), and gave rise to a terrible smell.

As Paris continued to grow, districts outside of the city developed apace, absorbing vast numbers of people who could no longer afford the city as it gentrified, or who came from the provinces looking for opportunity. The growth of industry on the city’s outskirts, as well as improved public transportation to the capital, made the suburbs attractive. There, on the undeveloped farmlands that sat at the edge of industry, small plots of land were put up for sale as developers pushed the dream of homeownership and the benefits of country living to workers and their families. This was a move made attractive, too, by moral reformers who worried about the degeneracy of the working classes and urged their transformation into “respectable” owners of property, away from the seductions of the Parisian hub (Stovall 1990: 169).

The realities of suburban growth, however, fell far short of these bucolic dreams. In the sixty years following the end of the second empire, the population of the Paris suburbs multiplied fivefold, reaching a total of 2 million people by 1930 (Stovall 1989: 438). This was a rate of growth that the villages giving way to suburban sprawl were in no way prepared to assume. New lots being put up for sale contained little in the way of infrastructural support. Those who sought to realize their visions of the new suburbia arrived there only to discover that their plot of land—their lotissement, bought, subdivided, and resold, in many instances, by unscrupulous developers—had not been equipped with water or gas hookups. The new suburbanites, moreover, were often expected to build their own homes, a challenge that few were able to meet with much in the way of means or skill. The towns that grew up around these allotments were similarly ill equipped to provide amenities. As Stovall recounts in his study of Bobigny, a suburb to the northeast of Paris, “of fifteen major allotments … twelve had no paved streets or sidewalks, twelve had no sewers, and twelve had no water mains” (1989: 443). The result was disarray.

Viewed from the centers of opinion in Paris, the suburbs were considered “haphazard” and a disgrace. Their growth was seen as erratic and uncontrolled, and predictably, as a danger to the capital. “From the threshold of their pitiful houses surrounded by cesspools, thousands of families can see on the horizon the silhouette of one of the most sumptuous cities in the world,” a Paris-based senator stated in 1928. “There is here an antisocial contrast, some would say a peril” (quoted in Wakeman 2004: 119; see also Fourcaut 1990: 13). As Stovall shows, it was the political parties of the left that most successfully made something out of this debacle, giving rise to the Paris “Red Belt,” a ring of communist-led towns that “menacingly encircle[ed] the city that no longer had room for its working class inhabitants” (Stovall 1990: 169).

Efforts to manage the problem of the suburbs shifted back to Paris in the 1920s, when young planners and architects, schooled in the new disciplines of urban planning, designed a total of nine “garden cities” on the outskirts of the capital, following the model pioneered by Ebeneezer Howard in Britain in the early twentieth century. As some of the first experiments in public housing, the garden cities were to provide decent lodging for workers in districts free of the degenerative effects of ...