The View from Above: The Science of Social Space by Jeanne Haffner (review)

In ‘Le Droit à la ville’, Henri Lefebvre wrote, ‘pour ce qui concerne la ville, l’objet de la science n’est pas donné. […] C’est un objet virtuel qu’étudie la pensée. Ce qui appelle de nouvelles démarches’ (L’Homme et la société, 6 (1967), 29–35 (p. 30)). Jeanne Haffner’s book is an insightful survey of the use of aerial photography in French approaches to the ‘virtual object’ of urban space. Haffner’s narrative begins just after the Great War, with the discovery that aerial photography’s ‘comprehensive picture of the landscape’ (p. 8) — its vue d’ensemble — could be as instrumental in topographical development as it was in military manoeuvres. In the chapters that follow, she examines aerial photography’s imbrication with the concept of l’espace social in French discourse. The myth of social space was invoked in France by Marxists as well as by conservatives, city commissioners, and professors. Utopian in the equilibrium it implied, ‘social space’ referred to ‘space abstracted beyond the chaos of the ground but not divorced from it; not solely geographical or social, it was […] a spatialization of complex social and economic relationships within a particular urban environment’ (p. 82). Haffner locates the origin of the concept in the 1930s, with the attempts of geographers and ethnographers to draw sociological conclusions from aerial photographs of urban conglomerations in French colonies. In their respective studies from above of the Tonkin Delta in Vietnam and Dogon villages in Cameroon, Pierre Gourou and Marcel Griaule sought to link supposedly objective formal topographies with ‘social, political, and economic structure, with levels of sociability, and with human happiness’ (p. 20) and to ‘plunge into the “mental life” (vie mentale)’ (p. 35) of the populations dwelling below. A fascinating anecdote of the way architect Henri Prost applied his urban planning experience in Casablanca to his proposals for the urban remodelling of Paris’s agglomération (p. 50) is one of many that extend the ‘thinking together’ of decolonization and post-war modernization in l’Hexagone that Kristin Ross has performed in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonialization and the Reordering of French Culture (MIT Press, 1995). The administrative study of social space culminated during the Fourth Republic with the publication of Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s landmark 1952 sociological report, Paris et l’agglomération parisienne: l’étude de l’espace social dans une grande cité (Paris: PUF), replete with detailed aerial photographs of Paris. In subsequent decades, urban-planning specialists like Chombart were heftily criticized by Lefebvre and other post-structural theorists for contributing to the disappearance of social space rather than its creation. Despite occasionally repetitious language and an absence of illustrations in its final chapter, The View From Above establishes extremely valuable connections between the high modernist use of aerial photography detailed in the research of scholars such as Paula Amad, and the late modernist disillusionment with aerial photography exemplified by Guy Debord’s texts and films during and after his participation in the Situationist International. It represents a continued invitation to contemplate our view of the city and our right to it.