The Social Project: Housing Postwar France by Kenny Cupers (review)

The Social Project: Housing in Postwar France, written by architectural historian Kenny Cupers, gives careful attention and novel analysis to the explosion of public housing projects and suburban growth in post–World War II France. The book itself, which is quite substantial and contains more than 125 pictures and 21 full-color plates, is divided into three main sections that focus on each of the decades of the trentes glorieuses, or thirty-year postwar economic expansion in France: "1950s: Projects in the Making," "1960s: Architecture Meets Social Science," and "1970s: Consuming Contradictions."

Those who are familiar with France know well the jarring juxtaposition between a city's historical center and its suburban periphery. In urban agglomerations like Paris, Lille, Marseille, and Grenoble, the cobbled lanes, monuments, and museums of the centres-villesepitomize medieval charm, while the suburbs, or banlieues, which mushroomed in the postwar era from the surrounding agricultural fields, are home to modernist structures, much concrete, and the bulk of the population.

According to the orthodox historical narrative, French technocrats and sundry "experts," intellectually formed in the crucible of war and imperial domination, forced public housing on the French populace in a heavy-handed, outward push from the centralized state apparatus. Where Cupers's work shines is in rejecting and redefining the master narrative that explains the shift toward industrial production of housing in France and the concentration of resources on grands ensembles, or mass housing projects. By integrating architectural history, urban history, and social science, Cupers achieves a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis that transcends the classic urbanisteapproach. Hence, The Social Projectis noteworthy in that it challenges the overly deterministic, étatistapproach to massive planned projects and favors "situated agency over abstract forces and contingency over determinism" (p. xv).

The most interesting part of this analysis, especially in section 2, describes an emerging "bureaucratic epistemology" wherein usagers—the "users" of the product—engaged in a dialectic exchange with the technocratic elite that planned and built the housing (p. 155). The constant dialogue between the usagersand policymakers, developers, and architects, which was mediated by social scientists, reshaped the ethos of public housing production in France into a grand social experiment. As Cupers observes, an important facet in facilitating this new exchange was the shift from the quantitative analysis of economists and demographers to the qualitative research of urban sociologists in the postwar era. Another important aspect of the new interplay between the technocracy and consumerism is the fascinating shift from a "ruling state" to a "serving state," where in a Foucauldian twist the state would rule by serving (p. xix). For this analysis, Cupers also relies on Paul Rabinow's interpretation of "welfare" as a key element to the French "modern" state (p. xxiv).

It is interesting that historians of French colonialism often consider the colonies as the laboratories of the metropolitan state. In the post-colonial era, as Cupers points out, the laboratory shifted to the suburbs of the metropolitan cities—what was once being contested on "foreign" soil, far from the French public's scrutiny, was now being debated in their backyard in the most literal sense. The planning sites of grands ensemblesemerged as the social laboratories of citizen participation and governmental policy-making, which evolved by the late 1960s into the "science of programming" lived space.

The final section describes the overreach of housing production and experimentation as planners sought to fashion "urban density and centrality" out of whole cloth. These readymade ersatz cities were a step too far. Realizing that many middle-class families were transitioning away from state-planned communities in favor of the private market, the government tried to respond by offering "intermediate" and "flexible" housing options. Burdened by a slowing economy, the state was not nimble enough to mimic the options provided by private builders.

This book will be of special interest to historians of technology and science in the way that it examines the epistemologies of state...