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

France’s social conflicts have for many years been uniquely spatialized. These conflicts have been assigned specific locations, chiefly the suburbs of large urban centers known collectively as banlieues. Here, the story goes, centuries of exclusionary practices have created an accumulation of the displaced and the disaffected, demoralized by an inhumane landscape of grands ensembles, or mass housing projects, which actively prevent their integration into society. In The Social Project, architectural historian Kenny Cupers explodes the easy tropes of brutal modernism and callous planning that inform so much analysis and writing on postwar urbanism in France, offering a fresh and complex evaluation of how these landscapes came into being.

While he is not in the least bit interested in denying the shortcomings of their production or the dispiriting futures that awaited them, Cupers rejects the possibility that such immense, expensive, and utterly transformative developments—which appeared on a global scale in the years following World War II—can be explained solely (or even mainly) by the persuasiveness of an architectural discourse. Tremendous economic, political, and intellectual resources were required to construct hundreds of thousands of housing units—sometimes in developments that amounted to entirely new towns—in a dizzyingly short span of time. These resources so far exceeded the bounds of the architectural that their mobilization must have had other origins. The Social Project explores a multitude of institutional arenas, from state planning bodies and academic think tanks to architectural collectives and residents’ associations. The book tracks between different scales of analysis—from the apartment complex and the municipality to the national and the international—to offer a multifaceted account of France’s particular path to postwar urbanization. The result is a social history of a professional milieu, a spatial history of welfare provision, a political history of the home, an intellectual history of key social scientific concepts, and even something of a business history of the French postwar landscape.

This is a gracefully interdisciplinary work. While any of the areas just mentioned could be elaborated into a fuller account, by uniting them Cupers makes visible a new terrain of historical experience and analysis. Tackling the daunting mountains of paperwork generated by postwar urbanism, the author draws deeply and broadly on the studies, memoranda, sketches, plans, and reports of state and parastate bodies. Journalism by and about those living in the grands ensembles also features prominently, as do even more unexpected sources, such as instructional films and the promotional brochures of private developers. From these the author constructs a robust and surprising narrative that unearths the experimentation, the collaboration, and the reckoning with the inhabitants’ everyday experiences that shaped the production and consumption of France’s state-directed housing, generally regarded as little more than the arrogant artifacts of planners and officials.

The Social Project begins with the dire state of French housing after World War II. Dilapidated and undersupplied before the conflict, lack of maintenance and wartime destruction left the nation’s dwellings positively ramshackle by the mid-1940s. Policy makers not only faced a Herculean task in solving the immediate crisis but also labored under the obligation to make powerful and enduring statements about French recovery and grandeur. The country’s technocratic tradition helped shape these statements. The prestige of public service emerged from the war strengthened rather than undermined, while Vichy provided new experience with economic planning through which to funnel a peculiarly French conception of territorial development—one that Cupers identifies as “volitional geography.” With origins in nineteenth-century Saint-Simonianism, volitional geography lent particular force and “thinkability” to state efforts to rework national territory in the name of modernization and efficiency. By the early 1950s, state competitions, guidelines, and subsidies fundamentally rewrote the conditions and networks of housing production across the country. Durable connections between the state and the large public works enterprises capable of responding...