Rethinking the French City: Architecture, Dwelling, and Display after 1968 (review)

'The city as text' might be another subtitle for this groundbreaking study that straddles seemingly disparate fields —French and urban studies —and that reflects to what extent architectural and urban planning issues have become central to public policy debates in France. Monique Yaari privileges the consequences of the May 68 'shift', which infused a new level of utopian discourse into traditional concepts and practices of design, construction, and landscaping: 'the concern with providing a quality environment for all is one of the lasting and most important legacies of the May 68 events' (p. xxiii). Postmodernism has been taken more seriously in the United States than in France, which is of course paradoxical, since it was French theoreticians who produced most of the canonical postmodern texts. Yaari's book provides evidence that postmodernism has also proven to be more influential in the fields of architecture and urban planning than in literary theory. In the second chapter, Yaari offers a 'dialectical transcendence' of the modern versus the postmodern, which she calls l'après-moderne. The recurring discussions about which prefixes to use ('post', 'sur', etc.) make for dreary reading and bring back dismal memories of similarly abstruse and sterile texts from earlier phases of postmodernist theory. Fortunately, most of the chapters of Rethinking the French City are both readable and insightful. The author concentrates on Paris and on two regional cities that have seen significant —and, for the most part, successful —urban renewal projects in the past few decades: Lille and Montpellier (Chapters 3 and 4). It is perhaps no accident that both of these regional centres have repeatedly elected municipal councils dominated by the Socialist Party, which has largely incorporated the progressive discourse of l'urbanité into its political platform. Lille has capitalized on the wave of building and renovation that accompanied its transformation into a high-speed TGV rail hub. Meanwhile, Montpellier developed an innovative 'projet de ville' with the aim of 'weaving into a global plan the old and the new, buildings and ecology, public places and public services, work and leisure' (p. 101). The chapters devoted to Paris concentrate on examples of what has come to be known as 'les grands projets': Chapters 7 and 8 cover the monumental undertaking of the Parc de la Villette. While the term generally refers to the Presidency of François Mitterrand (1981–95), it can also include such multi-disciplinary institutions as Beaubourg (Chapters 5 and 6), which was the brainchild of Georges Pompidou. Refreshingly, the numerous quotes are provided both in the original French and in English. Perhaps inevitably, there is the occasional incorrect translation: 'prise de parole' becomes 'capture of speech' (p. 297). The illustrations, albeit usually small and black-and-white, provide the visual context of Yaari's investigations, which alternate between theoretical considerations and detailed descriptions, usually from the perspective of a pedestrian. The overall and fairly positive impression left by this book is that the utopian impulse of May 68 has led to sophisticated yet relatively non-dogmatic theories on the best ways to make cities more liveable.