Review: The Social Project: Housing Postwar France, by Kenny Cupers

Abstract

Kenny Cupers The Social Project: Housing Postwar France Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 424 pp., 25 color and 167 b/w illus. $115 (cloth), ISBN 9780816689644; $35 (paper), ISBN 9780816689651 The grands ensembles— the large-scale suburban social housing estates, often featuring repetitive rows of tall concrete slabs—are a significant part of France's postwar built environment. In North America, postwar suburban housing was tied to government financial incentives, private market developments, and individual homeownership, as in the famous case of Levittown tract housing. By contrast, much of France's suburban landscape was defined by housing projects that were colossal in scale and subsidized by the state, much like their Eastern bloc counterparts. If the grands ensembles initially attracted popular interest as a potential solution to ongoing housing shortages, they quickly developed a poor reputation across the political spectrum and attracted criticism for their monotony and obliviousness to human scale. For many, the postwar French suburbs represent a bygone utopian past, an era French economist Jean Fourastie famously called les Trente Glorieuses , which has since devolved into an everyday reality marked by racial segregation, social alienation, and lack of employment opportunities.1 As Kristin Ross has argued in her now classic Fast Cars, Clean Bodies , the suburbs were central to France's economic development and political discourse in the aftermath of World War II and decolonization.2 Yet, despite their crucial place within the postwar built environment and social imaginary, few studies on the grands ensembles have been available in English, a situation that Kenny Cupers helps to remedy with The Social Project . Were the myriad postwar suburban housing schemes in France a long series of “monumental errors,” to use the title of a book by architectural historian Michel Ragon?3 Or do we, in hindsight, continue to underappreciate the humanist ambitions and the varied solutions proposed by French architects and planners for whom modernism was “not a style but a cause”?4 Those reading Cupers's latest book may be disappointed …